Cultural Geography

voices, including those of women in the south.

The challenge for feminist scholarship is to tran-

scend the colonizing boundaries of modernist

discourse, which demands the recognition of

difference and the multiplicity of axes and iden-

tities that shape women’s lives. Greater empha-

sis is now placed on the ‘positionality’ of the

researcher in relationships of power. As Duncan

and Sharp (1993) argue:

It is much more than a question of being culturally

sensitive or ‘politically correct’... it requires a continual

and radical undermining of the ground upon which one

has chosen to stand, including, at times, the questioning

of one’s own political stance.

Black feminists and women in the south are

fighting for spaces in which to articulate their

own demands and shape their own political

agendas. Furthermore, marginalized women are

resisting their representation by elite women

from within their own cultures, many of whom

are now located within the western academy. As

one scholar comments,

Frankly, I’m very tired of having other women interpret

for us, other women sympathise with us. I’m interested

in articulating our own directions, our own aspirations,

our own past, in our own words. (Skonaganleh: R’a, in

Sittirak, 1998: 135)

Taking into account the criticisms that black

feminists in particular have articulated regarding

the exclusionary tactics of white feminism, con-

stant reflection on the creation and production of

knowledge remains important. As bell hooks

argues,

if we do not interrogate our motives, the direction of

our work, continually, we risk furthering a discourse on

difference and otherness that not only marginalizes

people of color but actively eliminates the need of our

presence. (1990: 132)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990) takes this

argument a step further by arguing that western

feminists need not only to acknowledge the

situatedness of their knowledges (i.e. their cultural

specificity and, therefore, their partiality), but

also to ‘unlearn’ their privilege as loss. This

involves recognizing that privileges (race, class,

nationality, gender, and so on) may have pre-

vented the attainment of certain knowledges, not

simply information not yet received, but the

knowledge rendered incomprehensible by reason

of specific social and cultural positions. In order

to unlearn these privileges western feminists

need to work hard at gaining some knowledge

of others who occupy those spaces most closed

to their view. It also means recognizing the

importance of attempting to speak to those

others in such a way that they might be able to

answer back.

Critiques of western spatial metaphors

and temporalities

Related to these issues of power and knowledge

is an explicit critique of the spatial metaphors

and temporality employed in western discourses.

Whereas previous designations of the ‘Third

World’ signalled both spatial and temporal dis-

tance – ‘out there’ and ‘back there’ – attempts to

dislocate western centricity insist that the ‘other’

world is ‘in here’ (Chambers, 1996: 209) and

that the modalities and aesthetics of the south

have partially constituted western languages and

cultures. This attempt to rewrite the hegemonic

accounting of time (history) and the spatial dis-

tribution of knowledge (power) that constructs

the ‘Third World’ has certainly been significant

within feminism.

As discussed above, the ways in which

western women represent their southern counter-

parts, and the power relationships inherent in

this, have increasingly been brought under

scrutiny. As the ‘Third World’ is frozen in time,

space and history, so this is particularly the case

with ‘Third World women’ (Mohanty, 1991).

Carby (1983) writes:

Feminist theory in Britain is almost wholly Eurocentric

and, when it is not ignoring the experience of black

women at ‘home’, it is trundling ‘Third World women’

onto the stage only to perform as victims of ‘bar-

barous’, ‘primitive’ practices in ‘barbarous’, ‘primitive’

societies.

Western feminists often universalize their own

particular perspectives as normative, and

essentialize women in the south as tradition-

bound victims of timeless, patriarchal cultures

(Mohanty, 1991: 71). In so doing, western

feminist scholarship reproduces the colonial dis-

courses of mainstream, ‘male-stream’ scholarship.

What Mohanty (1991: 72) calls the ‘colonialist

move’ arises from the bringing together of a

binary model of gender, which sees ‘women’ as

an a priori category of oppressed, with an

‘ethnocentric universality’, which takes western

locations and perspectives as the norm. The

effect is to create a stereotype – ‘Third World

woman’ – that ignores the diversity of women’s

lives in the south across boundaries of class,

ethnicity and so on, and reproduces ‘Third World

difference’. As suggested, this is a form of other-

ing, a reprivileging of western values, knowl-

edge and power (hooks, 1984; Ong, 1988;

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