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Aihwa Ong
Return to
Inscriptions Volume 3-4 | Return to
Inscriptions
Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-
presentations of Women in Non-Western
Societies
Aihwa Ong
Who Is the Non-Feminist Other?
In a recent paper, Marilyn Strathern notes that feminists discover themselves
by becoming conscious of oppression from the Other. In order to restore to
subjectivity a self dominated by the Other, there can be no shared experience
with persons who stand for the Other. Thus, necessary to the construction of
the feminist self is a non-feminist Other ... generally conceived of as
"patriarchy" (Strathern 288). But Strathern also cautions that if women
construct subjectivity for themselves, they do so strictly within the
sociocultural constraints of their own society (291). This paper will suggest the
problems feminists [1] experience in achieving the separation they desire
when it comes to understanding women in the non-Western world. [2]
The irony of feminism is twofold: 1. As an oppositional subculture
reproduced within the Western knowledge of the non-Western World, it is a
field defined by historicism. This post-Enlightenment view holds that the
world is a complex but unified unity culminating in the West. Liberal and
socialist feminists alike apply the same incorporating world historical
schemes to their understanding of women and men in the non-Western
world. With common roots in the Enlightenment, masculinist and feminist
perspectives share in the notion that enlightened reason has been a critical
force in social emancipation. Western standards and goals--rationality and
individualism--are thereby used to evaluate the cultures and histories of non-
Western societies. Feminist voices in the social sciences unconsciously echo
this masculinist will to power in its relation to non-Western societies. Thus,
for feminists looking overseas, the non-feminist Other is not so much
patriarchy as the non-Western woman. 2. Essential to the feminist task,
Strathern argues, is the need to expose and destroy the authority of Others (i.e.
male) to determine feminine experience. Yet, when feminists look overseas,
they frequently seek to establish their authority on the backs of non-Western
women, determining for them the meanings and goals of their lives. If, from
the feminist perspective there can be no shared experience with persons who
stand for the Other, the claim to a common kinship with non-Western
women is at best, tenuous, at worst, non-existent.
My concern here is to talk about the intersections between colonial discourse
and feminist representations of non-Western women in what may be called
"women in development" studies. There are different self-styled approaches
within this feminism, linked by a basic concern with problems of sexual
inequality and difference in non-Western societies, problems perceived as the
failure to achieve modernity. The terms "non-Western" and "Third World"
are used as a shorthand, and not to imply a monolithic world outside
European and American societies which have collectively maintained
hegemony over much of the globe in recent history. [3] By "colonial
discourse" I mean different strategies of description and understanding which
were produced out of the historical emergence of this transnational network
of power relations. Historically, distinct strands of colonial discourse
circulating in particular colonial societies were linked to Western imperialist
definitions of colonized populations. [4] Although there has been significant
dismantling of this global political structure since the Second World War,
neo-colonial preoccupations continue to haunt Western perceptions of ex-
colonial societies. The following discussion suggests that well-known
feminist studies on women in ex-colonial societies have not escaped this
hegemonic world view.
Feminist Discursive Power and the Silenced Other
Albert Memmi characterizes the relationship between the colonizer and the
colonized as one of "implacable dependence." For the privilege of making
cultural judgments which see their way into print, feminists often speak
without reducing the silence of the cultural Other. George Marcus and
Michael Fischer have recommended the repatriation of anthropology in
order to defamiliarize the world view of middle-class Americans. Much
recent feminist study of Asian women already has had this function,
producing epistemological and political gaps between us feminists and them
"oppressed" women. I will argue that although some kind of distance is
necessary for arriving at a partial understanding of each other, this is not the
kind of separation we should seek. We have to first divest ourselves of a
cultural heritage whereby women in non-Western societies are fixed as
various sexualities and natural capacities.
In the late 19th century, British traveler Isabella Bird passed through the
Malay peninsula and made the following observation:
The people lead strange and uneventful lives. The men
are not inclined to much effort except in fishing or hunting, and, where they
possess rice land, in ploughing for rice... The women were lounging about the
house, some cleaning fish, others pounding rice; but they do not care for
work, and the little money which they need for buying clothes they can make
by selling mats or jungle fruits...
