Reading: C.T. Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle" and Johnson-Odim and Strobel, "Conceptualizing the History of Women in Africa, Asia..."

Terms, words and concepts to learn:

Third World                            gender                   monolithic
non-Western                           agency                   hegemonic
essentialism                            patriarchy
 

Questions to consider:

Johnson-Odim and Strobel:
 

• How do women (in any society) exercise power in ways that are not conceived of as "power" or as powerful? How is power as a concept gendered?
• How do certain institutions (concubinage, sex segregation) contain contradictions for women? In other words, in what ways are institutions that are supposedly "bad for women" advantageous to them?
• Why do women participate in structures or institutions that subordinate women? In other words, why do women participate in (seemingly) their own subordination?

Mohanty: focus on her explanations from a point of view as a so-called "third world" woman.
 

• What are some of the issues that third world feminists have with western women?
• Why do third world women (or as Mohanty also says, women of color) question the term feminism (p. 7)?
• Why do third world feminists reject a "singular focus on gender as a basis for equal rights"? (p. 12)
• How does Mohanty define "third world woman"?
• How does she link third world women's oppression as women to other structures of oppression?

What did you learn most from these articles?
What questions do you have that were unanswered from this reading?
Why do you think I assigned these particular articles?