Women Of Third World Research Articles

(Im)Possibilities of Development: Women and the Paradox of Growth in the Malaysian Novel

Abstract: Though women figure prominently in the discourses of postcolonial nations that concern development, these discourses position women in a way that vacillates between tradition, which needs to be preserved, and modernization, essential for "catching up" to the developed or so-called first world. This article approaches the ambivalence surrounding the question of women and development through the lens of literature. It turns to two turn-of-the-century novels, Chuah Guat Eng's Echoes of Silence (1994) and Yang-May Ooi's The Flame Tree (1998), to problematize the depiction of the "Third World" woman and development in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia. The article explores the coloniality embedded within narratives of growth of the women protagonists against the backdrop of the developing nation—and highlights when the conditions for women underwent far-reaching changes, for instance, at the end of colonial rule, when women became a part of an independent social and political nation, and persistent structures of marginalization and discrimination resulted in decreased opportunities for women. The article's focus on Malaysian Chinese writers foregrounds the colonial constructions of race and gender that Malaysia inherited from the colonizers, which continues to shape the lives of postcolonial subjects. The two novels provide a glimpse of the problems underlying the developmental agendas in postcolonial nations and call for a shift in the understanding of development—from a prescriptive sense of "how it should be for the third-world women" to a consideration of national and global frameworks of development that limit the choices and agency of women.

Unmasking Post-Truth Narratives: Interpreting “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse” through the Prism of Distorted Realities

Post-truth is built as a theory after its recognition by Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, as the word of the year because of the increasing usage by politically active communities and people, among them alt-right and Brexiteer was at the highest use this term in the US for denoting the political situation out there. Post-truth is majorly referring to or indicating situations in which appeals to emotion and personal conviction have a greater impact on public opinion than do factual facts. The signs of the origin of this term can be traced from the word “truthiness” coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, which could be described as being convinced of something's truthfulness even though it isn't necessarily supported by the facts. Chandra TalpadeMohanty in her essay “Under the Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” attacks the bogus Post-truth and monolithic statement of Western feminists and philosophers about third-world women regardless of their race, class, geographic location, or religion and without any knowledge about women of third world nation and their priorities. In order to get the superior position even in pointing out the difficulties faced by third-world women, the first-world feminists judging their way of daily routine in the light of subjugation, suppression, and ostracization, which could be seen through the post-truth theory. The essay was first published in 1986 as the opening chapter of Feminist without Borders. To make her point more clear Mohanty supports her statements with anti-post-truth examples, the gendered division of labour, the veiling of women, or women's financial dependency on males. According to Mohanty, unless these examples are taken into account in context, these data by themselves are not a useful source of knowledge. Western feminists' views will be incorrect and ineffectual in assisting the communities they are attempting to assist if they base them on these observable realities. So the approach of this paper is to analyze these post-truth statements with reference of the essay by Mohanty where she depicts the individual differences of third-world women and asks for strategic essentialism against these postcolonial and post-truth ways of presenting things by third-world nations.

Marginalization, Patriarchy, and Religion: A Feminist Study

Even though organizations have been developed to eradicate, marginalization is still in vogue for third-world women. Prima Facie evidence in support of the fact can be found in profession, religion, or gender. The patriarchal setup with works of literature and media as co-actors leaves nothing unturned to achieve this ultimate objective. However, the mutinous pen of a Pakistani writer, Muhammad Hanif, presents the rebellious ideology and marginalization of suppressed women. Hanif’s portrayal of Alice in his work entitled “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” is an accurate picture of a wretched third-world woman facing marginalization based on her gender, religion, and profession. The researcher has studied chunks of text under the theoretical lens of Spivak and Said’s proponents that a third-world woman is doubly marginalized (Spivak, 1993), and she is created as a traditional Asian woman (Said, 1991). The most probable outcome of the study of Alice’s marginalization is that the minority is prone to be suppressed, and if it is a female, then the chances of betterment are near zero.

The Active Cry of the Double Other Nadine Labaki in the Perspective of Postcolonial Feminist Theory

In the Arab world, where the film industry is not well-developed, Lebanese director Nadine Labaki gained the world's attention in 2018 with Capernaum, through which people see the social problems of the Third World and through director Nadine Labaki, people see the double oppression and plight of women in the Third World. As a female director from the third world with female consciousness, Nadine Labaki uses the film as a tool to cry out for the double other actively. As an American scholar from India, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has always focused her attention on the Third World and its women, combining deconstructionism, postcolonialism and feminism to form her own unique postcolonial feminist theory. Nadine Labaki and Spivak have a certain identity overlap- both are Third-World women, both have female consciousness, both have some connection with the Western academic or art world, and both have certain social status and their own achievements. Combining Spivak's postcolonial feminism with a film text analysis, this paper attempts to explore how director Nadine Labaki actively cries out for the double other in her films and draws a conclusion that the double oppression suffered by third-world women is in synergy. The greatest significance and purpose of this theoretically-oriented analysis of film practice is the social dimension, to provide the right to speak for the subalterns, for women, and also to expect to see more marginalized people and things through the medium of film, thus dissolving the authority of centrism.

Bagai Makan Buah Simalakama: Resistensi Perempuan Terhadap Lembaga Sosial Keluarga dalam Catatan Hati Seorang Istri

This article aims to describe the figure of feminine resistance by depicting a wife's life in Catatan Hati Seorang Istri (Notes of a Wife's Heart). In Asma Nadia's prose, the narrative highlights domestic problems often experienced by third-world women who usually are faced with a dilemma between matters of domestic space and access to public space. This article refers to Naomi Wolf's view that feminism must fulfill if it is to be called a resistance movement: independence, altruism, persistence, courage, resilience, and willingness to sacrifice. The results of the study show that Wolf's view of power feminism is in the form of women's resistance figures, namely: (1) awareness of the power of women as independent women; (2) the way of thinking and acting of female characters who prioritize the interests of their husbands and children rather than their interests as strength; (3) firm and sure of the chosen decision; (4) dare to voice opinions on their choices; (5) the struggle of a woman when faced with a dilemma in the domestic and public spheres; and (6) sacrifice for the decision of the path of his own choice of life.

Romance, Power, and Female Oppression: A Textual Analysis of Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided

This study is based on a Pakistani Anglophone partition novel, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957). This research explores love and romance concerning power and female oppression in the above-mentioned novel. Major theoretical insights are drawn from Simone De Beauvoir’s groundbreaking text The Second Sex (1949) contextualizes love and romance to women in patriarchal societies. In addition to this theoretical support is taken from post-colonial feminism to contextualize and explain the gendered power imbalance and oppression experienced by the third-world women as presented through the fictional characters of the selected novel. This qualitative study hopes to demonstrate that within the South Asian patriarchal society, men use love and romance to oppress women and keep them within the patriarchal limits. It also aims to analyze how women experience, understand, and try to use love and romance as a power-giving strategy but is socially rejected. Men view love and romance differently from women who are more self-effacing and sacrificing in nature. Employing the method of textual analysis, this study also explores how love changes in times of war and can be a destructive force that brings hatred, revenge, and pain.

Reproductive Justice Discourse vis-à-vis Abortion Law in India: A Critical Review

The narrative concerning third-world women has long been considered regressive, discriminatory, and monistic. The legal narratives, too, could not escape the traditional trope of identity ascribed to women. Though essentially empowering, the practical realisation of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act of 1971 could never harness a sense of inclusivity until the amendment of 2021. But the seven categories of women included in the amended Act did not consider the issues of pregnancy arising out of a consensual sexual encounter (contraceptive failure) for an unmarried woman. For the first time, the Supreme Court of India has recognised the concept of agency for all women without any external factor functioning as an influence. The idea of choice has never been celebrated. Thus, in the context of contemporary India, where the idea of the metanarrative of identity appears imminent and the third-world postmodern feminism celebrates the ideals of intersectionality, the legal discourse of deconstructing the difference among women in the name of marital status to strip them of their fundamental rights to bodily autonomy and reproductive justice needs intervention. This review paper intends to diachronically approach the existing data of empirical and critical research on abortion vis-à-vis the human rights discourse in the context of Indian women.

The Empowerment of the Classy Women in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron

Western feminists have utilized the power they have acquired from their position in inactive discourses to cast third world women as victims who need the assistance of their western sisters. Structuring third world women in a category or one dimension of analysis as suppressed, savage, subjugated, pawn, helpless, and dependent, have outraged many non-western writers to enhance the exact image of women relying upon their different experiences and resistance methods to the gendered oppression of female and originating empowered examples of women in their literary narratives. The Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie offers a fresh perspective on third-world women by highlighting their struggles, contributions, and ordeals as well as their fight to live and fulfill their potential. By incorporating transnational feminist theory as a radical theoretical model to expose and define the west's hegemonic practices, transcending nation-state boundaries, and addressing inequalities globally, this study aims to demonstrate how Shamsie challenges western ideas and stereotypical images

