American feminist legal scholarship has largely ignored global contradictions and the struggles of women outside the US. The essay examines how feminist human rights analysis has conceptualized an international sisterhood based mainly on women's shared experience of oppression. However, this ignores important differences between women shaped by factors like nationality, class, race and sexuality. A truly feminist internationalism requires interrogating the complex power relations that construct women's realities in different ways globally, and examining how gender intersects with other discourses of power like nationalism and imperialism.

1. 7 of 7 DOCUMENTS
Copyright (c) 1993 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Women's Law Journal
1993
16 Harv. Women's L.J. 189
LENGTH: 9180 words
ESSAY: TOWARD A FEMINIST INTERNATIONALITY: A CRITIQUE OF U.S. FEMINIST LEGAL
SCHOLARSHIP
NAME: VASUKI NESIAH *
BIO:
* J.D., Harvard Law School, 1993. I would like to thank my editor, Wendy Patten, for the enormous amount of thought and time she
devoted to rescuing my piece from the chaos of its first draft. My thanks to S. Nanthikesan for the numerous discussions that helped clarify
and push my thoughts in relation to this piece, and also more broadly. Thanks also to Kumanan for help in the title search and for bournvita.
I dedicate this Essay to my parents, Anita and Devanesan Nesiah.
SUMMARY:
... In the context of the West's hegemonic position today . . . Western feminist scholarship cannot avoid the challenge
of situating itself and examining its role in [the] global economic and political framework. ... The questions are
unhappily familiar: Who is included and excluded in the "women" who are the subjects of American feminist legal
analysis? Whose interests are erased from the political consciousness of this feminism? In this context, I am repeatedly
disappointed that global contradictions have been ignored even by feminist legal theorists sensitive to the multiplicity of
social relations that situate women's lives along axes such as gender, class, race and sexual orientation. ... If American
feminist legal analysis is to contribute to a feminist internationality, it must interrogate critically the complexities of a
world in which women's realities, be they Sri Lankan factory workers or American academics, are constructed along
lines not only of gender, but also of nationality, ethnicity, class, race and sexuality. ... When feminists assert and explore
the differences between women -- e.g., between the feminist legal scholar in the United States and the free trade zone
factory worker in Sri Lanka -- they should not reinscribe difference in neocolonialist ways. ... As we work towards
gendered understandings of the regulation of sexuality, class, race, nationality and ethnicity, feminist internationality
demands that, in turn, we examine how gender is itself implicated by these other discourses of power. ...
TEXT:
[*189] In the context of the West's hegemonic position today . . . Western feminist scholarship
cannot avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining its role in [the] global economic and political
framework. To do any less would be to ignore the complex interconnections between first and third
world economies and the profound effect of this on the lives of women in all countries. n1
Factories operated by transnational corporations (TNCs) n2 in "Third World" n3 countries have been a crucial
avenue for the appropriation of [*190] surplus capital from the "Third" to the "First World." These exportoriented
factories employ women primarily; roughly a half million women work in TNC factories n4 under oppressive
conditions. The struggles of these women against gendered and neocolonial exploitation form a critical fault line in the
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2. global map of imperialism.
I use this Essay to examine how American feminist legal analysis n5 has dealt with the global contradictions n6
that Sri Lankan factory workers address in their struggles. I also explore how American legal feminism itself could
work to disrupt the imperialist map. I argue that although feminist legal scholars have provided a powerful critical
voice in a number of arenas, they have not challenged global contradictions in their efforts to articulate a feminist
project. Moreover, when they have addressed the struggles of women in the "Third World," their analysis has often
worked to erase the structural contradictions that separate women across the globe. n7
[*191] My Essay is mapped in the following manner: In Section I, I note the sheer invisibility of global
contradictions in feminist legal scholarship in the United States. Section II explores conceptions of internationality in
that narrow strand of feminist legal analysis that does explicitly include women all over the globe in the feminist
project: feminist human rights analysis. Here I take apart and examine the conceptions of internationality entailed in
what Gayle Rubin has described as theory that "accounts for the oppression of women in its endless variety and
monotonous similarity." n8 I suggest that most feminist human rights work locates the foundation of feminist
internationality in women's shared experience of male oppression. In Section III, I problematize this approach by
bringing together American scholars' struggles in the legal academy and Sri Lankan factory workers' struggles in
transnational corporations to explore some of the fault lines of feminism in an international frame. My primary goal is
not to investigate the practical legal problems of Sri Lankan factory workers and American legal academics, but rather
to work towards a feminist internationality n9 by interrogating both situations simultaneously. While this project partly
involves appreciating and challenging the political strategies of the factory workers, I focus primarily on the legal
academics. n10 I build upon my criticisms of experiential discourse to suggest an alternative way of thinking about
feminist internationality.
I. GLOBAL CONTRADICTIONS AND AMERICAN FEMINIST LEGAL ANALYSIS
Feminist legal theory in the United States remains remarkably insular. For the most part, the theoretical and
practical preoccupations of feminist [*192] legal scholarship have been informed and bounded by a United
States-centered vision. In mainstream American legal analysis, n11 such intense internal preoccupation would not be
surprising given its narrow conception of the scope and object of legal scholarship. Feminist legal analysis, on the other
hand, has often pushed and challenged such narrowness; it has provided a vigilant, critical voice to combat efforts to
effect closure on the social concerns with which legal academics "legitimately" engage.
In light of this critical history, it is all the more telling that global contradictions have remained virtually invisible
in the politics of American feminist legal analysis. The struggles privileged by these feminists have seldom included
the challenging of global contradictions that are fundamental in structuring the realities of women in the "Third World"
-- and, indeed, of women everywhere. n12 This absence conveys a loaded presence. What Cherrie Moraga said of the
invisibility of women of color in white feminist groups also speaks to the invisibility of "Third World" women in the
conversations of American feminists in the legal academy: "[S]o often the women seem to feel no loss, no lack, no
absence when women of color are not involved; therefore, there is little desire to change the situation. This has hurt me
deeply." n13
When posed in the most abstract form, my arguments for recognizing and challenging global contradictions echo
the arguments raised by Moraga and others for working through the institutional arrangements and practices that
structure the reality of women of color in the United States. The questions are unhappily familiar: Who is included and
excluded in the "women" who are the subjects of American feminist legal analysis? Whose interests are erased from the
political consciousness of this feminism? In this context, I am repeatedly disappointed that global contradictions have
been ignored even by feminist legal theorists sensitive to the multiplicity of social relations that situate women's lives
along axes such as gender, class, race and sexual orientation. Even as [*193] I learn from their acute political
sensitivity in invoking multiple struggles with a radical simultaneity, I am struck by their failure to recognize the critical
links between the struggles within the United States and the struggles contesting imperialism on the global map. n14
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3. II. GROUNDING FEMINIST INTERNATIONALITY IN THE PERVASIVE EXPERIENCE OF OPPRESSION
Feminist human rights scholarship is the one arena where feminist legal theorists have made an attempt to engage
in contestations outside the United States and to speak of a feminist internationality. n15 Even here, however, there is
very little work, and most of the work is relatively recent. The human rights framework has special relevance for the
women who constitute the TNC labor force. Efforts to improve working conditions have often involved both
international labor regulations and international human rights law.
