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Feminism Without Borders CONTENTS Acknowledgments, vii Introduction: Decolonization, Anticapitalist Critique, and Feminist Commitments, 1 Part One. Decolonizing Feminism 1. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, 17 2. Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 43 3. What's Home Got to Do with It? (with Biddy Martin), 85 4. Sisterhood, Coalition, and the Politics of Experience, 106 s. Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation, 124 Part Two. Demystifying Capitalism 6. Women Workers and the Politics of Solidarity, 139 7. Privatized Citizenship, Corporate Academies, and Feminist Projects, 169 8. Race, Multiculturalism, and Pedagogies of Dissent, 190 Part Three. Reorienting Feminism 9· "Under Western Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles, 221 Notes, 253 Bibliography, 275 Index, 295 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been a long time in the making, and it would not have been possible without the community of fe minist, social justice activists and scholars to whom I am profoundly indebted. For their integrity, friend­ ship, and generosity in walking this path with me, I thank Jacqui Alexander, Zillah Eisenstein, Ayesha Kagal, Elizabeth Minnich, Satya Mohanty, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Susan Sanchez Casal. Affection, support, and conversa­ tions over the years with numerous disparate individuals played a significant role in my thinking in this volume. I have learned much fr om Ann Russo, Ella Shohat, Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis, Liliane Landor, Leslie Hill, Paula Rothen­ berg, Audre Lorde, Rhoda Linton, Papusa Molina, Linda Carty, Piya Chatter­ jee, Gloria Joseph, Si Kahn, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Norman Rosenberg, Gwyn Kirk, Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, Lisa Lowe, Gloria Watkins (bell hooks), Biddy Martin, Risa Lieberwitz, LeslieRo man, Paula Moya, Nancy Rabinowitz, Mar­ garet Gentry, Wendy Jones, Shelley Haley, Arnie Macdonald, Angela Davis, Amber Hollibaugh, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Saraswati Sunindyo, Vivyan Adair, and Leila Farrah. Sue Kim was a wonderful early reader of my essays, and I thank her, Amy Gowans, Nick Davis, and Mag Melvin fo r their invaluable help with sections of the manuscript. The many, many students I have taught and learned fr om over these two decades at Oberlin College and Hamilton College occupy a special place in my heart-they always challenged me to greater clarity. My dear fr iend Zillah Eisenstein read, reread, and offered fe edback on numerous draftsof these chapters-I thank her fo r her boundless heart and spirit as well as hard work on my behalf. Thanks to Wendy Jones and ArnieMacdonald fo r their generous and perceptive responses to parts of this book. My fa mily has nurtured and sustained me in their own unique ways and in multiple languages and fo ods over the years-my parents, Pramila and Madhukar; my brother, Salil; sister-in-law, Medha, my cousins Ela, Roopa, and Sonali; my mother-in-law, Kamala, and the entire Mohanty clan in Bhu- baneswar and Cuttack; and La!, Tilu, and the kids. I thank them all fo r their unwavering affection and presence in my life. Last, but certainly not least, I thank Satya Mohanty fo r over two decades oflove, companionship, challenge, and superb vacation planning. He remains my truest and most valuable reader and critic. My daughter, Uma Talpade Mohanty, brings enormous joy, curi­ osity, and unanswerable questions and conundrums into my life-I thank her fo r the giftof parenting. And of course Shakti, our chocolate lab, who brings boundless energy and affection into our life at home- he too sustains me in his own way. viii Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION Decolonization, Anticapitalist Critique, and Feminist Commitments This volume is the product of almost two decades of engagement with fe minist struggles. It is based on a deep belief in the power and significance of fe minist thinking in struggles fo r economic and social justice. And it owes whatever clarity and insight the reader may findin these pages to a commu­ nity of sisters and comrades in struggle fr om whom I have learned the mean­ ing, joy, and necessity of political thinking. While many of the ideas I explore here are viewed through my own particular lenses, all the ideas belong collec­ tively to the various fe minist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist communities in which I have been privileged to be involved. In the end, I think and write in conversation with scholars, teachers, and activists involved in social justice struggles. My search fo r emancipatory knowledge over the years has made me realize that ideas are always communally wrought, not privately owned. All fa ults however, are mine, fo r seeking the kind of knowledge that emerges in these pages brings with it its own gaps, fa ults, opacities. These I accept in the hope that they too prove useful to the reader. Feminist Commitments Why "feminism