Chandra Talpade Mohanty was born in 1955 in India and is currently Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education, and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, at Syracuse University in the United States. Her intellectual trajectory sits at the intersection of feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and anticapitalist thought, and it cannot be separated from the lived experience of migration and the critical positioning between the Global North and the Global South. Educated in the United States, Mohanty built a body of work that systematically questions the ethnocentric assumptions embedded in mainstream Western feminism — not in order to abandon the feminist project, but to radicalize it from the standpoint of historical, geographical, and class difference.
The turning point of her career was the essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” first published in 1984 in the journal Boundary 2 (vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 333–358) and reprinted in 1988 in Feminist Review (no. 30, pp. 61–88). There, Mohanty argues that certain strands of Western feminist scholarship, in analyzing the women of the so-called Third World, inadvertently reproduce a colonial logic: they construct the “Third World woman” as a monolithic, homogeneous category — poor, uneducated, constrained by tradition, oppressed by family, religion, and state — implicitly contrasted with the “Western woman,” who appears as modern, autonomous, and emancipated. According to Mohanty, this gesture of discursive colonization erases the historical, economic, cultural, and class differences among women of the Global South, and grants Western feminism an epistemic authority over experiences that are not its own. Her argument is not that oppression is absent; it is that describing it in generic, atemporal terms prevents concrete analysis and reinforces Eurocentrism.
Nearly two decades later, in “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles” (2003), Mohanty returned to her original essay with a critical and self-correcting eye. She acknowledged that her earlier critique risked being read as cultural relativism or as a refusal of any transnational feminist comparison. In the revision, the emphasis shifts: the primary adversary is no longer merely the Western discourse about the Third World, but neoliberal globalization as a system that affects women from peripheral regions in differentiated — and frequently more brutal — ways. Mohanty then proposes the notion of “feminism without borders”: a political and intellectual practice that builds transnational solidarity among women without erasing differences, grounded in concrete anticapitalist struggles and a “politics of location” that requires every researcher to make her own position explicit.
Key Concepts
- Discursive colonization (“Under Western Eyes,” 1984/1988): the process by which certain Western feminism produces the “Third World woman” as the universal subject of its analysis, erasing internal differences and imposing an ethnocentric analytical frame on heterogeneous experiences.
- Third World woman as homogeneous category (“Under Western Eyes,” 1984/1988): Mohanty’s critique does not deny oppression, but objects to the abstraction that dissolves historical contexts, class relations, and cultural specificities into a generic, agentless victim.
- Politics of location (Feminism Without Borders, 2003): the methodological imperative to situate knowledge — who speaks, from where, under what institutional conditions — as a precondition for any honest, non-imperial feminist analysis.
- Feminism without borders (Feminism Without Borders, 2003): not to be confused with feminism without differences; it designates a transnational solidarity that begins with differences and politically articulates them around shared anticapitalist struggles.
- Transnational solidarity (Feminism Without Borders, 2003): a form of political alliance that replaces abstract universalization with concrete convergence around common causes — labor, migration, health, violence — without requiring prior identity or homogeneity.
Influenced by
- Edward Said — critique of Orientalism and discursive colonization
- Gayatri Spivak — epistemic violence and the representation of the subaltern
- Kimberlé Crenshaw — intersectionality of gender, race, and class
- Adrienne Rich — the politics of location as a feminist tool
Influenced
- Transnational and decolonial feminism in the 1990s and 2000s
- María Lugones — coloniality of gender and decolonial thought
- Postcolonial feminist studies in universities of the Global South
- Debates on globalization, labor, and gender in the 2000s
Works
The essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” was first published in Boundary 2 (vol. 12, no. 3, 1984, pp. 333–358), reprinted in Feminist Review (no. 30, 1988), and later included in the anthology Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991), co-edited by Mohanty with Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres — a volume that became a curricular reference in feminist studies courses. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003) is her most comprehensive book: it brings together essays written over fifteen years, including the critical revision of the 1984 essay, and connects the theoretical, pedagogical, and political dimensions of transnational feminism. The article “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles” appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (vol. 28, no. 2, 2003) before being incorporated into the book.
See also
Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, María Lugones, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Judith Butler