Most feminist legal theorists who invoke the human rights framework to confront women's struggles across the
globe ground their analysis in the pervasive experience of women's oppression. This experiential approach to
understanding oppression and identity construction is dominant in American feminist jurisprudence in general. Most
feminist human rights theorists posit the experience of the denial of women's human rights across the globe as proof of,
and grounds for, an international sisterhood. They emphasize that although women are "one half of humanity," n16 they
suffer oppression all over the world. They thus illustrate a gendered gap between human rights theory and action. The
[*194] attraction of the human rights framework is notable. n17 On the one hand, it has been an enabling framework,
internationalizing rights discourse and thereby opening space to engage with the struggles of "Third World" women.
n18 On the other hand, it has been restrictive. The struggles of "Third World" women have been conceptualized only
within the narrow vocabulary and institutional framework of rights discourse. n19
Catharine MacKinnon's argument that violence against women is "torture" is paradigmatic of this approach. Her
identification of oppressive features of women's lives across the globe -- "rape, domestic battery, and pornography" -- is
used to frame the universal "realities of women's condition." n20 For MacKinnon, this "universal" reality of sexbased
torture must form part of the human rights agenda. n21 Her vision is grounded in the idea that women's rights as human
beings are threatened because all women's lives are structured by gender -- the most deep and pervasive contradiction of
human relations. n22 By understanding [*195] oppressive aspects of women's lives primarily, and sometimes
exclusively, in terms of gender, this approach produces a sweeping vision of women's internationality. MacKinnon, like
most feminist legal scholars, sees no differences among women that are significant enough to trip the analysis. As
Karen Engle notes, generally "they approach women's human rights as if all women were essentially the same.
Although several are faced with the possibility of differences among women, they do not confront those differences . . .
." n23
When writers do recognize differences in institutional arrangements and ideological systems, they usually find that
gender overdetermines all other differences in constituting the identity of those oppressed. They see differences as
running along the gender continuum, rather than reflecting structures, such as nationality and class, that overlap with
and contest gendered processes. In MacKinnon's words, "Inequality on the basis of sex, women share. It is women's
collective condition." n24 Most feminists understand systems only in terms of whether they are more or less male
dominated. n25 The feminist agenda, then, is clear: gendered structures must be transformed. If "woman" could become
"a name for a way of being human," n26 then the gap between the rights women have as women and the rights they
should have as humans would be eliminated.
In asserting the primacy, and perhaps sufficiency, of gendered ideologies and institutional arrangements to explain
oppression, feminist human rights scholars construct a transnational identity as woman. For some of these feminists,
this identity is also essentialist, and therefore prior to male-dominated social conditions; for all of them, this identity is
coherently rooted in the shared experience of gendered oppression. The difficult question of a transnational subject
class is clarified in this experiential understanding of gender. While they may disagree about whether to understand
experience solely in terms of structures of oppression, or also in terms of authenticity, n27 they do see experience as
[*196] speaking fairly clearly about the coherence of women as a universal category.
The production of a transnational feminist agenda is grounded in this transnational identity as woman. In a volume
on feminism and legal theory, Martha Fineman and others formulate the feminist project in law as an attempt to ground
legal interventions in "women's actual lived experiences." n28 These interventions should reference "women's gendered
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4. lives" so as to "validate and accommodate women's experiences." n29 Experience thus becomes the most critical
touchstone of the feminist project in two senses: determining the subject of feminism and determining the agenda of
feminism. By focusing on experience, feminist theorists produce an international subject class and contend that this
focus also produces a shared international agenda.
III. PROBLEMATIZING THE IDEA OF "WOMEN" AS A TRANSNATIONAL SUBJECT CLASS
The overwhelming approach of American feminist legal scholars has been to work through an experiential
discourse of women as an oppressed category in order to take for granted a transnational community of women. This is
a loaded move in two related senses: it prescribes that experience can and should be "translated" into feminist analysis,
and that the experience of gendered oppression can and should be "referenced" into a transnational community of
"women" as victims of, and resistors against, male oppression. In this section, I problematize the use of experiential
discourse in the context of two related sets of [*197] concerns: first, that a discourse about universally shared
oppression can obfuscate global contradictions, and second, that a discourse about the experience of oppression often
participates in the imperially charged agenda of defining "Third World" women as victims of oppression. In laying out
my criticisms of American feminist legal scholars, I draw heavily on the political interventions of Sri Lankan women
who labor in transnational factories.
Increasingly, factories owned by transnational corporations are among the largest non-agrarian employers of young
women in Sri Lanka. Women constitute eighty-six percent of the workforce in these factories, which are located in the
free trade zones. n30 They work on assembly lines carrying out small, repetitive tasks such as sewing on shirt buttons.
n31 Working conditions are marked by hard-line anti-unionism, abysmal occupational health and safety standards,
routine sexual harassment, and intense regulatory scrutiny of worker performance. Taking five minutes to visit the rest
room can involve lengthy negotiations with the supervisor. n32 Non-existent health and safety standards often result in
physical problems, ranging from eye strain to birth defects, that ensure fast labor turnover. n33 Employers have the
prerogative to hire and fire at will. n34 There are virtually no avenues established to [*198] remedy unfair labor
practices and sexual harassment. n35 Attempts to unionize are brutally crushed; organizers are fired and blacklisted. n36
Labor and other government ministries have proven unsympathetic to workers' claims. In fact, the country commits to
"discouraging" worker militancy so as to entice transnational companies with the promise of a docile work force. n37
Despite this oppressive working environment, the coupled phenomena of spiraling unemployment and inflation
ensure that jobs in these firms are in high demand. n38 The TNC is able to hire nearly the cheapest factory labor in the
world. n39 At the same time, the factory worker receives higher wages than women workers in other sectors of the
economy. n40 Even within the industrial sector, TNC employees earn slightly more than workers in the better regulated
local factories outside the free trade zone. n41
A. Experientialist Discourse and the Foundationalist Error of Negating Structural Contradictions
Translating or referencing experience functions to sidestep the need for socially located analysis. To some extent
the foundationalist, if not [*199] essentialist, connotations of "experience" can be viewed as the contemporary
successor to the biological or psycho-social discourses about gender difference that held currency in the past. n42 The
suggestion of experiential discourse is that women experience male domination because they are women. The positing
of a foundationalist social division serves to deny the plasticity and historical contingency of current social structures,
and to deny the diversity and internal tensions that inhere in existing structures. By invoking experience as if it
somehow captured the lived realities of all women at some basic level, theorists begin to take gendered individuals for
granted. When the experience of gendered oppression is given the authority simply to assume a feminist alliance, it not
only obscures other structures of oppression but also renders the operation of gendered oppression too neat, ahistorical
and fixed. Theorists must instead look at gender identities as being continually reconstituted through social processes.
