It ought to be of some political significance at least that the
term "colonization" has come to denote a variety of phenomena in
recent feminist and left writings in general. From its analytic value as a
category of exploitative economic exchange in both traditional and contemporary
marxisms (particularly contemporary theorists such as Baran, Amin and
Gunder-Frank) to its use by feminist women of color in the U.S. to describe the
appropriation of their experiences and struggles by hegemonic white women's
movements, colonization has been used to characterize everything from the most
evident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular
cultural discourse about what is called the "Third World."' However
sophisticated or problematical its use as an explanatory construct,
colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and
a supression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question.
What I wish to analyze is specifically the production of the "Third World
Woman" as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist
texts. The definition of colonization I wish to invoke here is a predominantly
discursive one, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of
"scholarship" and "knowledge" about women in the third
world by particular analytic categories employed in specific writings on the
subject which take as their referent feminist interests as they have been
articulated in the U.S. and Western Europe.
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