without borders?" First, because it recalls "doctors with­ out borders," an enterprise and project that embodies the urgency, as well as the internationalist commitment1 that I see in the best fe minist praxis. Sec­ ond, because growing up as part ofthe postindependence generation in India meant an acute awareness of the borders, boundaries, and traces of British colonialism on the one hand, and of the unbounded promise of decoloniza­ tion on the other. It also meant living the contradiction of the promise of nationalism and its various limits and fa ilures in postcolonial India. Borders suggest both containment and safety, and women oftenpay a price fo r daring to claim the integrity, security, and safety of our bodies and our living spaces. I choose "feminism without borders," then, to stress that our most expan­ sive and inclusive visions of fe minism need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them. Feminism without borders is not the same as "border-less" fe minism. It acknowledges the fa ult lines, conflicts, differences, fe ars, and containment that borders represent. It acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, reli­ gions, and disabilities, are real-and that a fe minism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division. I want to speak of fe minism without silences and exclusions in order to draw attention to the tension between the simultaneous plurality and nar­ rowness of borders and the emancipatory potential ofcr ossing through, with, and over these borders in our everyday lives. In my own life, borders have come in many guises, and I live with them inside as well as across racialized women's communities. I grew up in Mum­ bai (Bombay), where the visible demarcations between India and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, British and Indian, women and men, Dalit and Brahmin were a fa ct of everyday life. This was the same Mumbai where I learned multiple languages and negotiated multiple cultures in the company of friends and neighbors, a Mumbai where I went to church services-not just Hindu temples-and where I learned about the religious practices of Muslims and Parsees. In the last two decades, my life in the United States has exposed some new fa ult-lines-those of race and sexuality in particular. Urbana, Illi­ nois, Clinton, New York, and Ithaca, New York, have been my home places in the United States, and in all three sites I have learned to read and live in relation to the racial, class, sexual, and national scripts embedded in North American culture. The presence of borders in my life has been both exclusionary and enabling, and I strive to envision a critically transnational (internationalist) fe minist praxis moving through these borders. I see myself as an antiracist fe minist. Why does antiracist fe minism 2 mat­ ter in struggles fo r economic and social justice in the early twenty-firstcen­ tury?The last century was clearly the century ofthe maturing offe minist ideas, sensibilities, and movements. The twentieth century was also the century of the decolonization of the Third World/South, 3 the rise and splintering of the communist Second World, the triumphal rise and recolonization of almost the entire globe by capitalism, and of the consolidation of ethnic, national- 2 Feminism without Borders ist, and religious fu ndamentalist movements and nation-states. Thus, while fe minist ideas and movements may have grown and matured, the backlash and challenges to fe minism have also grown exponentially. So in this political/economic context, what would an economically and so­ cially just fe minist politics look like? It would require a clear understanding that being a woman has political consequences in the world we live in; that there can be unjust and unfair effects on women depending on our economic and social marginality and/or privilege. It would require recognizing that sex­ ism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism underlie and fu el social and politi­ cal institutions of rule and thus often leadto hatred of women and (suppos­ edly justified)vi olence against women. The interwoven processes of sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism are an integral part of our social fa b­ ric, wherever in the world we happen to be. We need to be aware that these ideologies, in conjunction with the regressive politics of ethnic nationalism and capitalist consumerism, are differentially constitutive of all of our lives in the early twenty-firstcentury. Besides recognizing all this and fo rmulat­ ing a clear analysis and critique of the behaviors, attitudes, institutions, and relational politics that these interwoven systems entail, a just and inclusive fe minist politics fo r the present needs to also have a vision fo r transformation and strategies fo r realizing this vision. Hence decolonization, anticapitalist critique, and solidarity.4 I firmlybe­ lieve an antiracist fe minist framework, anchored in decolonization and com­ mitted to an anticapitalist critique, is necessary at this time.
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