The situation of the Sri Lankan free trade zone worker emphasizes the inadequacy of merely positing the
experience of gender as an allconsuming analytic category. By examining ethnicity and class, a more complex
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5. understanding of how these women negotiate gender emerges. While the situation of the free trade zone worker is
deeply oppressive, she may be relatively privileged because of ethnicity -- a critical issue in the context of Sri Lanka's
ethnic conflict. In the southwestern part of the country, where the free trade zones are located, the Sinhalese constitute
78% of the population. n43 However, the ethnic composition of the free trade zone labor force is 97.6% Sinhalese, 1.2%
Moor and 1.2% Burgher. n44 These women enjoy not only the broad privileges of the dominant ethnic group but also
the concrete gains that stem from work in the factories. Recruitment into the free trade zone takes place primarily
through patronage networks, such as those established by local members of parliament. n45 Given a patronage system,
membership in the dominant ethnic group and, more importantly, ties to the Sinhala-dominated ruling party often
translate into rewards such as sought-after job opportunities. The disparity between the diverse ethnic composition of
the country and the near monolithic composition of the free trade zone work force illustrates this point forcefully. The
homogenization of Sri Lankan women that results from purely gendered lenses obscures power [*200] relations along
the axis of ethnicity. These unequal power relations play a fundamental role in structuring the options and opportunities
of Sri Lankan women.
While ethnic injustice has remained a dormant issue among free trade zone workers, their statements reflect a
concern for questions of class. These women do not articulate their claims solely through the frame of gender. When
speaking to women organized as feminists, the TNC workers refer to themselves not simply as women but as "female
employees." n46 Despite their goal of building links with feminists, they are quite insistent on invoking both class and
gender oppression. If terminology can be taken as symptomatic of a broader theoretical and political commitment, the
TNC workers convey the simultaneity of class and gender through their refusal to call themselves female except when
coupled with worker or employee.
The emphasis on gender as an analytical category is necessarily in tension with negotiating other lines of conflict.
This tension is seldom recognized in the political interventions of American feminist legal academics. These feminists
remain complicit in masking global contradictions by insisting upon the universalization of female oppression. By
privileging gender as the source of community and as the frame in which claims are articulated, they prevent other
critical issues from being raised. The danger of basing feminist internationality on experiential discourse is that
American feminists simply assume an international feminist community without interrogating their own investment in
obscuring the structural contradictions that separate women. The global class privilege that these women enjoy as
members of the American legal academy forces on them a particular responsibility to interrogate their own complicity
in the global economic and political framework. n47
The masking of global contradictions by feminist scholars is illuminated by locating the American legal profession
in an international [*201] frame. This erasure is particularly ironic since the export of the "rule of law," with the
freedom and democracy it is said to safeguard, is the frequently heard campaign cry of America's imperialistic
adventures. Law is often the touchstone of the crude "orientalist" n48 dichotomy that protrays the "Third World" as
shackled to brutal chaos and the industrialized North as the embodiment of secured freedom and ordered democracy
under the rule of law. n49 In this context, the prestige and identity of the legal profession is invested in the vision and
the projects of American imperialism. n50
MacKinnon's essay, On Torture: A Feminist Perspective on Human Rights, n51 illustrates tellingly the dangers of
erasing global contradictions in producing feminist internationality through experiential discourse. Although
MacKinnon seeks to produce a transnational community, her analysis focuses on the political agendas of "First World"
women. MacKinnon speaks with broad statements about women's experience of oppression all over the world: "Almost
universally, women are battered, raped, sexually abused as children, prostituted, and increasingly live pornographic
lives in contexts saturated more or less with pornography." n52 In her concrete examples, however, cases of gender
violence [*202] are located in the "First World," n53 while the examples of political torture are all from the "Third
World." n54 There is a glaring absence of any discussion of "Third World" women as objects of rape, battery and
pornography. Moreover, even MacKinnon's treatment of other types of torture does not speak to the particular concerns
of "Third World" women. Her discussion of torture is mainstream liberal, rather than feminist; she utilizes the generic,
"gender-neutral" stereotypes of torture. In this sense, "Third World" women are completely absent except as
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6. anonymous members of generalized categories such as "international feminist community."
By invoking the international community of women, MacKinnon is able to juxtapose highly detailed examples of
violence against women in the "First World" against examples of torture from the "Third World." She thereby highlights
the brutality of the "First World" incidents: "In the accounts by these women, all the same things happen as happen in
the Amnesty International accounts of torture, except that they happen in homes in Nebraska or in pornography studios
in Los Angeles rather than prison cells in Chile or detention centers in Turkey." n55
It is crucial to problematize the distinction between violence against women in the so-called "domestic" sphere and
"torture" as violence against women (and men) in the so-called "political" sphere. MacKinnon, however, seems
exclusively preoccupied with "First World" women's investment in such an effort. While the stark brutality of the "First
World" incidents she describes must be acknowledged, and while addressing violence against women is critically
important, her appeal to the international feminist community is extremely problematic. "Third World" women are
pulled into the transnational community of women only so they can provide the harsh backdrop of torture for someone
else's agenda.
If American feminist legal analysis is to contribute to a feminist internationality, it must interrogate critically the
complexities of a world in which women's realities, be they Sri Lankan factory workers or American academics, are
constructed along lines not only of gender, but also of nationality, ethnicity, class, race and sexuality. As noted earlier,
most feminist human rights theorists do not confront differences among women: "[They] avoid this issue by focusing
almost exclusively on the 'male' attitudes of individual States and of those who define [*203] human rights discourse."
n56 There is a marked need in feminist human rights analysis, and in feminist legal scholarship more generally, to
engage in a socially located discussion of internationality. It must speak to the specific political realities that divide
women as much as it does to those that may bring women together.
Feminists cannot invoke "women" without speaking to the specific politics and conditions of struggle through
which women are socially constructed and against which women are socially situated. This is not to say that we should
not generalize but rather that generalization must always be hesitant and politically grounded. n57 The signification of
"women" can be understood more fully in terms of the contingent politics that inform and constitute such identity.
My emphasis on socially located analysis is not a celebration of localism, nor is it a celebration of cultural
relativism. In attempting to understand and contest oppressive structures, feminists cannot sidestep the difficulties of
negotiating power relations merely by focusing on the local. n58 As suggested by the tensions of ethnicity, class and
gender in the interventions of the Sri Lankan workers, socially located analysis calls for sensitivity to the particular
power structures implicated in a given situation. Certainly such sensitivity demands generalization in some cases.
However, "we do not need 'easy generalizations,' [but] we do need difficult ones." n59 It is this "difficult generalization"
that will help us struggle toward a feminist internationality. Even when feminists deconstruct the presupposed
commonality of women's experience, they must seek to hold on to the possibility of a strategic feminist internationality.
