The Meeting with Bernadette:

The Meeting with Bernadette:

One of the highlights of our visit to South Africa, was the meeting with the awesome Bernadette. Her marvelous resume had set anticipation and expectation rolling and we were not to be disappointed. Here was a person at the confluence of the East and the West, who beautifully transcended the boundaries of Western feminism to interpret and apply its essential conceptualizations and meld it with the existing theory of oppression in the Third World. Her main area of focus was the evolution of gender consciousness in the patriarchal structure of the state and society (an explicit disclaimer-all of this is my interpretation of Bernadette’s thoughts and I do not claim to have the unilateral last word!). Basically, she expanded the concept of intersectionality, when Western feminism recognized the confluence of multiple factors like race and class on the oppression of women, to interpret oppression in the Third World. She faulted the lack of a gender consciousness in the state structure as contributing to the prevalence of patriarchy. It was a marvelous application of the concepts of Western feminism, which inevitably focused on personal struggles as the causal factor of oppression, to explain the political causes of oppression in the Third World. Indeed one of my greatest grievances against Western feminism, and especially feminist International Relations, was that it seemed to emerge from a purely Western perspective that did not adequately factor in all the political factors of oppression that characterize women from other parts of the world like India. Indeed, I am grateful for the wonderful expansion of intersectionality in Western feminist theory to encompass non-Western concepts. I do not mean to denigrate the appreciation of the struggles of the Third World by Western feminism, which has been set into motion by the controversial Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes,” and the inherent ability of the liberal democratic West to identify the sources of oppression in the Third World. But somehow, feminist theory still seems motivated and dominated by these essentially Western concepts, which while not precluding a normative comprehension of other forms of feminism, is still defined by these basic concepts. Once again, I realize I may have embarked on something controversial as Western feminism has begun to embrace notions of intersectionality. Nevertheless, Bernadette’s foray into “gender consciousness” and her application of it to South Africa, an ostensibly Third world society, holds interesting possibilities for the wonderful concepts developed here in the Western world, which provide a powerful conceptualization of oppression, and application to newer areas constituted by different historical perspectives.

Shritha