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] Conclusion As Marta Maldonado’s introduction to Puerto Rican poets in dis/content suggests, we need to understand feminisms in relational and contextual terms, much the same way we understand political economy. I argue that feminist critiques can by no means bypass political economy and that one cannot grasp political economy at all without engaging feminist critiques that focus on the mode of production at various levels. This dialectical logic also applies to race/gender/class relations: such relations do not obtain as discrete categories and identities but dialectically emerge out of social and political-economic interactions. Thus, even though there are some specic features that characterize feminisms in third-world countries (as there are some specic features that characterize feminisms in rst-world countries), feminisms coming out of rst-world countries and those coming out of the third can engage each other through both contact and conict.     In the end, even if they are not the “right kind of feminists,” women in third-world countries have to struggle with and foreground in theory and praxis the issues that affect them and their communities profoundly – the very issues that Western feminists are often blind to, the very issues which third-world women live daily at the cost of their labor, humanity and even life without which, however, the global imperialist economy cannot function even a second.     However, people located in the rst world fail to see that the clothes they wear are made of the sweat and blood of women in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Mexico. The rst world has the privilege of not knowing that the microchips inside the computers they use were and are assembled by women in Malaysia, Vietnam, and India who went blind or are becoming blind. Many in the rst world don’t know that those women have been looking through the lenses of a microscope for 16 hours a day for several years. The meaning of feminsim cannot be grasped apart from understanding that “made in USA” does not mean “made in the streets of Beverly Hills” but “made in the dingy, alienating sweatshops of east L.A. and the Mariana Islands.” And to know that the toys children in the rst world play with are made by women who cannot afford them for their own children is not simply a sad lesson, but the fundamental law of contemporary political economy of global capitalism.     As feminists in rst- and third-world countries we need to realize that in order to be able to talk about equality we need to “do” equality. Not just talking but radically changing. That is why building women’s mass organizations throughout the third world and forging linkages among them are always foremost feminist agendas. Without of course romanticizing the past, feminists today can draw inspiration and learn lessons from the traditions of third-world women’s struggles, past and ongoing – the Telengana struggle in India; peasant women’s anticolonial struggle in Kenya; women’s struggle for the right to language and land in Bangladesh; prostitutes uprising in India and Bangladesh; women’s national struggles in Palestine and the Philippines; socialist women’s struggles in Peru and Chile; native, chicana, Asian, and black women’s struggles in the United States, to mention but a few.     In this conjuncture of “globalization” when women in the third world are continuously subject to multiple levels of exploitation and colonization, combating the governance structures of globalization such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank should be part of feminist struggles. A profound understanding of the global political economy and the ways in which the monstrous “C” works is key to struggles not only for equality, but also for justice. Transnational corporations prot from ignorance. They cash in on apathy. They (re)produce hopelessness. Feminisms in rst- and third-world countries must engage all such issues in their organic totality. Otherwise the problems of inequality cannot be addressed effectively. Microsite politics are not sufcient, nor is one demonstration, however massive. El Saadawi already said: “we live in one world.” One world in which third-world women are exploited like slaves. Understanding and changing this historical-material condition has been, and remains, the ultimate challenge for Western feminists. We need to build a world free from all forms of exploitation and oppression. Previous section     Table of Contents