By contesting global contradictions, feminist theorists may contingently construct a transnational community of
women, based on "a political constituency, not a biological or even sociological one." n60 [*204] Such a community
will be fraught with instability, but it can be a politically enabling instability if difference is confronted and negotiated.
B. The Experiential Discourse of Oppression and the Colonialist Project of Defining "Third World" Women
Intimately related to feminist theory's tendency to obscure structural contradictions among women is the
ideological production of "Third World" women through experiential discourse on women's universal oppression. As
discussed above, the traditional orientalist move used by "First World" feminists to comment on the "Third World"
essentializes, homogenizes and erases these communities. Here, the orientalism is retained to exact a slightly different
move; "Third World" women are not erased from the picture but are defined by "First World" feminists. The emphasis
on women's oppression becomes a neo-colonialist project in which the invocation of the "shared oppression of women"
translates into the power to define and produce "Third World" women -- typically, as passive victims of male
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7. oppression.
American feminist human rights analysts often effect homogenization by situating women against universalized
male oppression, thus abstracting women out of their communities. For instance, Rey Chow gives an account of an
American feminist asking, in the context of the Tiananmen Square massacre, "How should we read what is going on in
China in terms of gender?" n61 Chow, responding with a point I have emphasized in this Essay, argues that: "To ask
how we can use gender to 'read' a political crisis such as the present one is to insist on the universal and timeless
sufficiency of an analytical category and to forget the historicity that accompanies all categorical explanatory power."
n62
In Foucauldian fashion, Chow stresses the link that joins the will to know and explain with the will to power. Here,
by defining and categorizing the experience of "Third World" women, "First World" feminist scholars hold power over
"Third World" women. "First World" [*205] feminists' concern with the experience of oppression allows and
legitimates the colonialist assertion of privileged positionality in representing the concerns of "Third World" women.
A hauntingly colonialist approach dominates the work of Fran Hosken, a veteran of the feminist human rights
movement who has been at the forefront of an international campaign against clitoridectomy. Hosken is remarkably
insensitive to how imperialism structures "culture" and complicates the debate on women and cultural relativism. For
example, in discussing clitoridectomy, she writes: "The myth about the importance of 'cultural' traditions must be laid to
rest, considering that 'development' -- the introduction of imported Western technology and living patterns -- is the goal
of every country where the operations are practiced today." n63 I share the view that cultural relativism is not a
convincing or helpful response; it often masks how the interests of powerful groups within a community are privileged
relative to women's claims and how those interests are held out as the cultural interests of the entire community.
Nevertheless, as Hosken crucially and tellingly neglects, the cultural relativism debate must be situated in the context of
imperialism. It must be accompanied by a critique of how people in communities across the globe negotiate the
conditions of economic, political and cultural life in the context of Northern hegemony.
An analysis of Hosken's treatment of "Third World" women helps illustrate how her erasure of anti-imperialist
struggles casts "Third World" women in a victimized narrative. Hosken presents women only as objects of
universalized male oppression: "Rape, forced prostitution, polygamy, genital mutilation, pornography, the beating of
girls and women, [and] purdah (segregation of women) are all violations of basic human rights." n64 As many observers
have pointed out, the simplistic presentation of purdah as violence against women and as an example of oppressed
womanhood is quite problematic, particularly when purdah is reduced to gender-oppressive, pre-modern religious
despotism. n65 Operating on such a view, Hosken arrives at an incomplete understanding of the veil, purdah's most
familiar representative. By focusing solely on gender oppression, she misses the nuanced debate on the potential of the
veil as subversive of Western imperialism. Reducing the question [*206] of whether purdah is oppressive to women
to a "yes" or "no" answer fails to recognize that societies in the "Third World" are fraught with complexity, not simple
and static lines of oppressors and victims. A highly contextualized analysis is therefore needed in order to locate
purdah socially. This analysis must be sensitive to the multiple meanings produced in the complex intersection of
gendered, imperialistic and nationalistic structures. If feminists are to recognize that "Third World" women are
negotiating multiple trajectories of power -- gendered as well as colonial, ethnic, religious, racial and more -- then they
must engage in a socially located textual analysis that traces this heterogeneity.
A similar narrative of victimization operates in the context of the Sri Lankan free trade zone worker. Much of the
literature on the subject produces an image of a helpless worker, an oppressed cog in the wheel of global capital.
Although I acknowledge the harshly oppressive working conditions, I urge against the passive recording of women only
as objects of capital, as traces of patriarchy. Women resist despite huge constraints and penalties. Although
non-unionized and unorganized in "traditional" terms, women have carried out work stoppages and other oppositional
action in a number of factories. n66 It is speculated, for example, that the extraordinarily high frequency of medical
complaints by free trade zone workers are non-traditional forms of protest. Undoubtedly, these complaints, which have
no apparent somatic basis, disrupt the efficient functioning of the factory. n67 In addition, efforts to unionize persist
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8. despite continued harassment from management.
Contextual analysis again is needed to resist the modeling of "Third World" women as victimized and to
acknowledge the complexity of Sri [*207] Lankan women's work in TNCs. While factory work is undoubtedly
oppressive, transnational factories are the one form of economic development that not only "creates employment
disproportionately for women," n68 but also offers wages that "are . . . usually higher than what they could earn as wage
laborers in alternative low-skilled female occupations." n69 Wage labor has likely had a significant impact in disrupting
the gendered political economy of the household and the agrarian sector. The fact that women have had to leave their
homes and live in hostels on the outskirts of the free trade zones, albeit in horrifying conditions, has inevitably allowed
them greater independence. n70 Thus many young women may choose employment in transnational factories as a ticket
out of a socially suffocating and financially less lucrative political economy. It is a difficult ticket, but such
employment is in high demand given structural constraints on available options. n71
Many feminists who examine "Third World" women and transnational employment refuse to recognize these
complex and contradictory tensions that resist easy conclusions about women's work in these factories: "[F]eminists
who see patriarchy and gender subordination as crucial underpinnings and inevitable consequences of all capitalism
refuse to recognize any benefits to women in the Third World from employment in export factories, insisting that such
employment intensifies rather than alleviates their gender subordination." n72 These feminists portray women workers
as passive victims because they fail to appreciate factors other than gender subordination in their experiential
framework.