Not a colonial official but an "indomitable" explorer of the Eastern world
recntly brought under Western influence, Isabella Bird had already fixed her
market lenses on the Malay (lack of) potential as a labor pool. [5] There are
numerous other examples by less well known British observers in the
"tropical dependencies" where natives were constantly evaluated in terms of
their "natural" capacities and then dismissed as "indolent." [6]
What has this got to do with contemporary feminist perspectives on Asian
women? Since the early 1970s, when feminists turned their attention
overseas, our understanding of women and men in the Third World has
been framed in essentialist terms: how their statuses may be explained in
terms of their labor and reproductive powers. Ester Boserup's Women's
Role in Economic Development blazed a trail which has yet to spend
itself. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, books on non-Western women
emphasized their roles in capitalist development. Let me cite a few
collections: "Women and National Development: The Complexities of
Change," a special issue of Signs; African Women in The Development
Process edited by Nici Nelson; Of Marriage and the Market: Women's
Subordination in International Perspective edited by Kate Yong et al.;
Women, Men and the International Division of Labor edited by June
Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly; and Women's Work:
Development and the Division of Labor by Gender edited by Eleanor
Leacock and Helen Safa. Part of my own training as an anthropologist has
been influenced by this kind of feminist literature largely shaped by a political
economic perspective. By and large, non-Western women are taken as an
unproblematic universal category; feminists mainly differ over whether
modernization of the capitalist or socialist kind will emancipate or reinforce
systems of gender inequality found in the Third World. The status of non-
Western women is analyzed and gauged according to a set of legal, political
and social benchmarks that Western feminists consider critical in achieving a
power balance between men and women.
A. Modernization Discourse on Third World Women
Most of the literature in development studies falls within the framework of
the so-called modernization school, as most clearly spelled out by William W.
Rostow. Each generation of scholars has reworked this model which opposes
Western modernity to Third World traditionalism. In the 1960s, Raphael
Patai in Women in the Changing World accounted for gender inequalities in
terms of the degree to which "age-old, custom-determining roles" were being
broken down by "Westernization," a process seen to favor women's access to
wage work and higher social status. This position was challenged by Laura
Bossen who argued that Westernization has caused women to lose highly
variable roles in the traditional economy. By placing structural limits on
women's access to new production activities, the modernization process has
reduced women's status relative to that of men in the Third
World.
A recent revival of the modernization theory is expressed by Linda Lim in
her paper on "the dilemma of Third World women workers in multinational
factories." She maintains that in societies "where capitalist relations are least
developed ... traditional patriarchy is sufficiently strong to maintain women
in an inferior labor market position" (79). Following from this logic, she
maintains that by providing these women with wage employment,
transnational companies contribute to their emancipation. This is an example
of linear thinking which ignores the multiple and fluid nature of power
relations. As my 1987 study shows, factory women freed from some forms of
family control come under new systems of domination such as industrial
discipline, social surveillance and religious vigilance. Patriarchal power is
reconstituted in the factory setting and in the fundamentalist Islamic
movement which induce both rebellion and self control on the part of
women workers. By using a traditional/modernity framework, these
feminists view the destruction of "traditional customs" as either a decline of
women's status in a romanticized "natural" economy, or as their liberation by
Western economic rationality. This either/or argument reveals a kind of
magical thinking about modernity which has proliferated in Third World
governments, while confusing and obscuring the social meanings of change
for people caught up in it.
B. Discourse on Women in Capitalist and Social Transitions
For many socialist feminists, Asian societies are significant to the extent they
possess or lack "patriarchal" traditions which may be reproduced in the
transition to a capitalist or socialist "mode of production." Women's Work is
based on papers on the sexual division of labor initially published in Signs
(Vol. 7, No. 2, 1981). Women's status worldwide is discussed within "an
evolutionary perspective on the gender division of labor" (Leacock and Safa).
In their critique of Boserup, Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen offer a "capital
accumulation" model to discuss "the specific ways in which women are
affected by the hierarchical and exploitative structure of production associated
with capitalism's penetration in the Third World"(150). Capitalism is
personified and differentiated in terms of its varied effects on "domestic
work," production and reproduction, population control and birth control. In
contrast, "women" (in Africa, Latin America and Asia) are differentiated only
in terms of their status as wives and workers in reproduction (i.e. the
production of use values in the household), and production (of
commodities). Beneria and Sen's claim to "a richly textured understanding"
may possibly describe their abstract formulation of "tensions between gender
and class," (156) but not their representation of "women in the Third World."
This substitution of understanding of women as cultural beings by an
elaboration of feminist theory is also found in Women, Men and the
International Division of Labor (Nash and Kelly). The papers taken as a
whole tell us more about Marxist feminist thinking about the capitalist world
system than about the experience of women and men in the industrializing
situation. Eleven papers fall under sections entitled "global accumulation and
the labor process," "production, reproduction, and the household economy,"
and "labor flow and capitalist expansion." Seven essays (including my own)
are "case studies in electronics and textiles." This organization is clearly an
attempt to discuss changing women's positions in the encounter between
global capitalist forces and the everyday life of paid and unpaid work.
