December, 2000 Volume 3, Issue 3 Past Issues About dis/content Editorial Collective Contributors Contact Us Submissions Links Home   The Right Kind of Feminists?: Third-world Women and the Politics of Feminism [continued] Keeping Feminism Some third-world theorists and activists hotly contest the very notion of feminism and question the appropriateness of the term when applied to women’s struggles in third-world countries. This contestation assumes a particular force of meaning when those theorists and activists view “feminism” as a rst-world construction, often characterized as a historically racist, imperialist, and elitist production of assumptions and procedures. But racism, imperialism, and elitism are precisely those very structures and relations of power and production against which women in third-world countries have been ghting and struggling. The works of bell hooks, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Chandra Mohanty, and Nawal El Saadawi, to name but a few, variously map out the contours and parameters of such on-going struggles.     As a result, some women in third-world countries have dispensed with the term “feminism” in order to account for and decolonize their historically specic personal and collective struggles. Others, such as myself, have chosen to keep it. And the reason for keeping it is basically twofold: (1) Women in third-world countries can be – and denitely have been – active agents in (re)articulating and (re)dening feminism as a concept in ways that apply to their particular experiences, being able to formulate their own agendas independent of those of rst-world feminists; and (2) the concept of feminism can be strategically mobilized and continuously politicized in ways in which it can account for the specicities of women’s movements, organizations, and struggles in different third-world countries – and everywhere, really. Therefore, even though the concept has been contested for its apparent exclusiveness, it can be, and has been, (re)shaped in ways that serve as a useful political-theoretical-discursive tool for women in third-world countries. Previous section     Next Section     Table of Contents