This victimization narrative is coupled invariably with a contrasting story about comparatively privileged Western
women. Even the roots of women's protest in peripheral "Third World" countries are located in the center, the "First
World." For example, Riane Eisler remarks that
[i]n the 18th century, when the modern human rights movement was still in its infancy, Western
feminists challenged the medieval idea that a man's home is his castle where he is the sole and
undisputed ruler. Today women from both the developed and [*208] developing world are demanding
respect for the human rights of women. n73
The construction of this international feminist community, where today women from "both the developed and
developing world" come together, figures as the climactic moment in a narrative about feminism's center-to-periphery
trajectory. In an approach whose subtext sees Western women as having a patent on feminism, the benevolent Western
feminists provide theory that is useful for "Third World" practice, that rescues "Third World" women. n74 American
feminist theorists thus produce an international division of labor that says Western feminists theorize, and "Third
World" feminists struggle. This narrative in some sense re-enacts the colonial project in which the "white man's
burden" of carrying Christianity and civilization to the heathens is now the Western woman's burden of carrying
feminism and civilization to victimized "Third World" women. To contest this narrative, it is necessary to problematize
the "First World" feminists' sense that they are privileged as women and its concomitant colonialist claim to cultural
superiority. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written, "[I]n order to learn enough about Third World women and to
develop a different readership, the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated, and the First World feminist
must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman." n75
When feminists assert and explore the differences between women -- e.g., between the feminist legal scholar in the
United States and the free trade zone factory worker in Sri Lanka -- they should not reinscribe difference in
neocolonialist ways. In confronting global contradictions, "First World" legal feminists must not assume the privileges
of modernity and Western cultural location relative to orientalist tradition, of theoretical insight as opposed to practice
in the trenches, of emancipatory feminism as opposed to false consciousness and victimization.
[*209] It should be of no great surprise to anyone when we reject a feminism which uses Western social
and economic systems to judge and make pronouncements about how Third World women can become
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16 Harv. Women's L.J. 189, *206

9. emancipated. Feminist theories which examine our cultural practices as 'feudal residues' or label us
'traditional' also portray us as politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the
ethos of Western feminism. They need to be continually challenged . . . . n76
Sensitivity to structural privilege and discursive ruptures in "women" should not be the re-inscription of an orientalist
dichotomy that now, in a call to modernity, appropriates the discourse of feminism to produce a neocolonialist
difference.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this Essay I have problematized a dominant strand of American feminist legal scholarship and, more particularly,
a dominant strand of feminist human rights work. The identification of a dominant tendency, however, should not
preclude an acknowledgment of American feminist legal analysis as heterogeneous, complicated, nuanced and dynamic.
In fact, part of the agenda of an expansion of this Essay should be the exploration of the marginal strands of feminist
legal scholarship that do speak of the lives of "Third World" women in ways that engage in analyzing the complexity of
their goals and strategies. These strands are located primarily, but not entirely, in feminist legal writing that addresses
race and racism, and in some feminist human rights scholarship. n77 The unexplored possibility of using debates within
American feminist legal analysis may provide an avenue to understanding feminism in the context of international
structures and social relations. n78
Similarly, theorists must resist a homogenization of feminists and feminist struggles in the "Third World." The
repetitive uniformity of [*210] conditions in transnational factories in Sri Lanka and, for example, the Philippines
bears out the claim of the homogenizing power of global capital. Yet the specific social relations into which
transnational factories intervene are vastly different. The deeply pervasive structural contradictions between the North
and the South may locate different women within Sri Lanka, and even Sri Lanka and the Philippines, similarly in the
international division of labor. This similarity of location, however, says nothing about the very complex, highly
textured differences in the particular contexts in which different women imagine, theorize, fight for and occasionally
even succeed in shaping a more equitable, emancipatory reality.
American feminist legal academics must critically examine issues central to feminist theory and practice in an
international context. They need to acknowledge and confront the theorizing, the struggles and the lives of "Third
World" women. To do so, they must situate feminist scholarship and political intervention in the global framework and
examine tensions, and also shared understandings, between "Third World" and "First World" women. Finally,
American feminist legal scholars must explore the centrality, and simultaneously the deconstruction and fragmentation,
of various identities, beginning with the logic that produces the category "women." As Bruce Robbins has argued, "If
there is no one central contradiction in society, no one linear path of historical development, then the logic linking
multiple actors must be complex." n79 As we work towards gendered understandings of the regulation of sexuality,
class, race, nationality and ethnicity, feminist internationality demands that, in turn, we examine how gender is itself
implicated by these other discourses of power.
Legal Topics:
For related research and practice materials, see the following legal topics:
International LawSovereign States & IndividualsHuman RightsTortureLabor & Employment
LawDiscriminationHarassmentSexual HarassmentDefenses & ExceptionsAntiharassment PolicyLabor & Employment
LawEmployment RelationshipsAt-Will EmploymentDuration of Employment
FOOTNOTES:
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10. n1 Chandra T. Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, in Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism 51, 54 (Chandra T. Mohanty et al. eds., 1991).
n2 I use the term "transnational corporation" rather than "multinational corporation." The transnational corporation is defined as
a designation adopted by the United Nations mid-way through its intensive examination of what had earlier been referred
to as multinational corporations. The latter terminology still remains the preferred choice among spokesmen for TNCs,
writers in American business publications, and most American (and European) academics. Certainly the designation
transnational [sic] in contrast to multinational [sic] carries a definitional dimension that challenges the ideological
pretensions of American-based TNCs, i.e. that they are truly global (in all levels of management, in ownership, etc.).
Robert B. Stauffer, Transnational Corporations and Host Nations: Attitudes, Ideologies and Behaviours 39 n.1 (University of Sydney
Transnational Corporations Research Project Research Monograph No. 9, 1979).
n3 I am uncomfortable with the use of terms such as "Third World," "First World," "underdeveloped" and "developed." Historically, the
term "Third World" has often been used within paradigms that invoke orientalist conceptualizations of the countries or regions to which they
refer. They have negative essentialist connotations that imply a bipolar, adversely hierarchical relationship between the "developed First
World" and the "underdeveloped Third World." They group together a number of countries as if they were homogeneous with no regard to
their diversity and complexity. They terms "North" and "South," although not as hierarchical, are equally homogenizing. Moreover, even a
work that speaks critically of "Third World" resistance runs the risk of implying untenable links between identification as a "Third Worlder"
and political commitment to anti-imperialist struggle. Nevertheless, I use this terminology because I want to address certain commonalities
that arise from the impact of colonial and post-colonial domination without negating the historical specificity that conditions the experience
of each country and each community in the "Third World." In addition, some writers have suggested that the term "Third World" could be
recaptured in oppositional political interventions akin to the appropriation of terms such as "Black" and "queer." See, e.g., Chandra T.
