postcolonial feminism time
"The phrase 'women as a category of analysis' refers to the crucial assumption that all women, across classes, and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the process of analysis. This is an assumption that characterizes much feminist discourse. The homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological essentials but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and anthropological universals. Thus, for instance, in any given piece of feminist analysis, women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of a shared oppression. What brings women together is a sociological notion of the 'sameness' of their oppression. It is at this point that an elision takes place between 'women' as a discursively constructed group and 'women' as material subjects of their own history. Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of women as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always already constituted group, one that has been labeled powerless, esploited, sexually harassed, and so on, by feminist scientific, economic, legal, and sociological discourses. (notice that this quite similar to sexist discourse labeling women as weak, emotional, having math anxiety, etc.,) This focus is not on uncovering the material and ideological specificities that constitute a particular group of women as 'powerless' in a particular context. It is, rather on finding a variety of cases of powerless groups of women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless." -- Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses."