Mohanty explains in her essay how Western feminist scholarship applies universal categories of gender and oppression to women in the Global South. She argues that this disrupts the true meaning of feminism because the diverse histories and lived experiences of non-Western women are flattened into the singular figure of the “Third World woman,” erasing cultural, class, and political differences. Such discursive homogenization distorts feminist political practice by reinforcing hierarchical power relations between Western and non-Western women and undermining the possibility of meaningful transnational solidarity. By positioning Western women as the norm, colonial legacies within feminist discourse itself are reproduced, disrupting efforts to build coalitions grounded in shared but context-specific struggles. Mohanty frames this disruption not as a breakdown of feminism, but as a critical failure that demands more historically situated, self-reflexive feminist analysis.

“It is in the production of this ‘third-world difference’ that western feminisms appropriate and colonize the constitutive complexities which characterize the lives of women in these countries.”