#uma narayan

[kaintthink]

“Western feminists, despite their critical understanding of their own culture, often tend to be more a part of it than they realize. If they fail to see the contexts of their theories and assume that their perspective has universal validity for all feminists, they tend to participate in the dominance that western culture has exercised over nonwestern cultures.” 

The above is a quote from Uma Narayan's "The Project of Western Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist".

Published in 1988, it's shockingly still relevant in feminist discussions and debates today.

The best way I can sum up what Narayan says in her essay, is through a story from year 11.

I'm the only South Asian in my, very white private girl's school, English class. We're reading and analysing the poem, "Muliebrity", by Sujata Bhatt.

Every student (white) spoke about how the girl must have been forced to do this awful, disgusting task, because she was a woman. They thought the poem was about the sexism of Indian Society.

They couldn't have been more off the mark. But as the only South Asian, the onus of correcting them fell more onto me, than the teacher. I'm not even Indian. I'm a Pakistani Punjabi.

Problem was that all of these girls were feminists, and didn't understand how their western form of feminism failed to understand this situation and even South Asian forms of patriarchy, and therefore failed to help the women they claimed to be fighting for.

This is the very thing that Narayan talks about.

I've broken down the main points in her essay below:

Western Epistemology can be incompatible with nonwestern politics and patriarchal structures. E.g. Indian cultures argue that women do have value but in specific conditions. Now, western epistemologists arguing for the value of women to be appreciated, can be misconstrued to be arguing for this, Indian, value system that Indian women are trapped in. This means that western feminist epistemology can lead Indian women to shooting themselves in the foot.

The differences in Western and Nonwestern forms of patriarchy can lead to western feminists arguing for the superiority of Western culture over Nonwestern cultures. (This very thing ended up happening in the class I had, in the above story)

Western and Nonwestern Feminist Epistemology do not share the same enemies. (in reference to positivism but this can be extended further too)

Oppressed people have to fight on two fronts: against those of a dominant group who are hostile to the oppressed group, and those of the dominant group that can appear sympathetic to the oppressed group. E.g. Indian women have to express themselves to both their oppressors in India, and to Western Feminists who may not fully understand their localised struggles. (I had to try very hard to express to my classmates how patriarchy and oppression in South Asia is structured, while expressing how it was distinctly different to the notions they had)

Non-rational forms of communication, like poetry and literature, may be better at communicating the experiences of oppressed groups to those that don't share those experiences.

Epistemic Privilege/ Double-Vision has many costs. These include how oppressed people fit into neither cultural categories of the dominant or the oppressed groups, though they may have understandings of both cultures.

The above may sound strikingly familiar to you, if you are familiar with intersectional feminism or if you are part of a minority group. I found it quite validating reading Narayan. It made me feel less alone with my struggles in identity, straddling between English and Punjabi. And provided a really helpful understanding of these odd occurrences any woman of colour finds themselves in while in feminist spaces, trying to tell the white majority that they aren't getting it right, that they misunderstand, and are reproducing oppression, but just in other forms.

Anyway, to wrap up, I think you should read Narayan whether or not you can actually relate to her. If we want the project of feminism to help all women, Western and Nonwestern, let's understand the way the traditional feminist theory falls short.

Bibliography

Narayan, Uma. “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist.” The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra G. Harding, Routledge, 2004, pp. 213 - 224.

Bhatt, Sujata. Brunizem. Carcanet, 2007.

[kaintthink]

Optional Further Reading 1

Narayan, Uma. “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist.” The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra G. Harding, Routledge, 2004, pp. 213 - 224. - this is the original text that I'm writing in reference to.

Bhatt, Sujata. Brunizem. Carcanet, 2007. - Read poem 13, which is Muliebrity. It's the poem I refer to. I also think her wider work is fantastic. She's a great poet and really beautifully expresses herself and her experiences of being a brown woman

McIntosh, Zara. “We need to talk about white feminism: from social media ‘feminists’ to the Suffragettes”. Taboo on the Bus, 22nd May 2025, https://open.spotify.com/episode/52XsWx3Sk5gKGJjx6lpyQr?si=674a346577ef477a - A podcast episode on Spotify that I think sums up the history of White/Western Feminism quite nicely and also provides an overview of some problems with the way it can be exclusionary. In the Description of the Podcast is the host's own reading list which may be of use to those reading this.

“Uma Narayan: The Project of Feminist Epistemology” YouTube, uploaded by Tod Desmond, 25th of September 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx1dVSVj_yU - A YouTube Video that nicely sums up and explains Narayan

Fricker, Miranda. “Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Supplementary Volume 25, 1999, 191-210. - This is Miranda Fricker's paper which builds on the foundations of standpoint epistemology, to talk about epistemic privilege

Toole, Briana. “Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood: A Defense of Epistemic Privilege.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10.3 (2024): 409–426 - I think this is a good read if you want to understand epistemic privilege. This article really helped my understanding.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press, 2003. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smp7t. Accessed 6 Aug. 2025. - Written by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in her own words it is "the product of almost two decades of engagement with feminist struggles.". I haven't read all of the book, truth be told, but the chapters I have read have been fantastic. She is another Indian Philosopher writing about decolonial and intersectional feminism and if you dig Narayan, I'm sure you will dig Mohanty.

