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Anirban Das

'Third World Feminisms: Towards (Ethico)politics of the (Im)possible'

To speak of 'other' feminisms is to think about others that are, after all, feminisms. Not external or opposed to the concerns of feminism, these modify the latter in specific ways. To use 'third world' as a necessary qualifier to 'feminism' or the 'woman' is to bring history into the ethical or epistemic universals implied by the latter two terms, – and this remains an implicit presupposition or overt declaration in the bulk of the literature. I emphasize the need to unpack (another much-vaunted word in want of unpacking) the word 'history' to bring out, along with the dimensions of time, the multiple dimensions of spatiality (location/situation/partiality-of-perspective) implicated therein. The paper goes on to trace the conceptual bases, usually unstated, upon which the theorization of a 'third world' in 'feminisms' rests. It also tries to unravel the consequences of not stating (implying a lack of awareness about) these theoretical premises. One of these is a lumping together of disparate positions, necessary sometimes for political solidarity, yet utterly inadequate in notional rigour. As the first tentative steps to come out of the resultant impasse, I suggest an attempt to explicate the theoretical assumptions along the analytic/hermeneutic divide.

That 'feminism' or 'woman' can only be defined from within a particular context or location, and specifying that location to be the 'third world', needs some major shifts in thought. One is a rethinking of universality and location and the many dimensions of 'space'. The other is a reworking of the concept of epistemology where 'understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being' (Ricoeur 1981). Not that this is sufficient. Feminist concerns require going further into the processes of hierarchies implicated in the sexuation of 'beings'. Paradoxically, this also involves a thick epistemological encounter with 'third world' forms of thinking that inextricably constitute the contexts of being, like a specific genealogy of the Indic 'devi' in the modern Indian woman (Spivak 2001).

A detailed survey of the rich and diverse literature on third world feminism/s that the paper undertakes reveals at least two clearly discernible conceptual strands. The almost ubiquitous of the two (Mohanty 1988, Tharu 1989, Tharu and Niranjana 1996), with many variations and often working as an implicit assumption, stresses on 'history' and 'experience' as resources for a critique of the homogenizing impulse in the 'western' eyes of feminism – a bid to put women 'back into history'. The other strand (Stephens 1989, Suleri 1996-1992) points at the pitfalls in such a solution. It speaks of the 'uncertain epistemological status of the category 'women's experience'' and the arbitrary structure of techniques through which '[c]ertain women, or groups of women, qualify [to be subjects] by fulfilling a set of criteria'.

The writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1987, 1988, 1993, 1999), though not avowedly, try to combine these insights. Her commitment to deconstruction makes her retain the uses of history even as she obstinately continues to point at the aporias that beset such a project. In the prevailing milieu of 'analytical' reasoning that pervades the theoretical world of third world feminisms, this working through the double bind of retention and critique is always and already translated as a 'paradox' (of working with opposed concepts) and remains perennially suspect (of inaction and non-commitment). My contention is, to get a glimpse of the wide horizon of possibilities opened up by the stance, one has to imagine the ontological contexts of knowing and the ethical contexts of being.

Before going into the details of this process, the paper deals with the possible links and disjunctions between the standpoint theorists (here used loosely to gather together figures like Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, despite their differences in details) and theories of located epistemes and politics like third world feminisms. The former can consistently be deployed to argue in favour of the latter stance, I submit. Otherwise, the ethical and political concerns of the 'third world' (itself in need of being rendered heterogeneous) would remain as something to be added on to feminisms exogenously, not flowing from the internal dynamics of the feminist cause. An extreme instance is the positing of a universality for the category 'woman' almost unencumbered by the specificities of location (Nussbaum 1995, Narayan 1997, the latter somewhat arguably).

In the backdrop of the recent communal carnage in India, the paper seeks to articulate the specific dynamics of women's participation in that violence, and tries falteringly to spell out some contextual articulations of ethics and politics. Rooted in the shifting onticity of locations, trembling and hesitant in epistemic claims, it does not relinquish the hope of a more democratic future yet doggedly trails an impossible ethico-politics of reaching out to the wholly other.

References:
Mohanty, C. T. 1988. 'Under western eyes' in Feminist Review No.30.
Narayan U. 1997. Dislocating cultures: identities, traditions and third world feminism. New York and London: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. 1995. 'Human capabilities, female human beings' in Women, culture, and development: a study of human capabilities ed. M. C. Nussbaum and J. Glover. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Ricoeur, P. 1981. Hermeneutics and the human sciences: essays on language, action and interpretation (edited and translated by J. B. Thompson). Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
Spivak, G.C. 1987. In other worlds. New York & London: Methuen;
1988. 'Can the subaltern speak' in Marxism and the interpretation of culture ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press;
1993. Outside in the teaching machine. New York & London: Routledge;
1999. A critique of postcolonial reason. Calcutta: Seagull;
2001. 'Moving Devi' in Cultural Critique 47. Stephens, J. 1989. 'Feminist fictions' in Subaltern studies VI ed. Ranajit Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Suleri, S. 1996 (1992). 'Woman skin deep: feminism and the postcolonial condition' in Contemporary postcolonial theory ed. Padmini Mongia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Sunder Rajan, R. 1993. Real and imagined women: gender, culture and postcolonialism. London and New York: Routledge.
Tharu, S. 1989. 'Response to Julie Stephens' in Subaltern Studies VI ed. Ranajit Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Tharu, S and Niranjana, T. 1996. 'Problems for a contemporary theory of gender' in Subaltern studies IX ed. S. Amin and D. Chakrabarty. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Bio: Anirban Das graduated in medicine, and is now shifting to the humanities (Masters in History) and specifically to studies on gender, science and postcoloniality. She is doing her PhD in philosophy and sociology on 'Embodied knowledges: the limits and possibilities of knowing and the body' at the Jadavpur University, Calcutta and the CSSSC. The thesis takes off from the notion of embodiment as deployed in the feminist criticisms of universalist knowledges. It deals specifically with the discourse on the 'body' and 'location' across multiple disciplines.
She has completed two one year programs with dissertations – (i) the history of sciences in the Asiatic society, Calcutta; (ii) Research Training Program in the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC).
Anirban is also a Research Associate at the Indian National Science Academy, working on the history of the concept of the 'body'. She is also a member of the editorial collective, from the margins: a journal of critical theory in a postcolonial setting. She has published essays in The Indian Journal of History of Science 33.3 (1998), in Rethinking Marxism, 13.2 (2001), in an edited book History Science and Society in the Indian Context, ed. A. K. Biswas, The Asiatic Society (2001), six articles in different issues of from the margins, several essays in vernacular 'little magazines'. Anirban has presented papers in seminars in and across multiple disciplines in the Universities of Jadavpur and Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; also the Cultural Studies Workshop (1999 – the CSSSC in Khajuraho), and summer-school on 'Genealogies of Modernity' (Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research in Amsterdam, 2001). She has also taught gender theories in orientation and refresher courses for college and university teachers at the universities of Calcutta and Jadavpur and in the History of Science program at the Asiatic Society.

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