However, a consideration of the latter is subordinated to descriptions of the
intersections of patriarchy and capitalism. Indeed, capitalism is delineated as a
historically-conditioned, polymorphous system; it has more contradictions
and personalities than the women and men who are ostensibly the subjects of
the volume. In most of the papers, the implied message is that even when
women constitute the majority of workers in transnational industries, their
practical and theoretical significance as "a source of cheap labor" tends to take
precedence over a more careful consideration of the social meanings these
changes have for them. Except for essays by Bolles and Green, discourse on
women's position is theoretically derived from their being acted upon in an
unproblematic fashion by patriarchal and capitalist relations of domination.
Even in the case studies, quotations cited are from marxist scholars (e.g.,
Braverman, Wolpe), and feminists like Heidi Hartmann are considered more
significant in uncovering the social meanings of work relations than the
words of women on the shop floor. The general effect of these papers is the
fetishization of capital accumulation and the valorization of women and
men as commodities.
By portraying women in non-Western societies as identical and
interchangable, and more exploited than women in the dominant capitalist
societies, liberal and socialist feminists alike encode a belief in their own
cultural superiority. On the one hand, we have a set of Western standards
whereby feminists and other scholars evaluate the degree of patriarchal
oppression inflicted on women as wives, mothers, and workers in the Third
World. For instance, studies on women in post-1949 China inevitably discuss
how they are doubly exploited by the peasant family and by socialist
patriarchy, [7] reflecting the more immediate concerns of American socialist
feminists than perhaps of Chinese women themselves. By using China as "a
case study" of the socialist experiment with women's liberation, these works
are part of a whole network of Western academic and policy-making
discourses on the backwardness of the non-Western, non-modern world.
There is a scientific tendency to treat gender and sexuality as categories that
are measurable, and to ignore indigenous meanings which may conceive of
them as ideas inseparable from moral values.
On the other hand, feminist approaches which purport to understand
indigenous traditions and meanings that have persisted over the course of
modernization often betray a view of non-Western women as out of time
with the West, [8] and therefore a vehicle for misplaced Western nostalgia. A
recent ethnography, Geisha (Dalby 1983), discussed the sexual
aesthetics of Japanese women and yet is coy about their specific intention and
techniques. Despite the rich ethnographic details, this view "into a feminine
community that has been the subject of rumor and fantasy for centuries in
the West" (dustjacket) has managed to refreeze geishas as objects in Oriental
erotica. Although their subculture is intended to create an illusion of an
earlier time, one wishes the writer had situated her description of their
images and working lives more firmly in late 20th-century Japanese society.
Another modernist mode for treating exotic women out of their time context
is presented in Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman
(Shostak 1983). This book has become a popular text for introductory
anthropology courses. Here is a feminist confrontation with a non-Western
woman as an "individual," i.e. someone seen as autonomous, in the moral
sense of our modern (individualist) ideology. It seems inevitable that Nisa's
life is re-presented as a sexual discourse that "we" can appropriate for our
post-modern consumption.
C. Modern Posturings with Nonmodern Images
Dumont defines modern ideology as that which is characterized by a
valorization of the individual as an autonomous moral being, and neglects or
subordinates the social whole (279-80). The feminist works cited above seek a
modern form of individual freedom in their analyses of gender relations in
the non-Western world. There is insufficient attention to nonmodern social
values which do not conceptualize gender relations in those terms (of
individualism). Furthermore, "the non-Western woman" as a trope of
feminist discourse is either nonmodern or modern; she is seldom perceived
as living in a situation where there is deeply felt tension between tradition
and modernity. Two analytical strategies emerge in the feminist discourses
discussed. First, even when, like Nisa, the non-Western woman speaks, she is
wrenched out of the context of her society and inscribed within the concerns
of Western feminist scholars. Secondly, however well-intended in their goal
of exposing the oppression of Third World women, feminist scholars have a
tendency to proceed by reversal: non-Western women are what we are not.
These tendencies of projection and reversal situate non-Western women in a
subordinate position within feminist theoretical and textual productions.
These self-validating exercises affirm our feminist subjectivity while denying
those of non-Western women.
