Week Six
Gunn Allen:
a)Gunn Allen speaks of her grandmothers and her mother telling her throughout her childhood that women were powerful, strong, and stable giving her a confidence in herself as a woman and as a member of her tribe. The cohesiveness of her tribe and of her with her elders instilled in her a vivid memory of her people's history and identity. She is conscious of the oppression; racism, colonialism, classism, sexism that she and her tribe suffer. Because of her consciousness as an Indian woman, she can use her identity to combat all manner of oppression.
b) Gunn Allen's consciousness is shaped by the hybrid identity she has in which she is constantly shifting in and out of/and is simultaneously in both her first identity as an American Indian and the dominant forces of Western colonialist culture. She experiances the oppression of racism, colonialism, classism, and sexism and yet at the same time she experiances the power of being a woman passed down to her from her grandmothers and the power of her people's will to survive.
c)Gunn Allen draws different conclusions, for example, about how power works through gender because of her own experiances. Though some Indian women have been abused and raped in the tribe, her images of strong, independent women help her overcome her vulnerability as a woman.
Mohanty:
a)Mohanty calls for a great expansion of western feminist consciousness. Western feminism has often framed non-western women in a dualistic logic in which non-western women become flat and homogenous. She suggests an approach that reclaims the lable of "third world woman" to give these women agency, voice, and distinction.
b)Mohanty's consciousness arises from her identity as a third world woman trained in the United States. Recognizing the vast ignorance and silence surrounding third world women in western feminist discourse, she demonstrated the need for a intersectional feminist analysis that would look at oppression not only in terms of sex but also geographic location, class, religion, race/ethnicity, history, and colonialism.
c)While western feminists have remained relatively silent on issues of colonialism, race, and poverty Mohanty shows us that all these forms of oppression intersect and act upon each other in ways crucial to our unerstanding of oppression. For example, immigration laws have been designed at many points throught history to target and exclude certain groups, such as Chinese women or Mexican miners from entering a colonizer country.
Both Gunn Allen and Mohanty's descriptions of gender and power intersect in that they both point to the need for white western feminists to expand their consciousness of poor, queer, women of color and also their ideas about what a woman can be. They also highlight the different levels of power women have in specific contexts: for example, white western women have the power to define and speak for third world women, and the women in Gunn Allen's tribe were considered to have considerable power by its members.