ABSTRACT

Julie Stephens offers a critique of contemporary feminist writings in India, arguing that the category ‘non-Western women’ is a fiction insofar as it avoids sincere engagement with its own ‘history’ under cover of doing battle with Western hegemony. This chapter includes discussion on the politics of ‘international sisterhood’, an important scrutiny of various modes of ‘experience’ for different women: ‘suffering’ or ‘struggle’ as experience for the objects under feminist analysis; ‘positive’ or ‘revelatory’ experience for the subjects doing feminist inquiry; ‘identification’ as experience for the hypothesised woman reader and so on. Further, Stephens highlights mainstream feminists’ manipulation of the category ‘experience’ in Third World feminism.