What is peculiarly colonial in these feminist perspectives is the assumption
that Western standards and feelings take precedence over those of their Third
World subjects. In their naturalistic conceptualizations of non-Western
women as labor power or sexuality, there is little interest (except in Dalby)
about indigenous constructions of gender and sexuality. We miss the dense
network of cultural politics that we demand of a study of women and men in
Western societies. Thus, although a common past may be claimed by
feminists, Third World women are often represented as mired in it, ever
arriving at modernity when Western feminists are already adrift in
postmodernism.
Modest Goals and Partial Understandings
Despite my critical remarks, I remain convinced that feminists, because of
their privileged positions as members of hegemonic powers, should speak
out against female oppression at home and overseas. Surely an element of
the current backlash against social science research by Third World
governments (Benard 275-84) is their protests against our cultural
assumptions and conceptual language. [9] Political elites in the Third World
have their own representations and discourses which do not necessarily
reflect a concern with women's or lower-class interests. However, this does
not mean that the prescriptions of sympathetic Western feminists are
inevitably more aligned with the ideas and values of Third World women. I
mentioned earlier our need to maintain a respectful distance, not in order to
see ourselves more clearly (the only possible goal, as Marcus and Fischer seem
to think), but to leave open the possibilities for an understanding not overly
constructed by our own preoccupations. This "privilege of
distantiation"(Dumont) also helps us accept that cultural struggles in the
Third World may be for social and sexual destinies different from Western
(male-dominated or feminist) visions.
I can suggest a few tentative leads for recognizing a mutuality of discourse in
our encounter with women in non-Western societies. We can resist the
tendency to write our subjectively-defined world onto an Other that lies
outside it. As the above review shows, feminist scholarship tends to be
riddled with natural, sexual, political, and social categories when it comes to
re-presenting the Other. When we jettison our conceptual baggage, we open
up the possibilities for mutual but partial, and ambiguous, exchange. With
James Clifford, I am doubtful that we can achieve more than partial
understandings. However, the multivocal ethnographic texts he would have
anthropologists produce must also disclose a riot of social meanings
embedded in the confrontation between tradition and modernity in Third
World societies. Below, I attempt to show how cultural analysis in
anthropology can produce an understanding of gender as constructed by, and
contingent upon, the play of power relations in a cultural context.
In my study of Malay factory women, gender is revealed as a symbolic system
not separable from domains such as the family, the economy, and politics, but
as embedded in discourses and images marking social boundaries and self-
reflective identities. Foucault (1977) has noted that modern power is
productive, rather than repressive. In sexual discourses, for instance, new
techniques and regulations are generated for controlling social activity and
perceptions. These in turn induce another scheme of power relations, i.e.,
techniques of self-management by people subjected to control (Foucault 1978).
The fluid and multiple nature of power relations becomes a part of the
everyday life of young peasant women working in transnational factories.
This making of a female labor force has been accompanied by an inflationary
increase in the social meanings of gender and sexuality: these are negotiated
and contested in relation to other discourses about social difference and
domination in Malaysian society. I identify at least four overlapping sets of
discourses about factory women: corporate, political, Islamic, and personal.
Corporate discourse elaborated on the "natural" accommodation of "oriental
female" fingers, eyes, and passivity to low-skilled assembly work. This
instrumental-biological representation of women is part of the neo-colonial
attitude towards development in Third World societies perceived as an
international reservoir of cheap labor. Secondly, the emergence of a Malay
female industrial labor force has produced a public debate over their sexuality,
as expressed in individualistic ideas, behavior, and modern forms of
consumption. The "electronics woman" becomes a symbol of sexual threat to
Malay culture and of working class defiance. Islamic pronouncements about
factory women's morality betrays an anxiety over their crossing of social
boundaries, and their flirtation with secularism and individualistic self-
identity. They demand a greater religious vigilance to bring Malay working
women back into the fold of Islamic womanhood. In this explosion of sexual
discourses, many factory women internalize the cautionary tales and are
induced to discipline themselves as Muslims and as workers. Others see
themselves as modern women, and throwing caution to the winds, embrace
Western images of sexual liberation. By looking at the politics of sexuality, I
discovered conflicting sets of genders, and their embeddedness in political
struggles over cultural identity and the transition to industrial
modernization. In their own words and actions, which I cannot reproduce
here, we see how meanings attached to gender can generate deep divisions,
confusion, and unresolved tensions between tradition and modernity.
Like Malay factory women, government bureaucrats, and religious zealots, we
may wish to deconstruct colonial categories and problematize modernization.
