What Happened to Global Sisterhood? Writing and Reading ‘the’ Postcolonial Woman

Abstract

While debates continue about how third wave feminism might be defined, it is generally agreed that this ‘wave’ embraces the diversity of women; and that it refuses the homogenising definition of woman-as-victim, as well as the universal ‘solutions,’ associated with second wave feminism. This clearly implies a generational approach to feminist history. But just as the spurious distinction between ‘activist’ and ‘theoretical’ feminisms, summarised as ‘Anglo-American versus French’ in discussions in the late 1980s and 1990s, ignored the majority of the world’s women, so, third wave feminism risks repeating the complacent assumption that the West is the world. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake have highlighted ‘the profound influence of U.S. Thrid World feminism on the third wave’ (9), pointing up the ways in which the essays in their collection, Third Wave Agenda, have found in the work of writers such as bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde (to name only a few) ‘languages and images that account for multiplicity and difference, that negotiate contradiction in affirmative ways, and that give voice to a politics of hybridity and coalition’ (9). Although Heywood and Drake do warn of the dangers of appropriation and borrowing by white US (third wave) feminists, I remain concerned about the place of ‘Third World’ women’s texts in the genealogy of the waves. Alka Kurian puts the issues succinctly:

While feminists would surely not deny that the oppression of women is a matter of international concern, the west has tended to dominate both the theoretical and practical aspects of the movement. The customary division of the history of feminism into “waves” stands as a good example of this, since these categorisations are conventionally organised around American and European events and personalities. Thus, however unintentionally, the “grand narrative” of feminism becomes the story of western endeavour, and relegates the experience of non-western women to the margins of feminist discourse. (66)