Cultural Geography

at the level of discourse, where western notions

are hegemonic within feminism, risking the

suppression and distortion of post-communist

women’s concerns. Eastern European women

resent the imposition of western cultural and

economic values, which extend even down to the

level of fashions and the way different women

dress. There are negative stereotypes on both

sides, and differences in culture, socialization

and personality. As Funk (1993: 320) argues,

like their southern counterparts, women in for-

mer state socialist countries appear to be more

oriented than western feminists toward children

and family. They have different attitudes toward

the individual and the collective and to authority,

and are more sceptical of the benefits of paid

work. They often have different attitudes toward

men and toward collective action. A moralistic

rejection by some western feminists of post-

communist cultural differences risks a failure to

recognize that the family was often a refuge from

state control, in much the same way that the

family in other cultures has been a refuge from

slavery and imperialism. Differences in tradition,

culture, personality, beliefs and desires, there-

fore, demand the interrogation and destabiliza-

tion of dominant western feminist discourses.

There is a need to ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty,

1992) western feminisms rather than see them as

a paradigmatic form of feminism per se.

The politics of speaking and writing

Critics have also challenged the experiences

of speaking and writing by which dominant

discourses come into being, focusing on the

problematic relationship between women in the

north and south (and especially between white

women and those in the former colonies). For

example, a term such as ‘the Third World’

homogenizes peoples and countries and carries

other associations – economic backwardness, the

failure to develop economic and political order,

and connotations of a binary contest between

‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ (Darby, 1997:

2–3). These practices of naming are not innocent.

Rather they are part of the process of ‘worlding’

(Spivak, 1990), or setting apart certain parts of

the world from others, with roots located histori-

cally in imperialism. Edward Said (1978) has

shown how knowledge is a form of power, and

by implication violence; it gives authority to

the possessor of knowledge. Knowledge has

been, and to large extent still is, controlled and

produced in the west. As we have seen, feminism

is not innocent of this. The power to name,

represent and theorize is still located here, a fact

that ‘other’ feminisms seek to disrupt by challenging

perceived western arrogance and ethnocentrism,

and incorporating the voices of marginalized

peoples.

Women in the south have been particularly

concerned with contesting the power to name,

including the use of terms such as ‘primitive’,

‘native’, ‘traditional’ and ‘Third World women’.

Their complaint is that western feminism has the

power to speak for women elsewhere. This has

not changed since colonial times; black women

are still denied a voice and the authority to repre-

sent themselves. As Mohanty (1991) argues,

black and southern women are constructed as

‘other’, located outside white, middle-class

norms. Diversities among women (in terms of

class, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexuality and so

on) are erased by monolithic and singular epi-

thets such as ‘Third World women’. T. Minh-Ha

Trinh (1989) describes the exclusionary tactics

of western feminism that make the concerns of

‘Third World women’ ‘special’ because they are

not ‘normal’, because they are other, and because

they are not written by white women. She writes:

Have you read the grievances some of our sisters

express on being among the few women chosen for a

‘Special Third World Women’s Issue’ or on being the

only Third World woman at readings, workshops and

meetings? It is as if everywhere we go, we become

someone’s private zoo. (1989: 82)

It is still the case that white western women are

empowered (economically and socially) to make

women in other cultures the object of their inves-

tigations, when the reverse is often neither possi-

ble nor feasible. For example, Sinith Sittirak

describes her experiences as a Thai woman

studying in Canada:

Officially, there are no regulations to prevent me from

exploring Canadian or any other ethnic groups. How-

ever, like many other ‘international students’ who

received scholarships from development projects, it

implicitly seemed that we ‘should’ focus on our own

issues in our homes. That is the way it is. At that

moment, I did not question as to why a Thai student had

to focus on Thai issues, while Canadian students had

much more academic privilege and freedom to study

and speak about any women’s issues in any continent

from around the world. (1998: 119)

The consequence of these criticisms is that the

presumed ‘authority’ and ‘duty’ of western aca-

demics to represent the whole world is increas-

ingly being questioned both from within and

from without its ideological systems (Duncan

and Sharp, 1993). Western feminists have

increasingly begun to recognize that international

feminism is constituted by a multiplicity of

408 BEYOND THE WEST

3029-ch21.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 408