Deconstructing the Image of Third World Woman in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West: A Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

Pakistani writers, particularly Mohsin Hamid, have long highlighted women's struggle and their predicament under patriarchy in order to deconstruct their image as third-world women who remain passive against social and political injustices. Through the lens of postcolonial feminism as espoused in the classical postcolonial feminist works, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” and “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” written by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (1985) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) respectively, this study intends to explore how female characters in Hamid’s novel, Exit West question and deconstruct patriarchal and colonial values which subdued them in the name of societal or western enlightened norms. These articles are used to explain the novel in the context of postcolonialism in general and postcolonial feminism in particular to investigate gendered roles and women’s resistance to patriarchal forms of gender violence and oppression. The study's outcome revealed that colonialism and patriarchy impose gendered roles on women to deprive them of agency and problematise their identity formation processes and independent thinking.

Cyberstalking practices: asymmetrical power relationships at the University of Dar es Salaam

ABSTRACT Cyberstalking, especially among university students, has become a critical social concern. While a growing body of research associates cyberstalking with abuse of technology, psychological instability and the perceived porosity of the legal systems, power inequality has not been foregrounded as a major driver. With a focus on establishing power relationships between victims and perpetrators, the study explored structural and social environments surrounding female students at the University of Dar es Salaam. The quantitative and qualitative data were collected with an online survey questionnaire distributed to 424 female students. Together with the questionnaire, deeper insights for the qualitative information were obtained from online interviews held with 30 female students and 15 key informants as well as from online Focused Group Discussion held with another cluster of 30 female students who had experiences of cybertalking. Interpreted from a feminist theoretical perspective and ‘gender digital divide’ stances, the results indicate multiple forms of unequal power relations surrounding third-world women internet users in universities. The study recommends strategies against gender inequality to be extended to cyberspace, while women’s empowerment in online spaces should be spearheaded in gender equality discourse.

A Non-Western Representation of the Third World Women in Nadia Hashimi’s A House without Windows

Third-world women in western literature have often been depicted as submissive, illiterate, vulnerable, and having no identity. They are cast from the outside discourses, always entangled in the gaze of the west as being primitive. Yet the world is open to change with viable feminist female practices to enhance the accurate and exact image oe third-world women. Nadia Hashimi’s A House Without Windows is a manifestation of deconstructing the false stereotyped image created by the West writers through skillfully presenting the real pressing contemporary issues of Afghan women in their society with diverse forms of ordeals. This paper aims to reflect upon the significant differences between stereotypical western depictions of third world women— are portrayed in mainstream western discourses as weak and in need of help— and their representation by Non-Western writers. It further explores how the female characters can cope with life hardships and pass the closures with no fear despite the difficulties of living within the nonwestern codes of patriarchy and culture. Investigating Hashmi’s novel is significant because it presents an accurate depiction of third-world women together with a variety of their inspirational tales, correcting and changing the stereotyped western representation. This study elucidates the Transnational Feminist Theory as a remarkable framework for comprehending the gap between the global north and south to address the representation of third-world women. Consequently, dismantling the stereotypical images of women in the third world and the phony universalization of global sisterhood is investigated by reflecting upon the vivid pictures of strong women.

Gendered consequences of social changes in Nepal: rich possibilities

In this commentary, we reflect on changing gender dynamics within a broader political-economic shift currently taking place in Nepal. We critique how Nepali women are stereotypically represented as vulnerable, uneducated or less educated Third-World women, who lack agency and are dependent on their male kin, in development and popular media discourses. Our key proposition is that the major political and economic changes over recent decades, beyond the obvious political changes witnessed in Nepal in 1950, 1990 or 2005, are having a significant impact on the lives of both women and men, across different social classes, castes, regions, religions and ethnic backgrounds. After outlining some of the stereotypical representations of Nepali women, followed by a brief discussion on the broader political-economic shifts, we conclude this paper by making four key propositions. These are: 1) current political-economic shifts have profound gender consequences, which need to be examined and understood in scholarship; 2) discussion on the position of Nepali women has been limited exclusively to sociocultural and religious domains, and particularly within Hindu patriarchy, which has overlooked the diversity of Nepali women; 3) the caring economy remains invisible; and, finally 4) with regards Nepali men, their changing roles and ideas of masculinities have been largely overlooked in any gender development policy debate. Overall, we argue that a more grounded, up-to-date, intersectional and critical understanding of dynamic gender relations within the shifting political economy is warranted, which neither romanticises nor pathologises Nepali women’s and men’s social positions.

