ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author writes at the urging of a number of friends and with some trepidation, revisiting the themes and arguments of an essay written some sixteen years ago. The “under” of Western eyes is now much more an “inside” in terms of my own location in the US academy. The author writes “Under Western Eyes” to discover and articulate a critique of “Western feminist” scholarship on Third World women via the discursive colonization of Third World women’s lives and struggles. She wants to expose the power–knowledge nexus of feminist cross-cultural scholarship expressed through Eurocentric, falsely universalizing methodologies that serve the narrow self-interest of Western feminism. “Under Western Eyes” sought to make the operations of discursive power visible, to draw attention to what was left out of feminist theorizing, namely, the material complexity, reality, and agency of Third World women’s bodies and lives.
