“State of Urgency”Feminism Without

Borders“Sisterhood, Coalition, and the Politics

of Location”Presented By:

Crystal Hsu and Jillian Robards

Chandra MohantyQuestion: How does the politics of location in the United States of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century determine and produce experience and difference as analytical and political categories in feminist "cross cultural work?“ (Mohanty, 106)

“The Politics of Location”By the term "politics of location" I refer to the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries that provide the ground for political definition and self-definition for contemporary U.S. feminists.“ (Mohanty, 106.)

The problem of individualized identity politics.

The universality of gender oppression is problematic, as it is based as it is on the assumption that that the categories of race and class have to be invisible for gender to be visible.

Robin Morgan’s Planetary Feminism: The Politics of the 21st Century

and Robin Morgan’s Coalition Politics: Turning of the Century

?

Why does Mohanty pose the encounter between:

From Sisterhood to Coalition…

For the class….

What is “the feminist Osmosis thesis?"

Females are feminists by association and identification with the experiences that constitute us as female.

Being female is thus seen as NATURALLY related to being feminist, where the experience of being female transforms us into feminists through osmosis. "Feminism is not defined as a highly contested political terrain; it is mere effect of being female“

Where we are now…

“But the moment we attempt to articulate the operation of contemporary imperialism with the notion of an international women's movement based on global sisterhood, the awkward political implications of Morgan's task become clear. Her particular notion of universal sisterhood seems predicated on the erasure of the history and effects of contemporary imperialism (Mohanty, 110.)

Mohanty critiques of Morgan

•notion of experience is anchored firmly in the notion of the individual self specifiable constituent of

European modernity limited bourgeois ideology of individualism

•That women are unified by their sameness of their oppression, struggles, and goals (betterment of

humna beings)

Discussion Terms

• Reagon’s “barred room”

• Nonsynchronous temporality

For Reagon, shared oppression doesn't bring unity, she explained coalition as the basis to talk about cross-cultural commonality of struggles, identifying survival. What women thinks is home doesn't feel like home any more. The experience of being an woman created an illusory unity.

Drawing Connection…“Decolonizing Feminism”

• State of War- Rosca

• State of Emergency- Reyes

• State of Urgency- Mohanty

1) A state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state.

2)A serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action

3) An earnest and insistent necessity.

Pinay poetry & feminist solidaritythe goals of this class

“What I am really saying here: in classrooms full of a majority of white folks with little to no experience with post-colonial and ethnic studies, with literary traditions of people of color in America, in classrooms full of a majority of white folks who held a certain reverence for the great Modernists (some of whom I indict as Orientalists in my work), I was learning a certain fineness of language and form such that typical resistance towards, say, the militant, angry woman of color stereotype, the oppressed minority stereotype was generally thwarted” Reyes- Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes and Paolo Javier by Eileen Tabios

http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2005/09/interview-with-barbara-jane-reyes-and.html

Poetry, Pinay Literature, poetry

“But we cannot afford to forget those alternative, resistant spaces occupied by oppositional histories and memories” (Mohanty, 120.)

Poeta en san francisco Barbara Jane Reyes

Orient. Dis-orient. Re-orient

“It is this process, this reterritorialization through struggle, that allows me a paradoxical continuity of self, mapping and transforming my political location. It suggests a particular notion of political agency, since my location forces and enables specific modes of reading and knowing the dominant”

Feminism Without Borders- Mohanty and Poeta en San Francisco

“What I hope and struggle for, I garner as my knowledge, create it as a place from where I seek to know (Mohanty, 123.)Women's struggles, oppressions and experience became what defines them and bring them together.

In Poeta en San Francisco, geography and body are sites of cultural collision for woman identity.