Mohanty, Chandra. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses". Feminist Review, No.30 (1988): 61-88.

Mohanty, Chandra. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses". Feminist Review, No.30 (1988): 61-88.

• The author critiques the assumptions within Feminist scholarship regarding the experiences of less fortunate or subaltern women, whose experiences are often assumed or ignored in favor of White and/or middle-class narratives (61-62).
• The dominant feminist scholarship assumes similar experiences, desires, and 'natural' mentalities of women regardless of race, location, socio-economic status. These 'universal' characteristics of womanhood are invariably constructed by feminists in Western or middle-class settings (64).
• Women in the Third World are constructed as subservient to a deeper form of patriarchy, in which their culture and poverty forces them into a limited life because of their gender. This assumption is made in contrast to the 'modern', educated, 'liberated' Western women (65).
• Western feminist scholarship must recognize that, in addition to the economic power of the West over the Third World, scholarship produced in the West carries considerable power in the Third World, which Third World scholarship does not in the West. Western scholarship must therefore be wary of spreading false narratives about the Third World (63-64).
• Within feminist scholarship, women are not designated as a group because of biological sex characteristics -- after all feminists are not biologists -- but by a presumed shared social reality of oppression. This definition means that feminist literature must always find the oppression in every situation (65-66).
• The drive within scholarly feminist to discover and elucidate the ways in which women are oppressed means that women globally become identified as "powerless" and "exploited". The labeling of all women in this manner is, "similar to sexist discourse labelling women as weak, emotional, having math anxiety, etc" (66).
• This focus on the oppression of women, especially in the Third World, denies agency to women in their social circumstances, instead relegating women to the status of objects and victims of social, economic, and religious systems. Portraying these situations without female agency implies the political immaturity of the Third World (66).
• Feminist literatures casts women in the Third World within a series of limiting roles as victims, either as helpless objects of male violence (66-67), or political and economic dependents to the patriarchal order (67). Both roles assume that being a victim is enough to create cultural ties or shared mentalities between disparity groups -- like Africans and American Blacks -- and that victimhood is enough to describe that entire group (67-68).
• This idea that Third World women are defined as a group by their oppression, which is then explained as a universal phenomenon of their sex, ignores the real, social institutions which serve to disadvantage women. This definition also ignores the diverse roles of women in society, instead relegating all women to oppression (68).
• This issues is especially poignant in Dr. Juliette Minces's description of 'Muslim' societies. By describing large groups of women as identical in oppression, Dr. Minces ignores the differences of national and regional practice, religion, class, and even individual variations in practice; instead an assumption is made that one version of female experience exists in those countries, culturally proscribed and immune from historical trends (70).
• "What is problematical, then, about this kind of use of 'women' as a group [...] is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity among women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead of analytically demonstrating the production of women as socio-economic political groups within particular local contexts, this analytical move [...] limits the definition of the female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic identities" (72).
• Even when describing smaller groups of people, such as in a study of marriage practices among the Bemba people of Zambia prior to and following colonization, Western feminist scholarship assumes unanimity within the group, focuses on a victimization of 'initiated' pubescent girls due to capitalist colonialism, but ignoring the positive change in the experiences of 'uninitiated' prepubescent girls (69).
• The issue of assuming universal 'female' needs and problems is especially clear in the work of a number of scholars on how women are affected by development. These studies discuss women within countries as a set group, talking about how women in Egypt are affected by economic development, ignoring the fact that development will obviously affect a peasant farmer differently than a middle-class housewife (71-72).
• Western feminist scholars a multitude of methodologies to demonstrate the universality of female exploitation by men, with the author describing and critiquing the three most common:
• The first proof of the universality of oppression is by providing sheer numbers of women engaged in practices which Western feminists find to be oppressive -- including pornography, purdah, wearing the hijab, or engaging in polygamy. These practices are not necessarily oppressive and need to be looked at within a cultural context (74-75).
• The existence of family institutions and gendered division of labour in all societies are used as proof that the 'same' patriarchal institutions exist everywhere. This again ignores the different values assigned to work and family roles in different cultures, which must be accounted for within a local context (75-76).
• Lastly, Western feminists simply do not bother to prove that the gender divide is universal, and assume that women will always have certain roles because of 'nature'. This ignores the substantial diversity of experiences of women and wrongly assumes that women lack identities beyond gender (77). 
• "This focus on the position of women whereby women are seen as a coherent group across contexts, regardless of class or ethnicity, structures the world in ultimately binary, dichotomous terms, where women are always seen in opposition to men, patriarchy is always necessarily male dominance, and the religious, legal, economic and familial systems are implicitly assumed to be constructed by men" (78).
• Contemporary feminist scholarship on women's liberation creates a firm dichotomy between the powerful and the powerless, ignoring the spectrum and range of potential power which women hold. It further ignores power differentials between women (79).
• From this perspective, the solution to issues of sexism must come from the concentration of power in new institutions which are constructed and controlled by women for women. However, this is just a reversal of patriarchy because it requires that all power belong to only one group, ignoring the fuzzy nature of the world (79).
• Similar to the relationship between Occident and Orient in the work of post-colonial authors, the relationship between Western feminism and the concept of "Third World women" is self-reinforcing. The constructed 'other' of the Third World is needed to demonstrate how secular and liberated First World women are (82).