in the same analysis-Chandra seemed to be doing it with ease. While many of us were struggling to “do intersectionality”-to keep gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, etc. Her feminism was crystal clear, and clearly radical, and refreshingly rooted in the global south. I came under Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s influence from the first day I read her work, and then had the chance to see her speak at a women of color conference in the 1980s. Her recent book, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity extends the argument of this essay and sets out an approach to transnational feminist collaboration. Mohanty states that Western feminisms have tended to gloss over the differences between women of the global South, but that the experience of oppression is incredibly diverse, and contingent on geography, history, and culture. In this essay, Mohanty critiques the political project of Western feminism in its discursive construction of the category of the “Third World woman” as a hegemonic entity. Her work became internationally known after the publication of her influential essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” in 1986.

As of 2013, she has served as the women’s studies department chair and professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. She has degrees from University of Delhi and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (born in Mumbai India in 1955) is a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist.

Chandra talpade mohanty books