by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Duke University Press
2003, paperback
SKU: 9780822330219
Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.
Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights. Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought--"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"--lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.
Reviews:
"Chandra Talpade Mohanty's illuminating analyses take up some of the most urgent questions facing a transnational feminist practice today. She provides resources for feminist engagements with difference, identity politics, the commodification of knowledge, and globalization and its effects. Shifts in the global political and economic landscape as well as Mohanty's own shifting location enable her to identify exhilarating new directions for feminist theory and practice." --Sandra Harding, coeditor of "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society"
"Over the last two decades, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has produced an extraordinary body of writings on transnational feminism, radically changing the way we think about such categories as 'third world women,' 'women of color' and 'globalization.' This volume combines her now classic essays with new writings that accentuate the centrality of anticapitalist feminist theories and practices to the most expansive and forward-looking version of women's studies today." --Angela Y. Davis
About the Author:
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College and Core Faculty at the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati. She is coeditor of Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures and Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.