Handra Mohanty’s article, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” describes how men have portrayed themselves as the all important, while women are the “other”. She goes on to describe how women are supposed to play the dependant model in the relationship, and this is obtained in many countries through genital cutting. Genital mutilation is seen as taking away a woman’s pleasure when engaging in sex, so her only purpose is to reproduce. As she explains, female genital mutilation occurs, “to assure female dependence and subservience by any and all means” (pg 66). With domestic violence, there is an undeniable alliance of men against women. She also explains how women are always grouped together because of their oppression and as victims of abuse.
Mohanty also goes into detail about women as universal dependents and the grouping of women based solely on their status as a victim. She describes that Vietnamese women and Black American women are linked together because they are victims, although they have almost nothing else in common. I think this is wrongly grouping because women shouldn’t be characterized and grouped based on being victims. Women as a whole shouldn’t be able to be grouped because they are victims. I think women need to escape the position of being dependent on men and avoid being recognized and put together because of their shared status of victims.
The other article, “Whose Security?”, by Charlotte Bunch, goes into detail about the national security measures taken after 9/11. She describes how the Bush administrations goals and actions actually served to hurt the women’s rights movement and take away their efforts towards human security. As she explains, 9/11 could have, and should have, generated efforts to bolster women’s human rights campaigns, whereas instead, the Bush administration took advantage of it to invade Islamic countries and take military action. I was also outraged to read about Mary Robinson and how she was stripped of her job because she stood up for women’s rights movements and pointed attention to human rights abuses. I think this sort of action is ridiculous and need to be made available for public scrutiny. I think if a story like this was made more public, something could have been done about it, and things like this could have been prevented in the future. I also found it horrible that the Bush administration used women’s rights as a tool to garner support for the war. He claimed abuses to women’s rights in the Islamic culture, which would boost women’s support of invading Islamic countries. I think this is awful to trick the American people into supporting a war in which they did nothing to aid women’s rights, and instead acted militarily and justify certain uses of torture.
I think that these military resources need to be used to address women’s rights both in this country and abroad. Bush did have a good idea on helping women’s rights efforts abroad, but I think the administration need to actually follow through and do something good for women. As Bunch explains, it is hard to determine what is best to do to help both the domestic and the global community, but we can all benefit from feminist activities around the world.
1 comment:
Samantha,
This is a tricky article; as we’ll discuss in class today. Mohanty’s less concerned here with the ways in which women have been cast as men’s “Other,” and more concerned with the ways in which western feminists have (inadvertently) recreated the problem, casting third world women as the “Other” of white, “western” feminists. “Our” feminist scholarship, she notes, tends to group all women from third world countries in a single group and treat this group as homogeneous rather than acknowledging the vast differences between different women. Further, we (western feminists) tend to assume that these women are universally disempowered and “victims” rather than looking at both the specific customs and practices that are understood as oppressing these women, what these customs and practices actually mean (and how their meaning changes), and how these women resist and challenge oppression.
Nice discussion of Bunch’s article – great reactions and ideas, particularly about the ironic use of women’s issues and human rights to further national security agendas that effectively stripped women’s rights away.
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