Mohanty, Ann Russo & Lourdes Torres, Preface to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, supra note 1, at ix, x. To convey my
continued discomfort with the terminology, I awkwardly use the terms in quotation marks.
n4 Linda Y.C. Lim, Women's Work in Export Factories: The Politics of a Cause, in Persistent Inequalities: Women and World
Development 101, 101-02 (Irene Tinker ed., 1990).
n5 Although the term "American" refers broadly to North and South America, I use it, absent a more precise term, to refer to the United
States. The designation "American feminist legal analysis" is not intended as an empirically descriptive category, but as a category that
signifies the privileges of readership and publication in academia in the United States. In examining American feminist legal analysis, I
focus on its most dominant voice -- dominant in the sense that it is both pervasive and attributable to scholars who may be labeled as elite. I
do not intend to imply that American feminist legal scholarship speaks with one voice. In fact, the critical, but marginal, voices have
significantly influenced the critique I offer in this Essay.
n6 I use the term "global contradictions" to refer to the transnational power relations that structure the political, economic and cultural map
on which people struggle over resources and cultural meanings. In the words of Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin, "The question of the
so-called developing societies lies at the very heart of the political, economic, and moral crises of contemporary global society . . . . [T]he
fundamental questions about 'developing societies' are not of difference only but of relationships past and present with the countries of
advanced capitalism and industrialization." Hamza Alavi & Teodor Shanin, Preface to Introduction to the Sociology of "Developing
Societies" xi, xi (Hamza Alavi & Teodor Shanin eds., 1982). This valuable collection of essays provides a broad overview of global
contradictions as well as a useful bibliography for further reading.
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11. n7 In using phrases such as "worked to erase" throughout this Essay, I am not making a statement about the conscious intent of the scholars
in question. My aim is not to identify self-interested conspiracies but to present my reading of the political meaning implicit in the writing --
whose interests are structurally privileged in particular practices of inclusion and exclusion.
n8 Gayle Rubin, The Traffic of Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex, in Toward an Anthropology of Women 157, 160 (Rayna
R. Reiter ed., 1975).
n9 I use the term "feminist internationality" (it is a borrowed term, but I am not sure of its original usage) in contrast to terms such as
"global sisterhood" that speak only of a universal alliance of women. "Feminist internationality" functions as a shorthand for a transnational
political alliance of women whose differences are acknowledged. While difference remains a potent tension that threatens a comfortable
sense of community, it is confronted rather than ignored, thus becoming rich and productive.
n10 Focusing on American feminism in the legal academy is open to criticism. Emphasis, even in critique, on that which is already
dominant participates in its continued monopoly of public attention and debate. There is a need to examine the efforts of women who have
been marginalized in the feminist debate. I acknowledge the limitations of this Essay in this regard. However, if we are to work toward
feminist internationality, it is critical to situate American feminist legal scholarship in a global context.
n11 I am thinking here of what Critical Legal Studies has referred to as liberal legalism or rationalizing legal analysis. See, e.g., The
Politics of Law (David Kairys ed., 1990).
n12 The critical international lens helps to illuminate the structural realities of women in the "First World" as well as the "Third World."
Indeed, the luxury of thinking of global contradictions as a "Third World" issue is a potent statement of the structural privileges enjoyed by
mainstream American feminists. In commenting on race, Ann Russo writes, "Not seeing race as a white issue is part of the privilege of
being white. Understanding the impact of race on our lives -- what we gain and what we lose -- would encourage us to see the issue of
racism as our issue." Ann Russo, "We Cannot Live Without Our Lives": White Women, Antiracism, and Feminism, in Third World Women
and the Politics of Feminism, supra note 1, at 297, 300.
n13 Cherrie Moraga, La Guera, in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color 27, 33 (Cherrie Moraga & Gloria
Anzaldua eds., 1981).
n14 Numerous critics have cited reproductive rights as one instance of this crucial link. See, e.g., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Supplement
to Marxism, Address at the Rethinking Marxism Conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Nov. 13, 1992) (recording on
file with the Harvard Women's Law Journal). Many "Third World" women are fighting forced sterilization sponsored by the coercive
population control programs deployed with the complicity of local governments and international aid agencies. Linda Gordon, Woman's
Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America 398-99 (1976). Often such agencies cynically use rhetoric about
women's rights to control reproduction. Id. at 401. Sensitivity to the struggles of these women in the "Third World" disrupts the ease with
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12. which mainstream U.S. feminism translates reproductive freedom into abortion rights. This disruption disturbingly echoes the protests of
feminist women of color against forced sterilization within U.S. borders. Id. at 399-401.
n15 See Karen Engle, International Human Rights and Feminism: When Discourses Meet, 13 Mich. J. Int'l L. 517 (1992) (analyzing
feminist theorists' engagement with human rights discourse).
n16 See, e.g., Riane Eisler, Human Rights: Toward an Integrated Theory for Action, 9 Hum. Rts. Q. 287, 303 (1987).
n17 In framing women's concerns in the terms of international human rights discourse, the broad moral consensus evoked by the rhetoric of
human rights inhibits resistance to a feminist agenda. Therefore, feminist legal theorists who use the human rights framework gain not only
a conceptual and political grounding in the idea that women are human, too, but also a powerful strategic tool to fight oppressive situations
all over the world. In speaking of a worldwide struggle against prostitution, Reanda argues:
[G]radually, perceptions are changing, concepts are being redefined, and the sexual abuse and merchandising of women,
regardless of age, are beginning to be understood as violations of human rights. The international system, which can
promote social change as well as respond to it, needs to be spurred to higher awareness of the dimensions of the problem
of prostitution and to greater and more effective action.
Laura Reanda, Prostitution as a Human Rights Question: Problems and Prospects of United Nations Action, 13 Hum. Rts. Q. 202, 228
(1991).
n18 This attempt by feminist human rights scholars is sometimes reminiscent of the efforts of 19th-century liberal feminists to extend the
rights of citizenship to women. For a discussion of feminism's debt to liberalism, see Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family 61
(1989).
n19 For an overview of some of the interventions in the Anglo-American rights debate, see: Elizabeth Kingdom, What's Wrong with
Rights? (1991); Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (1989); Judy Fudge, The Effect of Entrenching a Bill of Rights Upon Political
Discourse: Feminist Demands and Sexual Violence in Canada, 17 Int'l J. Soc. L. 445 (1989); Elizabeth Schneider, The Dialectics of Rights
and Politics: Perspectives from the Women's Movement, 61 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 589 (1986); Patricia J. Williams, Alchemical Notes:
Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights, 22 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 401 (1987).
n20 Catharine A. MacKinnon, On Torture: A Feminist Perspective on Human Rights, in Human Rights in the 21st Century: A Global
Challenge (Kathleen Mahoney & Paul Mahoney eds., forthcoming 1993) (transcript at 1, on file with the Harvard Women's Law Journal).
n21 Id.
