“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles

Abstract

I write this essay at the urging of a number of friends and with some trepidation, revisiting the themes and arguments of an essay written some sixteen years ago. This is a difficult essay to write, and I undertake it hesitantly and with humility—yet feeling that I must do so to take fuller responsibility for my ideas, and perhaps to explain whatever influence they have had on debates in feminist theory. “Under Western Eyes” (1986) was not only my very first “feminist studies” publication; it remains the one that marks my presence in the international feminist community. I had barely completed my Ph.D. when I wrote this essay; I am now a professor of women’s studies. The “under” of Western eyes is now much more an “inside” in terms of my own location in the U.S. academy. The site from which I wrote the essay consisted of a very vibrant, transnational women’s movement, while the site I write from today is quite different. With the increasing privatization and corporatization