“Were They the Ones We Were Waiting for?” The TWWA and the Performance of Solidarity

In her 1979 touchstone address, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Audre Lorde makes it clear that the only feminism that matters is one that includes and even centers the voices of “poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians.” She argues that this type of representation is not a mere academic exercise, but a means of survival for women within these groups. Speaking at the Second Sex Conference in New York, Lorde also laments the lack of attention paid to the ways women can and should embrace their differences while still relying on a solidarity that she sees as foundational to creativity and liberation. Women of color have always borne the greatest share of domestic and physical labor in the United States, and thus creating this solidarity is a challenge; when workers are spread far and wide, scared of management, and just living month to month, it can be difficult to organize and unite them. In the 1970s, the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) took on this challenge, seeking to organize women of color economically, culturally, and politically, embodying Lorde's charge in the decade prior to her speech. One of the key methods of organizing by the TWWA was a series of original skits, many of which were performed during celebrations of International Women's Day (IWD, 8 March).

"There's Plenty of Rapists Here": "Rape Culture" and the Representation of Anene Booysen's Rape in the International and South African Press

"There's Plenty of Rapists Here":"Rape Culture" and the Representation of Anene Booysen's Rape in the International and South African Press Helen Frost (bio) On February 1, 2013, seventeen-year-old Anene Booysen was found in a construction site in the town of Bredasdorp, South Africa, where she had been gang raped and left to die.1 Despite the shocking details of Booysen's death, her rape entered into both local and international media for its transnational connection to a similar crime that occurred two months earlier in Delhi, India. In the latter incident, a twenty-three-year-old medical student, Jyoti Singh, was gang raped on a bus in Delhi and later died in hospital. While Singh's death was a sensation in the international media, with "1,515 articles appear[ing] in the United States alone within … two month[s]," Booysen's death was generally only given significance through comparisons to the Delhi rape (Roychowdhury, 282). By contrasting the two cases, the international press diagnosed the South African response to Booysen's rape as inadequate when compared to the national outrage that followed Singh's death in India, while at the same time relegating these brutal versions of gendered violence to those other, "less civilized" locales. By analyzing the representation of these crimes in the international media, with a particular emphasis on Booysen's rape, I will show that the concept of rape culture is invested with different meanings depending on the situations described and the contexts in and from which the term is mobilized. Despite its association with the radical feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s, talk of rape culture has regained momentum in the North American public sphere alongside such diverse controversies as Robin Thicke's song "Blurred Lines," the Steubenville rape case, and Todd Akin's infamous comments that "legitimate rape" does not result in pregnancy. While the reactions to and contexts of these crimes and [End Page 176] controversies vary, when North Americans talk about rape culture the focus is often on structural issues: modes of representation that facilitate sexual violence, alcohol abuse in high schools and universities, and the failure of people in positions of power to take rape seriously. In contrast, the use of the label "rape culture" to describe contexts in the Global South is invariably linked to shockingly violent crimes. In North American and European popular discourse, the treatment of women is regularly used to index modernization; for this reason, conversations about so-called rape cultures in the Global South are inevitably intertwined with global circuits of power. The treatment of the Singh and Booysen rapes in the international press reflects Gayatri Spivak's well-known claim illuminating the "collective fantasy" of colonialism: "White men are saving brown women from brown men" (48). For Spivak, the Global North reinforces its self-fashioning as the protector of global well-being by considering the "third-world woman" to be in need of protection from "her own kind" (50–52). Taking Spivak's claim as my starting point, I am interested in how the rubric of rape culture circulates and accrues different currency depending on context, with the potential of producing a disciplinary gaze that revives colonial stereotypes of brown and black men as unruly and violent, and displaces more extreme forms of gendered violence onto "less civilized" countries. While rape culture as a concept finds its provenance in second-wave feminism, the dynamics that form our understanding of it have a much longer history. In his meditation on marriage and indictment of emergent women's movements, Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon describes men and women as characterized by "force" and "beauty" respectively. Proudhon's argument reflects these beliefs about female vulnerability, while it also performs a desire to police women's emancipation by restricting their sexual and intellectual "promiscuity," marked by his term pornocracy. Proudhon is troubled by what he sees as the intellectual equivalent of sexual promiscuity: women entering into social and intellectual spheres usually preserved for men, "salons, … academies, … bars, etc." For Proudhon, the woman who refuses to be defined purely in terms of "beauty" and enters into the realm of "force" threatens traditional...