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13. n22 In referring to gender, Riane Eisler states that "how we structure the most fundamental of all human relations -- the relation of the
female and male halves of humanity -- has profound implications for how we structure all human relations." Eisler, supra note 16, at 303.
n23 Engle, supra note 15, at 577.
n24 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 241 (1989).
n25 For instance, in Riane Eisler's attempt at "an integrated theory" of women and human rights, she argues for understanding oppressive
features of women's lives from a systems approach. Her approach measures such oppression in terms of the extent to which it contributes to
the maintenance of "androcratic" or male-dominated systems. Eisler, supra note 16, at 292.
n26 MacKinnon, supra note 20, at 17.
n27 Authenticity refers to a discourse about what it means to be a woman in the positive sense. See, e.g., Ruth Colker, Abortion and
Dialogue: Pro-Choice, Pro-Life and American Law 6 (1992).
n28 Martha A. Fineman & Nancy S. Thomadsen, Preface to Part III, Recognizing Pleasures and Pains, in At the Boundaries of Law:
Feminism and Legal Theory 113 (Martha A. Fineman & Nancy S. Thomadsen eds., 1991).
n29 See Martha A. Fineman, Introduction to At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory, supra note 28, at xi, xiv. The work of
Robin West provides an example of the reach of an essentialist experiential discourse, dichotomized along gender lines. For West,
"referencing" experience in "recognizing" women's identity as a transnational social class surpasses MacKinnon's vision that "woman" will
be "a name for a way of being human." See supra note 26 and accompanying text. It involves a more farreaching vision that defines a way
of being human that is fundamentally different from "human as human is now conceived." Robin L. West, The Difference in Women's
Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique of Feminist Legal Theory, in At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory, supra, at
115, 131. If women's "subjective, hedonic lives," women's experience of "our biological, reproductive role," Id. at 130, actually speaks to us
about what it means for a woman to be human, it would transform the agenda of international human rights: "It is only by starting with our
own experience that we will be able to develop a description of human nature which is faithful to our lived reality, rather than one which
ignores it." Id. at 133.
n30 Voice of Women, Women Workers in the Free Trade Zone of Sri Lanka: A Survey 85 (1983). Free trade zones are becoming
increasingly common in "Third World" countries. Seeking to attract foreign investment in their weak economies, these countries create
investment havens for transnational corporations by promising
cheap, usually female labour, the absence of trade unions, investment grants, tax holidays, customs privileges and the
ready repatriation of profits . . . . From Malaysia to Thailand to Egypt, "offshore" manufacturers exploit cheap local
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14. labour in these zones and export their output to the First World where they are sold at greatly profitable prices.
Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development 198 (1984).
n31 The host countries advertise the particular aptness of their labor force for such tasks in heavily gendered and racially charged terms.
For instance, the Malaysian government boasts in its brochure that "[t]he manual dexterity of the Oriental female is famous the world over.
Her hands are small, and she works fast with extreme care . . . . Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance, to
contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the Oriental girl?" Barbara Ehrenreich & Annette Fuentes, 'Life on the
Global Assembly Line' Exposes "Ms.-Treatment" of Women Workers, AFSC Women's Newsl. (Women and Global Corporations Project
Insert), Winter 1981, at 12.
n32 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 46; see also Rohini Weerasinghe, Women Workers in the Katunayake Investment Promotion Zone
(KIPZ) in Sri Lanka: Some Observations, in Women in Development in South Asia 306, 308 (V. Kanesalingam ed., 1989); Asoka
Bandarage, Women and Capitalist Development in Sri Lanka, 1977-87, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Apr.-June 1988, at 57, 68.
n33 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 45-48.
n34 Sunil Bastian, Women Workers and Foreign Capital, 23 Logos 53, 75 (Centre for Society and Religion, Colombo, Sri Lanka 1984); see
also Bandarage, supra note 32, at 68.
n35 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 51; see also Weerasinghe, supra note 32, at 315. For a more detailed discussion of the sexual
harassment of women workers, see Weerasinghe, supra at 317-18; Bandarage, supra note 32, at 68.
n36 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 51; see also Weerasinghe, supra note 32, at 315-16.
n37 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 51; see also Weerasinghe, supra note 32, at 315; Bandarage, supra note 32, at 67.
n38 The rise in rural poverty provides one explanation for the attraction of TNC employment. According to the International Fund for
Agricultural Development (IFAD), Sri Lanka is one of the five countries in the world that has experienced the sharpest increase in rural
poverty over the last twenty years. Trickle-Down Economics Hurt Rural Poor in Third World, Reuters, Nov. 23, 1992, available in SRI
LANKA NET.
n39 Western labor-intensive manufacturing industries have relocated to developing countries because of the cheap and abundant supplies of
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16 Harv. Women's L.J. 189, *210

15. labor to be found there. Linda Y.C. Lim, Capitalism, Imperialism, and Patriarchy: The Dilemma of Third World Women Workers in
Multinational Factories, in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor 70, 72 (June Nash & Maria P. Fernandez-Kelly eds.,
1983). Among workers in free trade zones throughout Asia, Sri Lankan workers receive the lowest wages. Voice of Women, supra note 30,
at 33.
n40 See Lim, supra note 4, at 109.
n41 Bandarage, supra note 32, at 68. My critique of TNCs does not stem from a priori opposition to foreign capital. Local private capital,
or state capital, can be just as oppressive and, in fact, has crucial links to global capital. Moreover, with the current Sri Lankan government's
embrace of directives from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, even local industries that were previously subject to strong
labor laws and other regulatory controls are now being privatized and deregulated. See Jayadeva Uyangoda, The Bank, the Fund and the
Rest of Us, Pravada, Jan. 1992, at 7, 7.
n42 See generally Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (1989).
n43 The ethnic composition of the southwestern region of Sri Lanka is as follows: 78% Sinhalese, 11% Tamil and 11% Muslim and others.
Stanley J. Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy 10 (1986).
n44 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 87.
n45 Statistics indicate that 49% of recruitment is through political patronage, and at least another 35% is through some other form of
patronage. Id. at 14.
n46 In 1980, a group of Sri Lankan feminists began a survey of the women workers in the free trade zone of Sri Lanka under the auspices of
Voice of Women, a feminist collective. Some of the women who were interviewed for the study later wrote to the researchers, giving an
extended account of conditions in a particular garment factory and urging them to try to mobilize for reform at the parliamentary level. They
asserted their class location even as they attempted to form an alliance with the Voice of Women group. The letter begins as follows: "We
are employed in the factory called [name withheld by Voice of Women for fear of retaliation against the workers by the TNC concerned] in
the Free Trade Zone. We, female employees, have decided to bring to your notice, a multitude of matters concerning the difficulties
prevailing in this factory." Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 78 (emphasis added).
n47 See Mohanty, supra note 1, at 53-54; see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, French Feminism in an International Frame, in In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics 134 (1987) (exploring "First World" feminist scholarship in relation to "Third World" women).
