Pakistani Literature m Week 9. Mam Najia

1. Under the Western Eyes: Feminist
Scholarshipand Colonial Discourses
By Chandra TALPADE Mohanty

2. Highlights
• How would “under Western Eyes” the third
world women outside the West is analyzed?
• Power –Knowledge Nexus
A Eurocentrism
B Universalizing Methodology
C Narrow self-interest of Western Feminism

3. • Western Feminist Texts focus women as
• Poor, Uneducated, tradition-bound, Victimized
Are Ethnocentric notions

4. • Western Feminists are gate keepers of
knowledge and language and can represent
the third world women more accurately.
• Foucault/Mohanty “Juridico-discursive”
imposes cycle of prohibition and
uniformity

5. • Either/mode Dualism
• In charge of thinking on behalf of the
victim/helpless/incapable
• Critical of homogenous perspective

6. Constructed Discourses on Veiling
• The West sees it as sexual control over women
• An oppressive structure
• Veil as a means of solidarity
• Against forced veiling in Iran
Dismantle universal view of veiling

7. • Avoid generalizations
• Decontructs veil
• Avoid Western-centric view or monolithic
terms as “Third world woman”

8. Key Words
• Hegemony of Western Scholarship
• Global hegemony
• Monolith or monolithic
• Women –third world women

9. Sexual textual Politics
By Toril Moi 1985
• Introductory text on History of Feminist
Literary Theory
• Summary of important feminist works
• Vital observation on the main strains of
feminist movements i.e Anglo-American
Feminist criticism and the French Feminist
Theory

10. Two Sections
• Anglo-American Feminist Criticism
• French Feminist Theory
• Anglo-American Criticism is theoretically naïve
• French theoretically Self-conscious and
sophisticated

11. Showalter on Woolf
• Views Woolf negatively- Androgyny failure for
feminism
• Julia Kristeva : various writing techniques
break rigid convention of social meaning
• Woolf advocated deconstruction of binary
opposition of masculinity and femininity

12. Kate Millet and Mary Ellman
• Sexual Politics Ph.D thesis
• Nature of Power relations among male and
female
• Male authors exhibit an offensive interest in
male degradation of female sexuality

13. • “Thinking about women” more interest in the
image of woman
• Male writers write authoritatively whereas
women writers are confined to the language
of sensibility
• Ideas shown with sense of protest and rage
• Women are written according to social
conventions

14. • Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex” is on
existentialism leading to marxism
• Helene Cixous neglects theory and analysis and
considers feminism to be politically marring the
women’s movement
• Lucy Irigaray thesis ‘Speculum of Other Woman”
strives to enact a speculum like structure by
initiating with Freud and concluding with Plato.

15. • Adds that the mystic experience permits
femininity to discover itself via the deepest
acceptance of patriarchy subjection .
• Julia Kristeva focuses on the problem of language.
• Ideological and philosophical basics for modern
linguistics as authoritative and oppressive
• She displaces Lacan’s distinction between the
imaginary and the symbolic order into a
distinction between the semiotic and the
symbolic.

16. Similarities
• Both define major critical address
• Anglo-American gynocritics centre on female
author or character, female experience
• White hetrosexual , middle-class woman as norm
• Literary history produced as selective and
ideologically bound as male tradition

17. • Gynocritics –women experiences =visible and
empowering
• Poststructuralist femisnim textualisess
sexuality
• Women writing and writing about women as
misconceived