Response One

Unhinging Universalities

Feminisms’ transnational movements are hinged on careful, investigatory analyses.  Contemporary writers and theorists such as Chandra Mohanty, Uma Narayan, Inderpal Grewal, and Caren Kaplan offer congruous notions of deeply-involved transnational feminisms.  Their exceedingly insightful analyses highlight the problematic notions of “woman” as a universal category and state the necessity for examining the contradictions within existing hegemonic power structures.

            Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” investigates existing power structures and the related presuppositions within society that reify or deconstruct them.  To Mohanty, an assessment of conventional categorizations deserves expedience, writing; “The first analytical presupposition I focus on is…the strategic location or situation of the category of ‘women’” (Mohanty, 64).  Intersectionally created existences yield unstable foundations for overarching categorizations, especially those created through binary vision.  Gender, as a system of domination and oppression, is equally multitudinous in its composition, and it is the duty of transnational feminisms to investigate these multifarious parts.  Uma Narayan’s piece “Contesting Cultures” emboldens this view of intersectional gender categories.  Narayan writes, “Simultaneously, colonialism and nationalism played their own ideological parts in the construction of gender roles…” (Narayan, 19).  Created and powered by masculinist, hegemonic regimes, gender roles and the category of “women” only further allow “…state power and the power of fundamentalist groups to mobilize forces against all female persons” (Grewal and Kaplan, 28).  Acknowledging an overarching issue within overarching categories, feminisms’ lenses widen to a transnational scale in order to reveal innate contradictions within existing doxa.

            Transnational analyses are greatly needed when investigating unknown or preconceived discourses.  Globalized identities deserve further investigations, for ubiquitous notions of being are signs of presupposed, hegemonic narratives.  By unveiling paradoxes within conventionalized systems, progressions toward fluidity can flourish; Mohanty states, “…by understanding the contradictions inherent in women’s location within various structures that effective political action…can be devised” (Mohanty, 74). Transnational feminisms aim to seek and highlight conventional paradoxes within hierarchal powers and categories.  Coming from the “Third-World” angle, Uma Narayan investigates the intersectionalities of dominating categories, but also those within conventional postcolonial and postmodern terminology.  Seeking confirmation of inconsistencies within dominant hegemonies, Narayan notes, “I do not intend to provide an analysis of the term ‘Westernization’ but rather concretely to point to tensions and paradoxes in the use of the term…” (Narayan, 5).  The ideologies that constitute “Westernization” are just as intersectional as the cultures that spread or vilify it.  These discourses act as a call for rejuvenation within transnational feminisms by deconstructing the universal category of “woman” and revealing contradictions built into hegemonic systems of power.