Lwinsp2019

Edits:

In her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Truth identifies the difference between the oppression of white and black women. She says that white women are often treated as emotional and delicate while black women are subjected to racist abuse and demeaned as a woman. However, this was largely dismissed and pushed down by white feminists who worried that this would distract from their goal of women’s suffrage and instead focus attention on emancipation. (https://isreview.org/issue/91/black-feminism-and-intersectionality and “Ain’t I a Woman?”)

For example, Chandra Mohanty discusses alliances between women throughout the world as intersectionality in a global context. She rejects western feminist theory, especially when it writes about global women of color and generally associated “third world women.” She argues that “third world women” are often thought of as a homogenous entity, when, in fact, their experience of oppression is informed by their geography, history, and culture. When western feminists write about women in the global South in this way, they dismiss the inherent intersecting identities that are present in the dynamic of feminism in the global South. Mohanty questions the performance of intersectionality and relationality of power structures within the USA and colonialism and how to work across identities with this history of colonial power structures. (http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202015%20readings/IPD%202015_5/under-western-eyes.pdf)

This is elaborated on by Christine Bose who discusses a global use of intersectionality which works to remove associations of specific inequalities with specific institutions, while showing that these systems generate intersectional effects. She uses this approach to develop a framework that can analyze gender inequalities across different nations and differentiates this from an approach (the one that Mohanty was referring to) which, one, paints national-level inequalities as the same and, two, differentiates only between the global North and South. This is manifested through the intersection of global dynamics like economics, migration, or violence, with regional dynamics, like histories of the nation or gendered inequalities in education and property education. (https://www-jstor-org.ccl.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/23212241.pdf?refreqid=search%3A74bb37c173364db098d46d1f2f31bdaa)