“ For me feminism is both a consciousness that women suffer discrimination at home, at work and in society and in life because of their gender, as well as action to do something about this. So it is a striving for justice and equality for women in a just world; it is a frame of mind and a way of life, a kind of path that can be followed by everyone – regardless of gender, sex, race, faith and other differences among us. But justice and equality are contested and relative concepts, in the sense that they mean different things to different people in different contexts. There is also an epistemological side to feminism, it is also a knowledge project; in the sense that it tell us how we know what we know. Feminist scholarship in Islam as in any other religious tradition has a lot to offer to both the understanding of religion and the search for justice. But feminism, as an ideology, as a movement, as well as a knowledge project, in order to grow and not to become dogmatic, needs to have a critique from within. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black and ‘Third World’ feminists provided that critique; for instance, Audre Lorde’s criticism of mainstream feminist literature of the 1960s for its focus on the experiences of white, middle-class women and their values; Chandra Mohanty, with her seminal article “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse”, offered a potent critique of the complicity of feminism and colonialism. Such criticism helped feminism to grow theoretically and become more inclusive.
February 13, 2010
