In this book Chandra Mohanty confronts the orientalist arrangement of “The West versus The Rest” within the category of Women of Color or what she refers to as “Third World Women”.  Mohanty walks the reader through the complexities of the very categories that we take for granted and reveals the inherent reactionary forms of domination that lie within supposed philanthropic intervention from the West to “rescue” Third World Women.  This book reminded me very much of Lugones’ Decolonial Feminism in the way that it called for the removal of borders from the way that we discuss and engage in feminist resistance.  

Monhanty’s discussion of the way that we take categories for granted revealed a key problem within the way women are operationalized.  The social, cultural, and historical context within which women are conceptualized in commonly looked over and Western cultural norms and social institutions are transplanted into the analysis of the lived experiences of non-white women.  What caught my attention within Mohanty’s argument is the essentialism of women as a category and their reference to men, something that can be traced back to Aristotle’s notion of essentialism as well as his definition of democracy.  Mohanty stated that what actually creates or binds the category of women with one another around the world in spite of their different histories and circumstances is their socio-political location (p. 20, p.22).  So it’s the relationship to the structures of power and domination that creates this homogeneity versus the homogeneous essential notion of women as a biological category all dominated by the same patriarchal structure.

Mohanty then later takes on an argument that is attempts to contextualize women within a global economy through the idea of “women’s labor” for a comparative analysis.  In a number of ways this is a helpful method because due to the global span of capitalism and colonialism, we are seeing similar markets that also move across and beyond the notion of national borders.  Capitalism is transnational in its functions and given that Mohanty set up the argument of women as a category that speaks of a socio-political status, it could provide a more local context to a comparative analysis.  Capitalism, for Mohanty, provides what she refers to as “relations of rule” that position women differently as workers. For Mohanty, what this method does is provide a means through which a comparative analysis operates off of the common interests and tied histories of women not essentialist notions of commonality and the relational functions of hegemony (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class (economic), ability, etc.).

What I did struggle with in this text is Lugones’ slippage between gender and sexuality.  The notion of women’s labor was also built off of the notion of the sexual politics of global capitalism.  While this is part of it, sexual politics and sexuality require another analytical engagement as a relational form of domination that is different from gender in its function as well as its definition.  I do not think that Mohanty aimed to do that kind of work necessarily in this text (she did not claim to) but it would have greatly improved and contextualized her argument overall.  It did get me thinking about where do Trans and non binary gender people fit within this analysis, because while we are referring to women as a socio-political category I am not sure if we can completely abandon Mohanty’s thesis as not being cisgender centered but I believe it can be extended to cover that. Overall, the Mohanty text helped better understand Lugones’ argument for me even more but also helped me put a number of different authors into context.  This happened through me being exposed to an analysis that contextualizes power and domination rather than identity conceptualized through biological determinism.