Are we right to blame it all on colonialism?

The study on the history school subject showed that any reenactment of the history discipline should include the reinterpretation of identities from a historical perspective, and this reinterpretation should start with colonial history because this is where it all began. A different approach to history will have positive implications on society’s view of gender, as it will encourage the inclusion of devalued categories such as women, black women and third-world women. But does this mean that colonialism is fully to blame for all the gender issues, as is the case within the Malawian history syllabus? This paper explores the influence of colonialism on the history/social and environmental sciences primary school subject.

The politics of pity and the individual heroine syndrome: Mukhtaran Mai and Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan

Abstract Using Lilie Chouliarki’s questions regarding the ethical responsibilities of spectators towards visual suffering in our mediatized age as a start-off point, wherein she states, ‘the mediation between spectator and sufferer is a crucial political space because the relationship between the two of them maps on to distinct geopolitical territories that reflect the global distribution of power’, this article looks at a recently staged operatic performance in NYC about the story of Mukhtar Mai’s rape called Thumbprint, as well as the performative memoir I am Malala (2013) by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb. This article raises the following questions: is Thumbprint a ‘spectacular performance’? Does it reproduce the image of the ‘third-world woman as monolith’ – or did it allow for the figure of Mukhtaran (as she is sometimes called) to speak to the audience assembled at Baruch Performing Arts Center in ways that brought forth the historical context of Pakistani and US politics? Does Malala’s self-representation in her memoir, her staging of herself as the ‘voice’ of a Pakistani young woman, similarly exemplify the competing motives animating the spectacle of being placed in the center of a supposedly ‘universalist’ human rights discursive framework? How far do these two women’s performances of Self/Voicing (as presented in the theatre of the West) – force us to ask anew, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. To what extent do these two performative instances of ‘voicing the other’ call attention to the West’s ongoing obsession with ‘the cultural politics of recognition’, which, based on an ‘identity-based politics of visibility’, has dominated western liberal feminism since the end of the twentieth century, and been responsible for directing ‘public attention away from the regressive politics and growth of global capitalism’– and which in turn is implacably intertwined with the politics of US Empire in the twenty-first century? How do these two performances of individual women refusing victimhood feed, paradoxically, into a neo-liberal politics of redemption?

Containing Kassindja: detention, gendered threats and border control in the United States

In 1996, the USA issued a landmark decision to grant political asylum to a young woman, Fauziya Kassindja, due to the threat of forced genital circumcision. The case, Matter of Kasinga, is now a cornerstone in the area of law known as ‘gender-based asylum.’ While the legal victory occurred during a watershed moment for women’s human rights, it also spawned considerable critique for reproducing colonial tropes of third-world women, cultural backwardness, and narratives of rescue. This article offers another perspective by examining key phases of the case that predate the final decision. I demonstrate how logics of containment shaped the case trajectory and outcome. Initially, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sought to contain Kassindja as a bogus asylum seeker through detention. However, once a powerful advocacy campaign exposed the violence of detention, the INS shifted their containment strategies to safeguarding the legal paradigm and circumscribing its legacy as a precedent-setting case. By focusing on the role of detention and the logics of containment, this article supplements cultural critiques of the case and provides an example of how gender and gender violence can be leveraged by state agencies and actors to reinforce border control and manage refugee/asylee populations.

Postcolonial-Feminist elements in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

Postcolonial feminism, also labeled third-world feminism, is an innovative approach, depicting the way women of colonized countries suffer from double colonization: native patriarchies and imperial ideology. While Western feminism focuses on gender discrimination, postcolonial feminism tries to broaden the analysis of the intersection of gender and multicultural identity formation. Postcolonial feminists believe that Western feminism is inattentive to the differences pertaining to class, race, feelings, and settings of women of colonized territories; therefore, postcolonial feminism warns the third-world woman not to copy nor imitate the Western woman's style, and tries to demonstrate what feminism means to woman in a non-western culture. The present article is based on the conviction that E. M Forster's A Passage to India (1924) possesses the characteristics to be interpreted from the postcolonial feminism vantage point. This novel is the account of two British women who question the standard behaviors of the English toward the Indians and suffer permanently from an unsettling experience in India. The female victim in this novel is not a third-world black woman as typically portrayed in such novels, but a white British woman who fails in her quest to see the real India. By depicting the limited worldview of the two British women this article concludes that the privilege attributed to them is indeed a one- dimensional view and Western feminist prejudice.

