It is noteworthy to mention that, although Mohanty’s analysis is mostly focused on the specific works by the aforementioned writers, feminist writers in the non-Western world, too, can benefit from her criticisms when aiming to write or theorize about the lives of women in rural and impoverished regions. Mohanty challenges the notions that over-categorize non-Western women without considering the class, ethnic, and racial contexts to which they belong to. This approach is keen, she argues, to label women in the Third World countries as “poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, and victimized,” i overlooking the extant complexity, diversity, and multiplicity of women in the non-Western world. She argues that the universal categorization of a large group of women in non-Western countries is mostly done through constructed monolithic terms and classifications. According to Mohanty, these writers draw attention to the codification of scholarly writings that discursively colonize and ghettoize non-Western, “Third World” women as the collective Other.
More specifically, the author anchors her accounts of Western feminism in a select group of texts produced by Fran Hosken, Maria Cutrufelli, Juliette Minces, Beverly Lindsay, and Patricia Jeffery published by Zed Press in what is entitled the Third World Series. In Under the Western Eyes, Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes homogeneous perspectives and presuppositions in some of the Western feminist texts that focus on women in the third world. Under the Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.
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