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16. n48 The term "orientalism," popularized by Edward Said, has come to refer to the colonial and neocolonial project of Western writers, from
academics to journalists to foreign policy bureaucrats. Their imaginative discursive production of "the Orient," defined in opposition to "the
Occident," is crucially linked to the power configurations of imperial dominance. See generally Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1979).
n49 See, e.g., Max Weber, On Law in Economy and Society 213 (Max Rheinstein ed., Edward Shils & Max Rheinstein trans., Simon &
Schuster 1967) (1925). Weber contrasts what he presents as the less nomological ("irrational") system of "khadi" justice with the highly
rational legal systems of capitalist countries. Id. at 213.
n50 The tie between the rhetoric of law and imperialism is further manifest in bicentennial celebrations of the U.S. Consitution in embassies
throughout the world. Relatedly, the hegemonic aspects of Western legal and constitutional discourse are evident in narratives of national
origin in "Third World" constitutional discourse. For example, Spivak, in discussing transnational constitutional studies, examines the
moment of the 1924 drafting of the constitution of the modern Turkish nation-state in the context of the dominance of Western constitutional
discourse: "A simulated alien origin or source, from which to draw 'modernization' and constitutionality appears, politically and
philosophically cognizable, facing a terrain re-territorialized in response to the global release of industrial Capital . . . . 'The free Turk' is
obliged to a perennial acknowledgement of European debt." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Constitutions and Culture Studies, 2 Yale J.L. &
Human. 133, 140-41 (1990). In addition to legitimating the economic and militarist efforts of imperialism, the move towards global
homogenization of the formal legal and constitutional references of macro-institutional order may tend towards limiting the scope of our
political imaginations about possible socio-legal orders. The "legal advice and expertise" industry, now sending airplane after airplane of
Western "experts" to fashion the legal systems of Eastern Europe in its own image provides us with a topical marker of this attempt at
incessant homogenization of legal systems and constitutional orders.
n51 See MacKinnon, supra note 20.
n52 Id. at 8.
n53 Id. at 8-9, 14 (noting the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Denmark and Japan).
n54 Id. at 2, 7, 11, 13 (noting Argentina, Chile, Turkey, and Honduras).
n55 Id. at 7.
n56 Engle, supra note 15, at 577.
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17. n57 Such generalization should be in the spirit of what Gayatri Spivak refers to as strategic, not ontological, essentialisms. Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse, in Feminism/Postmodernism 324, 325 (Linda J. Nicholson ed., 1990)
(citing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Address at the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University (Spring 1985)).
n58 " We do not have some privileged access to understanding patterns of human agency simply by studying localities." Bruce Robbins,
Comparative Cosmopolitanism, 31/32 Social Text 169, 176 (1992) (quoting Simon Duncan & Mike Savage, Space, Scale, and Locality, 21
Antipode 179, 187 (1989)). Also see my discussion of the importance of ethnicity in shaping the situation of the Sri Lankan factory worker,
supra text accompanying notes 43-45.
n59 Robbins, supra note 58, at 175.
n60 Chandra T. Mohanty, Introduction to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, supra note 1, at 1, 7.
n61 Rey Chow, Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman, in Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism, supra note 1, at 81, 82.
n62 Id. In emphasizing that the invocation of gender must be bound to historical context, I do not argue that the tool has to be appropriate to
the task if it is to be more precise. Rather, we determine the appropriateness of an analytical tool by looking to our political priorities.
Gender is fundamentally a political intervention; it is not a mathematical formula that we can use to arrive at the "right" answer. The value
of gender as a category is not that it is a better lens through which to observe and to "read" but rather that it intervenes in a critically
de-hegemonic project, a critically political project. Gender does not help us read better or more objectively; rather it helps us conceptualize
and construct in ways that further our political agendas.
n63 Fran P. Hosken, Female Genital Mutilation and Human Rights, 1 Feminist Issues 3, 10 (1981).
n64 Id. at 15.
n65 For an excellent discussion of western feminist scholarship on purdah, as well as an overview of some of the existing literature on
"Third World" women and religion, see Marnia Lazreg, Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,
in Conflicts in Feminism 326 (Marianne Hirsch & Evelyn F. Keller eds., 1990).
n66 Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 51-54. In November and December 1992, numerous worker strikes and organized protests have
tested the resolve of police and security forces to maintain tight controls on worker activity. The unrest has had a crippling effect on several
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18. TNC factories. See PBI Attends Action in the Free Trade Zone, Peace Brigades International Sri Lanka Report, Dec. 1992, available in SRI
LANKA NET; Workers Unrest: FTZ Investors Threaten to Pull Out, The Island International, Dec. 23, 1992, available in SRI LANKA
NET. Aihwa Ong's book on factory women in Malaysia helps to shed light on the struggles of factory women. Ong's work contests
dominant analyses of Malaysian workers as passive victims of oppression. She explains how unorganized female workers in Malaysian
transnational factories express resistance to capitalist work and bodily discipline through individual, and sometimes mass, "spirit
possessions." These disruptions cause work stoppages and occasionally even short-term factory closures. See Aihwa Ong, Spirits of
Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia 204-10 (1987). As a study of social agency and localized protest, the
book's importance extends beyond the particular situation of Malaysian factory workers.
n67 " What emerges is that the complaints, [the] frequency and nature of which are unusually high among the FTZ [Free Trade Zone]
women workers and do not appear to have a somatic basis, are an expression of protest of an inability to cope with the working conditions."
Voice of Women, supra note 30, at 53. See also Ong, supra note 66, at 203.
n68 Lim, supra note 4, at 119.
n69 Id. at 109.
n70 See Katherine Gibson & Julie Graham, Rethinking Class in Industrial Geography: Creating a Space for an Alternative Politics of
Class, 68 Econ. Geography 109, 122-24 (1992).
n71 See generally Lim, supra note 4 (arguing that the literature on women working in transnational corporations has overemphasized the
negative consequences of such work and ignored its liberating aspects for women).
n72 Id. at 116.
n73 Eisler, supra note 16, at 296.
n74 I hope to displace the theory-practice dichotomy in my own discussion of American legal scholars and Sri Lankan factory workers by
understanding their work as political interventions. According to the typical model, American legal scholars provide the conceptual
framework and Sri Lankan factory workers offer the "real life" example, the struggle that will help clarify concepts, an experimental field on
which to test the application of the concepts. I find the distinction between theory and practice untenable and unhelpful. Moreover, I find its
mapping onto the North-South distinction imperialist. In examining American legal scholars and Sri Lankan factory workers, I
conceptualize all their work as political interventions, although as work carried out through different strategies, in different contexts, and
with different consequences. While these differences are important, the distinction between theory and practice obscures rather than clarifies
the understanding of these differences.
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19. n75 Spivak, supra note 47, at 136.
n76 Valerie Amos & Pratibha Parmar, Challenging Imperial Feminism, 17 Feminist Rev. 3, 7 (1984).
n77 See, e.g., Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991); Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race
and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1989 U. Chi. Legal F. 139
(1989); Angela Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 Stan. L. Rev. 581 (1990); Mari Matsuda, Standing by My Sister:
Legal Theory Out of Coalition, 45 Stan. L. Rev. (forthcoming 1993). For feminist human rights scholarship, see Engle, supra note 15.
n78 For instance, this may include debates about gender and difference in thinking about rights against discrimination.
n79 Bruce Robbins, Proximities of Distance: Critics and Au Pairs in the International Division of Labor, Address at the Rethinking
Marxism Conference 15 (Nov. 14, 1992) (transcript on file with the Harvard Women's Law Journal).
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