Ipshita Chanda Feminist Perspective Summary

While feminist scholarship constantly strives to challenge misconceptions about how structures in society oppress their subjects, Chanda explains that many feminists themselves have fallen victim to the fallacies they sought to debunk (486). Ipshita Chanda’s “Feminist Theory in Perspective” outlines the many ways in which feminist scholarship has approached development in the third world in order to express that the oppressions experienced by women in the non-west are based on different material realities from women in the west (486). While the assumption that all women share a common enemy is uniting, Chanda puts forth that not only is this incorrect, but policies and practical implications of said policy do very little to benefit women in

Exemplifying an institution like SEWA, Chanda argues that since women provide basic necessities in many households, therefore “hardest hit when development destroys or uses up scarce resources” (495), feminist needs are life-or-death. This possibility of life threatening scarcities consequently force women to collectivize in grass roots efforts to influence policy. These grass roots movements are based on the material realities of these women, a singular reality, a need for survival that unites women from different religions, tribes, castes, and socioeconomic classes (494). The fact that collective action is both a necessity of survival, and based on individual material realities, is something that development-strategists need take into account when attempting to empower women. Since trickle-down wealth failed (494), just as modernizing third world economy in reflection to how the west industrialized ignored the contesting realities of the third world infrastructure, attempting to empower women in the third-world identically to those in the west is equally irrational. As Chanda explains, third-world women can be empowered to collectivize and contest the patriarchal structural systems that suppress them, but not by trumpeting a humanist “human essence” (492) or importing western feminism that echoes both the “white-savior complex” and “western intellectual imperialism”. In order to provide aid to women in “post”-colonial under-developed locations, one must first criticize one’s own perspective in setting an unfair standard of development (493), understand that economic aid helps individuals in different ways based on age, gender, sexuality, community, and class, (487) and finally that in order to provide aid one must take into account the beneficiary’s “needs”