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] Conceptualizing the “Third World” Now what exactly is “the” third world? Also, and perhaps more pressing: Is it helpful at all to talk about “a” third world? Some scholars – most of them are from third-world countries – are rmly opposed to using the term “third world.” They argue that the term is not only inaccurate and misleading but is also theoretically incoherent and even empty. Nawal El Saadawi, for instance, registers her opposition thus: “This term [Third World] is no longer used by many people, including myself, because we live in one world (not three) and we are dominated or governed by one global system which is now the New World Order. However, we know that in fact it is an old world order, which uses new methods of exploitation and domination, both economic and intellectual.” As much as I agree with El Saadawi’s take on many issues, I strongly disagree with the way in which she dismisses the idea of “a” third world. Of course we do not live in three worlds, though sometimes it feels like it. And that is not the point of talking about third or rst-world countries. And, yes, we do live under one oppressive mode of production – what El Saadawi calls the New World Order and what others, myself included, would call capitalism. However, because of the international division of labor that such mode of production keeps alive for its own reproduction, people across the globe are never similarly located in or affected by that mode of production.     It is in this context that terms such as rst and third worlds assume a certain strategic value. In fact, more than the socio-economic conditions of a specic group of people, concepts such as rst and third worlds prove useful in describing current social relations of production at the international level. Moreover, such terms are likely to provide certain immediate clues as to who owns or steals the means of production, and who gets robbed of their natural resources and gets exploited as slave labor in the “New World Order” El Saadawi discusses in her works. First-world countries t the former description. And third-world countries t the latter description  – countries where the proletariat, under the unprecedentedly pervasive capitalist mode of production, consist of what my colleague Azfar Hussain calls “neo-slave labor in the South,” mostly women of color. So I do see certain usefulness in keeping the terms rst, second, third, and even fourth worlds. They suggest current unequal global socio-economic and political relations whereby the few increasingly enjoy, acquire, and accumulate resources in rst-world countries at the expense of many others located in the third world.     But, still, what is the third world? As Chandra T. Mohanty suggests, third-world countries can be seen as both a geographical and a socio-historical space. She takes the idea of the third world beyond the connes of the nation-state – which, however, is a crucial marker or even a determinant under many specic circumstances – into the space of an imperialist global economy. Mohanty argues: “with the rise of transnational corporations which dominate and organize the contemporary economic system, [...] factories have migrated in search of cheap labor, and the nation-state is no longer an appropriate socioeconomic unit of analysis.” Mohanty’s downright dismissal of the nation-state as an analytical category is profoundly awed simply because the nation-state still remains a crucial mediating institution in the world-system of capitalist production.     But here I intend to pursue some specic relational implications at the international scale. That is to say, for me, the third world does not merely signify economic conditions within specic countries or nation-states as such, but also signies economic/racial/gender relations between countries. The third world further signies economic exploitation of different subjects, regardless of the country in which they are exploited. Thus we can have third-world subjects in the United States, even though as a country it cannot be described as part of the third world. In fact, theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Angela Gilliam, and bell hooks have described women and communities of color in the US as third-world subjects. This rather complicated and highly unequal set of relations, underlying and constituting the notion of the third world, gets erased when someone says that “people in the third world do not have drinking water.” Previous section     Next Section     Table of Contents