Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes is an immensely important touchstone piece that everyone in academia should read. I remember reading it in my first feminist studies course and I’m so glad I get to reread it again in my final quarter here. Mohanty is disrupting and problematizing the notion that western scholarship is ahistorical and apolitical. And that western feminists working within that framework are only reproducing white supremacist structures. She looks at 5 instances where white western feminists wrote about women of the global south reinforcing and framing the monolith of all third world women being victims. It takes on a paternalistic tone that is extremely problematic, among other things. Moving forward she emphasizes how important context is when considering any situation and to also resist the universal idea of the third world women and global sisterhood.

Richa Nagar’s piece on Communal Discourses was very interesting and I would like to use some of the ideas presented in this article in my research paper. Although I am still unsure what exactly I want to work on for that project. Nagar also emphasized context in the beginning of the paper- that one cannot fully understand certain processes of colonialism and racial hierarchy without considering the gendered processes that also informed the communities. Nagar carefully traced these shifting contexts through time and space and how social reproduction and communal discourses informed marriage and migration patterns between South Asia and North Africa. I found the double bind placed on South Asian wives- the expectation of sexual purity to the point of them being denied any sexuality. That type of denial and repression made me think of Deepa Mehta’s Fire and the relationship that formed between Sita and Radha. I was wondering, while reading Nagar’s piece, if any queer relationships formed cross caste, cross class, cross racially and if any record of this exists today.