Revising Oneself

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Critique and criticism-self-criticism

• read: Mohanty, Introduction, Chaps. 1 & 9: Under Western Eyes, and Revisited (pp. 1-42; 221-252)

The second wave in the US is known for its practice of critique, its histories of sectarian politics, and its conflict and confrontations. "Under Western Eyes" works critique in transnational terms in which the US as center of feminist theory comes under scrutiny.

What does one use critique for? how do we connect and reflect on critique, debunking, critical thinking, revisioning, self-criticism?



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Some questions to ask in self-examination as one engages in critique:

• Given this critique, what needs to happen instead?

A critique is always a way of positioning one's own priorities and projects. Accountable and engaged critique is not self-satisfied, but puts those making it in some difficult positions....

• How hard is it to do what I advocate by making my critique?

• Can I do it? Do I do it? How do I do it? Who can do it? How do we do it together?

• What resources will doing this take?

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Some key words: (from the Wikipedia):

historical materialism
antihumanism
(humanism)
neoliberalism



Third World
North-South Divide
First Word and renaming Two-Thirds World

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227: terminology

"we are still working with a very imprecise and inadequate analytical language. All we can have access to at given moments is the analytical language that most clearly approximates the features of the world as we understand it."

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228: privilege & solidarity:

"Thus, I am for the Two-Thirds World but with the privileges of the One-Third World."

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terms under critique may be used still, but understood as complex:

224: "I did not argue against all forms of generalization, nor was I privileging the local over the systematic, difference over commonalities, or the discursive over the material.... nor did I define 'Western' and 'Third World' feminism in such oppositional ways that there would be no possibility of solidarity between Western and Third World feminists."

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242-3: feminist solidarity model:

"the links, the relationships, between the local and the global that are foregrounded, and these links are conceptual, material, temporal, contextual, and so on. This framework assumes a comparative focus and analysis of the directionality of power...."

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"the meaning, joy and necessity of political thinking" (p. 1)

Contexts from Introduction:

2: grew up in Mumbai, India; last two decades in US in Urbana, Illinois, Clinton, New York, and Ithica, New York.

of twentieth century:

• "struggles for economic and social justice"
• "maturing feminist ideas"
• "decolonization of the Third World/South"
• "rise and spintering of the communist Second World"
• "recolonization ...by capitalism"
• "consolidation of ethnic, nationalist, and religious fundamentalist movements and natiion-states"

of 70s and 80s (5):

• "theoretical limitations of an implicitly masculinist Marxism"
• "racialization of gender and class"
• "'family' and 'household' on Eurocenric grounds"
• "race blindness of 'imperial feminism'"
• "racism and heterosexism of the women's movement"

of 80s:

• "rise of standpoint epistemology" "link between social location, women's experiences, and their epistemic perspectives"
• "national struggles for liberation, and in the economic development and democratization of previously colonized countries"

contemporaneously:

• "theorization of feminism and racism, immigration, Eurocentrism, critical white studies, heterosexism, and imperialism"

levels of feminist practice:

daily life: "identities and relational communities"
collective action: "groups, networks, and movements"
theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity: making knowledge


problematic directions in US feminisms:

• professionalization leads to "careerist academic feminism"
• "corporatization of US culture" leds to "'free-market' feminism"
• "critique of essentialist identity politics" leds either "self-serving understandings of identity" or identity is only understood as "strategic"

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