>Katha Pollitt wrote:
>
>>and a way for imported academics like Gayatri Spivak to score points
>>from guilty liberals.
>
>What has Spivak said about the Taliban? Last time I heard her speak
>she was talking about Kant.
>
>Doug
Spivak doesn't say that sexist practices in poor nations should be
excused because they are part of their "culture" or anything like
that. The main point she is making is basically that oppressed women
in the Third World become a kind of political football between
nationalist men and liberal Western imperialists (including liberal
feminists). At the risk of oversimplification, I say that
Third-World nationalism often mobilizes the idea of the nation that
masks class & gender oppressions (with a partial exception of
revolutionary nationalism inflected by Marxism); Western liberalism
smugly presents itself as "enlightened" in contrast to "backward
cultures" and uses this contrast as an excuse for denying
self-government to poor nations (in the process Western liberalism
also turns a blind eye to the fact that its own imperialism has
helped to perpetuate and often to intensify the very backwardness
that it pretends to deplore [e.g., Western liberal support for
fundamentalist "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan]). Neither
nationalism nor Western liberalism serves poor women's interests
(first of all, because neither abolishes material conditions that
give rise to the oppression of poor women). So far, so good.
Spivak, however, used to argue that trapped between the rock and hard
places "the subaltern [e.g. poor women in poor nations] cannot speak"
(I don't know if she's still committed to this statement). I'd say
that Marxism-Feminism (coupled with fight against imperialism, it
goes without saying) is necessary to avoid the problem that Spivak
points out.
Yoshie