Entre reivindicaciones sexuales y reclamos de justicia económica: divisiones políticas e ideológicas durante la Conferencia Mundial del Año Internacional de la Mujer. México, 1975

La Conferencia Mundial del Año Internacionalde la Mujer se celebró del 19 de junio al 2 dejulio de 1975, con la participación de más de9 000 personas provenientes de 133 naciones. Laconferencia, organizada por las Naciones Unidas,fue el primer y el más grande intento poranalizar la inequidad de género desde una perspectivaglobal. Este artículo analiza el contextointernacional en el que se desenvolvió la conferenciay muchas de las discusiones que estaoriginó en su momento: desde el optimismoacerca de los resultados positivos que la reuniónmundial originaría hasta aquellas opiniones queridiculizaban o hacían sentir su indiferenciahacia una “reunión de mujeres”. En particular,el análisis se centra en los discursos acerca delconcepto de “mujer” debido a que este refleja lasperspectivas opuestas que las participantesmanifestaron en la conferencia. Las construccionesideológicas acerca de lo que significaba“ser mujer” desempeñaron un papel central enlas confrontaciones diarias entre mujeres de lospaíses de los llamados Primer y Tercer Mundos.Las mujeres de las naciones económicamentedesarrolladas fueron percibidas por laprensa y por algunas delegadas latinoamericanascomo interesadas únicamente en asuntossexuales, como el lesbianismo, el aborto y laprostitución. Por el contrario, el ideal de mujerdel Tercer Mundo estaba relacionado con la justiciasocial y la igualdad económica. Con esteanálisis, el presente ensayo tiene como objetivocontribuir al entendimiento de la construcciónde identidades femeninas en un contexto globaly demostrar que dichas construcciones estáníntimamente relacionadas con luchas políticas,económicas y culturales

Performative Writing as Tool for Social Change

According to Critical Art Ensemble, in our society (a pancapitalist society), the education system and media have become dominant institutions of socialization (14). If this is case, and I believe it is, it is important to look to these institutions to see what it takes to 'succeed' and whether or not this 'success' can be challenged. I would argue that single most important thing in both these institutions is ability to communicate or use language 'effectively'. More specifically, education emphasizes need to write in way that prescribes to certain established norms. The media reinforces these norms in their hiring practices and in deciding what is fit to print or televise, ultimately marginalizing 'others'. Following this course of logic it would make sense that writers are very influential. However Minh-ha reminds us that in current situation, such discrimination and opposition, it is hardly surprising that writer should be viewed as social parasite... her/his living largely relies on generosity of that portion of society called literate {Woman, Native, Other 10). Here lies problem of who are literate, and what type of literacy is recognized. Therefore, I believe that we need to recognize and use 'alternative' forms of communication or ways in which to convey meaning, whether that is through visual art, performance, dance, or in case of this paper, new forms of literary art as Minh-ha would call it. More specifically I will take deeper look at 'alternative' writing styles, where they arose from, why they emerged, what some of these forms look like to point out their possibilities and challenges for social change in future.As focal point of cultural consciousness and social change, writing weaves into language complex relations of subject caught between problems of race and gender and practice of literature as very place where social alienation is thwarted differently according to each specific context (Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other 6). With such an intense emphasis on writing, as 'focal point of cultural consciousness and social change' writer has very important and extremely challenging role. Minh-ha continues to emphasize role of writer, Charged with intentionality, writing is therefore disclosing (a secret), and reading is believing. The writer as personified releaser of meaning produces envelopes whose more or less brilliant colors serve to decorate 'the (theological) message {Woman, Native, Other 30). The writer is endowed with an immense amount of power and shapes society's understanding of what is real and what matters (or gets counted). Therefore perspectives of marginalized others are often avoided. This new type of performative writing would represent all viewpoints, including those in style and presentation. Minh-ha's work uses different forms of conveying meaning including storytelling, poetry and filmmaking from third-world woman's perspective. But where else can we move to challenge 'traditional' ways of writing?Minh-ha describes writing similar to a game that defies its own rules, as an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting 'me' into language, but with creating an opening where 'me' disappears while T endlessly come and go, as nature of language requires {Woman, Native, Other 35). She suggests move away from individualistic narcissistic thinking and writing towards direction to remove barriers between 'me' and 'Other.' According to Minh-ha, writing should 'defy its own rules' and I would extend this not only in form, but also in topic including histories not normally told. While at same time recognizing importance of letting writer move fluidly through text without claiming authority. Rather, writing as reflection of living in our social world. At moment author claims authority separation is re-established and important connections are eliminated. …