Southeast Asian Anti-Imperialist Feminism(s): Feminist Debates

"In accounting for the salience of the gendered division of labor, the term “housewifization” exposes how the ‘flexibilization of labor’ obscures women’s productive work. The integration of women’s labor, both waged and unwaged, into capitalist accumulation brings forth the discourse of patriarchy and imperialism. Maria
Mies incisively argues how the process of housewifization and integration of women into the international division of labor – a concept describing “the structural division, the vertical relationship existing between the colonial powers and their dependent colonies in Africa, Latin America and Asia” (112). For example, she states, “Women are the optimal labour force because they are now being universally defined as ‘housewives’, not as workers” (116). Mies explores different perspectives and connections across the racial, gendered and class-based inequities embedded in the international division of labor. The capitalist schematics of development programmes for women in the Third World are seen as culpable in reinforcing the very same oppressive structures like racism, patriarchy and class-based hierarchies."

"Similarly, Mariarosa Dalla Costa theorizes the invisibilization of women’s labor by analyzing the “Woman Question” in class struggles, the origins of the capitalist family, exploitation of the wageless and productivity of discipline. In “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” Dalla Costa examines the structural and material conditions that relegate women’s role to the invisible domestic sphere and delves into the central premises of social reproduction theory (to be defined in a later section). The continuing impacts of both texts by Mies and Dalla Costa signify the importance of uniting working-class, socialist, anti-imperialist struggles against global neoliberal capitalism that exploits women’s reproductive labor in all forms."

"Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders speaks to the longstanding questions centering Third World Feminism and the politics of migration. Analyzing the exploitation of poor women in Third World contexts highlights the naturalization of capitalist processes in the ideologies of ‘women’s work’,domesticity, femininity and racial cultural parameters related to the inheritance of gendered colonialism and imperialism. Mohanty emphasizes decolonizing theory in distinguishing Third World feminism from Western-liberal white feminism: she criticizes the totalization of western feminist perspectives on the state of Third World women’s oppression. Under Western purview, cultural and traditional practices in third world contexts are taken to be universally repressive and in the process, implicitly self-represent Western women as progressive, liberated and secular. This dilution of third world women ultimately stratifies women’s struggles into a binary sociological grouping: the westerner as the liberated savior, and the third world woman as the archetypal victim. From examining the development process of ‘underdeveloped’ countries to associating religious traditions with monolithic structures – the ahistorical glossing of women’s struggles in one universal category produces a generalized concept of subordination."