The Report, or, Whatever Happened to Third World Feminist Theory?

Mitra, Durba

doi:10.1086/723270

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…This fusing of identity and workload justified the tactic of working through international organizations like the UN, which James had long cast as neocolonial. As anti-institutionalism dissipated and many Third World women used international organizations, particularly their social scientific practices of data collection, to name and remedy women’s subordination (Mitra 2023), James campaigned for the 1985 ratification by the UN General Assembly of the demand to quantify the “unrenumerated contribution of women to agriculture, food production, reproduction and household activities” (Fleming 1986; Toupin 2018, 258). This shift from a struggle for payment to quantification reflected a decline in left power.…”

Section: Class-struggle Identity Politics and The International Of Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’s Internationalism of the Unwaged

Forrester

2024

Political Theory

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As political theorists explore work beyond traditional workplaces, how should we understand the vast class of insecure, informal, and unsalaried workers whose existence defies traditional categories of employment? In asking this question, I revisit the political theory of the Marxist feminist and cofounder of the International Wages for Housework movement, Selma James, to explore her “internationalism of the unwaged” and her writings on wagelessness. An example of political theory in service of struggle, James’s internationalism was widely circulated in anticolonial, Black radical, and autonomous Marxist circles in the 1970s. In this article, I argue that it was grounded in three intertwined and mutually reinforcing arguments: an account of how capitalist life is spatially divided into distinct workplaces; an anticapitalist theory of identity that explains social difference as maintained by the international division of labor and labor market hierarchies; and a diagnosis of work organization viewed from the perspective of the wageless worker. I trace how James developed these arguments about the spatial division of labor, hierarchies of identity, and internationalist political struggle and how her view of the common exploitation and division of workers formed the basis of a class-struggle identity politics. Her political theory was an important contribution to women’s international thought and transnational feminist critiques of global forms of domination and exploitation. It also offers a critique of capitalism’s organization of the displacement of work and workers and an account of wagelessness as a work situation, both of which illuminate capitalist organization of work and wageless life today.

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Section: Class-struggle Identity Politics and The International Of Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’s Internationalism of the Unwaged

Forrester

2024

Political Theory

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“…African feminists have been especially attuned to the implications, both material and epistemic, of the yoking of gender research to the women in development (WID) paradigm (see also Mitra, 2023). With origins in the 1970s, WID, with its assumptions around African underdevelopment, patriarchy and African women, continues to exercise the imagination of important publics, namely states and international donors.…”

Section: African Data Global Supply Chains and Knowledge Asymmetriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 5. In asking ‘whatever happened to Third World feminist theory’, Mitra (2023) maps the historic overreliance on the social science report, to which the intellectual labour of women researchers in ‘much of the world’ has been devoted. Mitra’s broader point is how these historical compulsions have sutured knowledge production to the social sciences, besides statist and non-profit governmentalities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Dissonant intimacies: Coloniality and the failures of South–South collaboration

Roy

2023

The Sociological Review

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North–South research collaborations have come to include both an epistemic and ethical promise – of disrupting hierarchies, inequalities and asymmetries in global knowledge production. In practice, however, these have been ridden with limits, tension and failure. The ‘South–South’ has emerged as a worthy foil: an easy repository of positive affects and of decolonial futurity. This article turns to a feminist collaborative research initiative that seemed primed to fulfil these promises, but in fact, failed to do so. A partnership between African and Indian feminist scholars did not provide meaningful and reciprocal intellectual exchange. On the contrary, it powerfully revealed the coloniality of knowledge and power in higher education and how it manifested, differently, in two distinct locales in the Global South. This partnership constituted less of a shared ground, than one of complex and uneven relationships – a terrain of dissonant intimacies. It is not surprising that these were Southern scholars working in marginalised areas of research, like gender and sexuality. Such a double marginalisation produces specific sets of choices – and ambivalent desires – when it comes to being included in an unequal global epistemic order (and responding to neoliberal demands). This article contributes to larger debates on decolonising higher education, by shifting the scale from the North–South to the complexities of knowledge-making and power within and across the South.

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Sisterhood Is X: On Feminist Solidarity Then and Now

Mitra

2023

South Atlantic Quarterly

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In the 1970s and 1980s, sisterhood became a critical concept in the making of internationalist feminisms built on an infrastructure of women's movements, international organizations, and postcolonial states. Perhaps most famously, radical feminist Robin Morgan declared over three anthologies and three decades that sisterhood is, in the present tense, powerful (1970), global (1984), and forever (2003). It was envisioned differently by women of color and Third World feminists who saw sisterhood as a critical praxis of survival in the face of authoritarianism. Today, the moral invocation of sisterhood as powerful and forever is far less viable. So, is sisterhood all bad for twenty-first-century feminisms? In this essay, I return to bell hooks's formulations of sisterhood as a pedagogy of political solidarity to ask, what kind of solidarity is possible under the rubric of sisterhood and how might we imagine a global feminist politics of solidarity today?

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The Report, or, Whatever Happened to Third World Feminist Theory?

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’s Internationalism of the Unwaged

Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’s Internationalism of the Unwaged

Dissonant intimacies: Coloniality and the failures of South–South collaboration

Sisterhood Is X: On Feminist Solidarity Then and Now

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