Today's discussion on post-colonial feminism was a modern analysis of the global effects of capitalism and the world economy on the structuring of gender and gender positions. In order to understand the implications of women's work in the world it is necessary to examine the constructs under which they were created. Feminism has the tendency to be slanted or preferential towards western views of society and order. The reproduction and exportation of those notions greatly impacts and influences non-western nations as well as biasing our understanding of international social and cultural complexity Coloniality is a very gendered nature which is perpetrated through globalization. Globalization processes export identity, subjugation, as well as support for gendered practices. The universality notions of the United States and western societies need to be deconstructed. Western feminists need to look comparatively upon other societies without usurping varying global differences. The goal should not be to find a group identity or global sisterhood, because diversity is our strength. Awareness as to how global differences in economy, race, state, and class play a part in shaping women's lives is important to our analysis. Chandra Talpade Mohanty's article, "Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity", can be best summarized in her opening paragraph,
"In this essay I want to focus on the exploitation of poor Third-World women, on their agency as workers, on the common interests of women workers based on an understanding of shared location and needs, and on the strategies/practices of organizing that are anchored in and lead to the transformation of the daily lives of women workers"(3). Throughout the world women are defined by their status as producers while men are the managers of those products. In varying degrees these notions have been challenged throughout the world. Women workers are often isolated and invisible, making worker consiousness and identity difficult to attain. Even when identification can be asserted many women choose to identify as women and mothers with their families instead of identifying as workers. Indigenous and traditional notions of women and femininity are tied to the family and laying claim to one's performance as a worker deminishes their femininity. The importance of their work goes highly unrecognized and rewarded, when women do not take pride in their work and their worth as productive and valuable contributers to the economy and society at large. Because women's work is highly displaced, there is a great need to forge collectivizations to assert women's claim to their own power. Cooperative building and ways of organizing around alternative economic systems are important unifying agencies for fighting against the exploitation of economic systems. Women need to be aware of collectives and support for women's rights and voices. And finally women need a political voice in order to see a transformation in their lives.
What was not mentioned in today's discussion due to time constraints, pertains to the material in the essay by M Jacqui ALexander, "Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization". And due to my desired journal entry length I will try to be as concise as possible. The women's movement in the Bahamas premised their challenge to the state and society on sexual grounds. Women were no longer going to play the puppets in society by securing the reproduction and security of the institutions of the nuclear family and as a loyal citizen to the state. In the view of the Bahama women's movement, women were not seen as independent citizens, the "evolution --from daughter to lady to women to citizen" was the point of recognition and contestation between the movement and the state (64). In order for women to attain their own autonomy outside of the imperial British legacy, women thought to use their sexual agency, "because loyalty to the nation as citizen is perennially colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality, erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of undoing the nation entirely..."(64). Heterosexuality is the site of the state's instability(65). And therefore Alexander presents her analysis of the state's "mobilization to reinvent heteropatriarchy within the Sexual Offenses and Domestic VIolence Act of 1991 by"..."literal resituation of the law of the father and of primogeniture"...and, "the minute ways in which the state works to reinvent heterosexuality..."(69). Because of the state's relectancy to accept homosexual practices and their insistence to support systems that do not protect nor guarentee women's rights, the work must be done by women in emancipatory groups as part of the larger movement to contradict and destroy the contradictory societal sacntions placed on their lives. Alexander ends by saying what is needed "would be an emancipatory praxis anchored within a desire for decolonization, imagined simultaneously as poiltical, economic, psychic, discursive, and sexual"(100). The freedom of exploration and independence is rooted in the power of the erotic as a political tool against the state in order to dismantle the heteropatriarchy left behind from imperialism.
--Jayna Turchek