‘Also I Wanted So Much To Leave For the West’

Abstract

In a strongly polemical opening to Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (1994), Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan state that: In arguing against a standpoint epistemology, we are not arguing that this is an era of postfeminism. We believe that many white, bourgeois feminists have announced a postfeminist era precisely because their particular definitions of feminism (which often require universalization) have not been able to withstand critiques from women of color as well as the deconstructions of poststructuralist or postmodern theory. (20) This defensive understanding of postfeminism as a ‘white’ discourse that upholds divisive borders alerts us to the continuing need for a more flexible and incisive understanding of feminist practice and theory, particularly when, as Winifred Woodhull reminds us, ‘even “radical” feminists often turn a blind eye to the situation of women in the third world’ (77). However, as Ella Shohat argues in her introduction to Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1998), ideological borders have no function if we accept the intrinsic ‘hybrid culture of all communities, especially in a world increasingly characterized by the “travelling” of images, sounds, goods and people’ (1; emphasis in original). ShohatKeywordsFeminist TheoryIranian WomanArab WomanTelevision DramaHybrid CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.