By giving up our accustomed ways of looking at non-Western women, we
may begin to understand better. We may come to accept their living according
to their own cultural interpretations of a changing world, and not simply
acted upon by inherited traditions and modernization projects. They may not
seek our secular goal of individual autonomy nor renounce the bonds of
family and community. Albert Memmi observes that in passionately
repossessing themselves, the colonized will be nationalistic, not
internationalistic (i.e., under Western hegemony). Many in the Third World,
including Malaysians, seek a separate destiny in Islamic fundamentalism,
itself a historical force against the global domination by Western imperialism.
Edward Said has suggested that a new way of transnational solidarity is not
through assimilating the Rest into a common unity, but by renouncing our
utopian, libertarian vision. It seems to me that as feminists, we need to take
into account the changing world community, and recognize the limits of our
own traditions and explanations. We begin a dialogue when we recognize
other forms of gender- and culture-based subjectivities, and accept that others
often choose to conduct their lives separate from our particular vision of the
future.
Notes
1. By "feminists" I do not merely mean white women but also persons of
different nationalities (myself included) engaged in the field of Anglophone
feminism, an area overly determined by Western interests. Back to main text
2.1 will confine my discussion to studies dealing with women in Asian
societies, although my remarks may apply to feminist endeavors in other
parts of the non-Western world. Back to main text
3. By the same token, "Western" is taken as a problematic construct, and is by
no means used to suggest an undifferentiated and congealed form of global
dominance. Since we are discussing texts in the English language, "Western"
is here taken to include European societies under prewar British and postwar
American hegemonic leadership. Back to main text
4. This definition of colonial discourse is thus broader than that used by Lata
Mani in "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,"
Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 119-156. Back to main text
5. Isabella Bird's writings on her travels to the corners of the British empire
and beyond have recently been printed in the United States because of the
American market for "travel literature." See her The Yangze Valley and
Beyond (New York: Beacon Press, 1987) and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (New
York: Beacon Press, 1987). Back to main text
6. For a discussion of colonial discourse in the Malay world, see S. Hussein
Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1977). Back to main text
7. See Molyneux, 1981; Kay A. Johnson, Women, Family and the Peasant
Revolution in China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982); Judith Stacey,
Socialism and Patriarchy in China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983); Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women and Socialism in China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). Back to main text
8. On circumventing "coevalness" in ethnographies, see Johannes Fabian,
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Males its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983).Back to main text
9. Some feminists have criticized feminist categories projected onto non-
Western women and men in the representation of indigenous meaning and
experience (see Marilyn Strathern, "Culture in a Netbag," Man (n.s.) 16 (1981):
168-88; and Deborah Gordon, "Feminist Anthropology and the Invention of
American Female Identities," a paper presented at the 86th Annual Meeting
of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, November 1987).
Back to main text
Works Cited
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Beneria, Lourdes, and Gita Sen, 1986.
Bird, Isabella. The Golden Chersonese. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford
University Press, 1967. [1886]
Boserup, Ester. Women's Role in Economic Development. London:
St. Martin's Press, 1970.
Dalby, Lisa. Geisha. Stanford: Stanford University
Press,1983.
Dumont, Louis. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in
Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I. An
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Gordon, Deborah. "Feminist Anthropology and the Invention of American
Female Identities." Conference paper. 86th Annual Meeting of the American
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Johnson, Kay A. Women, Family and the Peasant Revolution in China.
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the Division of Labor by Gender. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and
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Lim, Linda. "Capitalism, Imperialism, and Patriarchy: The Dilemma of Third
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Fernandez Kelly, eds. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press,
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Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural
Critique. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonized and the Colonizer. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1965.
Nash, June, and Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly, eds. Women, Men and
the International Division of Labor. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1983.
Nelson, Nici, ed. African Women in the Development Process.
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Patia, Raphael. Women in the Changing World. New York: Free
Press, 1967.
Rostow, W.W. Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto. New York: Free Press, 1960.V
Said, Edward. "Orientalism Reconsidered." Race and Class 2
27.23(1985): 1-15.
Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman.
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Stacey, Judith. Socialism and Patriarchy in China. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983.
Strathern, Marilyn. "An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and
Anthropology." Signs 12 (1987).
Strathern, Marilyn. "Culture in a Netbag." Man 16 (1981): 165-
88.
Wellesley Editorial Board. "Women and National Development: the
Complexity of Change." Special issue of Signs (1977).
Wolf, Margery. Revolution Postponed: Women and Socialism in China.
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and the Market: Women's Subordination in International Perspectives.
London: CSE Books, 1981.
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