ABSTRACT
In the mid-to late 1980s, postcolonial feminists and feminists of color dismantled Western feminism’s universalist assumptions, revealing the implicit whiteness of the category women. Academic feminism is a deeply troubled field: troubled from the outside, of course, but also troubled internally. The East–West feminist dialogue often begins with the Easterner patiently explaining the precariousness of her position in the region’s conservative academic institutions. Feminist theory has entered a phase of self-reflection, with scholars examining feminism’s engagements with its own development. A number of feminist thinkers have noted with alarm that neoliberalism has reframed many developments in feminist theory in accordance with its own agenda of depoliticization and privatization. Gender studies courses were not taught by movement activists turned academics but by scholars in various disciplines who had become feminists in response to the post-1989 retraditionalization. Feminists want to cause change, but on the other, feminist theory is an effort to understand change.
