Feminism Without Boarders, By Chandra Talpade Mohanty

When breaking into the field of feminist theory, I started to construct my own idea of a perfect world where there was social and political equality for people of all genders, sexualities, classes, and races. This is not an uncommon thing in feminism, as it helps anyone in the field of study understand what they want to accomplish in the field, and what ideas they should be putting firth into the world. When introducing her transnationalist feminist ideas in her novel Feminism Without Boarders, Chandra Talpade Mohanty provides her image of an ideal world which she describes as being full of freedom for both men and women alike to make the choices and lead the likes that they truly want, as well as living in a world with, “Economic stability,

She feels this decolonization is so important is best explained in the quote that follows, “Third world feminisms run the risk of marginalization of ghettoization from both mainstream (right and left) and Western feminist discourses.” (Mohanty, 17) This means that the goals and notions of feminism that takes place in the Third world has a legitimate risk of being silences by the louder voices of First world feminists, who wish to perpetrate their own concepts about what is right for women onto women who live in the third world. Mohanty discusses how the Western world tends create a “composite, singular ‘Third World woman’” as well as seeing systems and people in the Third World as different, and this allows for First World feminists to “appropriate and colonize the constitutive complexities that characterize the lives of women in these countries.” (Mohanty 19) This othering and even objectifying of Third World women put First World women in the limelight as it pushes aside Third World women, and this creates a negative, one sided environment for feminist goals to grow in (Mohanty, 39). So the decolonization of feminist theory consists of two parts, “deconstructing and dismantling”, where the idea of the “Third World woman” is taken apart and the variance of women is accepted, and the second part of this is “building and constructing”

Mohanty explains solidarity is needed in order to unite people from different parts of the world, as well as to get a voice that is loud enough to be properly heard; on the other hand, the notion of “sisterhood” has a tendency to overlook the differences between women in order to make them into a single homogenous group (Mohanty, 7). On the matter of her anti-capitalist critique, she is a little less clear on what she wants to put in capitalism’s place. She does say in her introduction that her ideal world includes “socialist practices”, as well as cites many prominent socialist feminists, but she never identifies herself clearly as a socialist or as for a fully socialist economy (Mohanty, 4). It is clear that her new vision for feminism contains a socialist nature in addition to her call for solidarity over the world’s