This list is nowhere near exhaustive. But it's a nice dip in the pond I think and it's a nice starting point for you to go on and do your own research (if you want to). Also of course you can follow the citations in all the above to citation-trail through some really interesting papers and resources.If anyone has any further recommendations, reblog and add them on?

[carmenvicinanza]

Uma Narayan

Il frastuono e la furia di conflitti del tipo “la mia cultura è migliore della tua” tra governi coloniali e movimenti nazionalisti del terzo mondo dominati dagli uomini, spesso servivano a oscurare il fatto che le donne erano cittadine di seconda classe.

Uma Narayan è la studiosa femminista che approfondisce i concetti di identità e post colonialismo.

Docente di filosofia al Vassar College presso la cattedra di scienze umane Andrew W. Mellon, i suoi corsi includono politica e teoria femminista, introduzione agli studi sulle donne e femminismo globale.

Il femminismo postcoloniale è nato tra la fine degli anni Settanta e l’inizio degli Ottanta da pensatrici provenienti da paesi altri che criticavano il fatto che le femministe occidentali pretendevano di dar voce alle istanze delle diverse realtà mondiali, rafforzando dinamiche neocoloniali.

Nata il 16 aprile 1958 in India, si è laureata in Filosofia all’Università di Bombay e si è specializzata all’Università di Pune prima di trasferirsi negli Stati Uniti.

Con la sua ricerca e scrittura, ha contribuito agli studi giuridici indiani sulla cui letteratura ha scritto diversi manuali partendo dalla tesi di dottorato conseguito alla Rutgers University nel 1990.

Il suo obiettivo principale è stato quello di introdurre una voce femminista non occidentale nel mondo accademico.

Il suo saggio più conosciuto è Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism in cui contesta la nozione secondo la quale il femminismo sia esclusivamente un prodotto della cultura occidentale.

Critica l’identificazione della cultura indiana come unificata e omogenea attraverso la contestualizzazione storica e culturale.

L’enfasi della sua opera risiede nella decolonizzazione del femminismo e nell’articolazione di tematiche che riguardano il femminismo globale.

Dislocating Cultures è una lettura fondamentale per comprendere il nostro privilegio di femministe del primo mondo e per riapprendere la costruzione del femminismo nei paesi altri.

Un altro testo illuminante è Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy.

Ha co-curato Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives con Mary L. Shanley, Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World con Sandra Harding e Having and Raising Children: Unconventional Families, Hard Choices, and the Social Good con Julia Bartkowiak.

Uma Narayan sostiene che i concetti di identità e cultura nazionale siano il risultato di lotte politiche.

In un processo di dislocazione culturale, incoraggia a riconoscere e percepire le differenze invece di totalizzarle in un programma femminista comune.

Uma Narayan - Una donna al giorno

Studiosa femminista indiana che insegna al Vassar College, il suo lavoro approfondisce concetti come identità e post colonialismo.

[yad-aljawza]

On this #InternationalWomensDay, I want to tell you about an Indian feminist scholar whose work has been important to me. In this book, Uma Narayan shows us exactly what “the political is personal and the personal is political” means by writing about how she developed her feminist consciousness through experiencing and witnessing the gendered behaviors and interactions in her household growing up in India. She mixes relatable personal stories with theory when she describes how authentic feminism is indigenous and locally rooted, how feminism in the periphery of the global economy (what some would call the Global South) is not just a mere imitation of Western feminism. Feminist consciousness arises anywhere and everywhere, at any time, organically out of our experiences as women or gender non-conforming people. I love how this locally-rooted feminism can also be transnational in nature, because women with an authentic feminist consciousness can recognize it in others, and our shared or similar experiences of gender and exploitation by global capitalism around the world make it much easier for us to be in solidarity with each other, although we don’t need to have the same experiences or similar cultures at all to cultivate solidarity. We can also always investigate the ways women have various dynamics of power amongst ourselves. I think real will always be able to recognize real. ☺️ Thanks Uma, and thank you Dr. Kimberly Walters at @csulb, who is one of the most talented, challenging yet nurturing professors, for assigning her. It is always very healing to be exposed to the work of Indian feminists, because it makes me feel like I belong to something. (at California State University, Long Beach)

[sapanaas]

My sense of entitlement to contest "my culture" is threaded through with both confidence and doubt. I grew up in a fairly traditional, middle-class, South Indian family, in the urban milieu of Bombay. Besides my parents, both my paternal grandparents also lived in the household, making us what in India is called a "joint family." As the eldest grandchild, and for several years the only child, I was raised with considerable indulgence. And I also remember the boundaries and limits to this indulgence. I remember my mother saying, "What sort of a girl are you to talk back like that to your father?" and my thinking, "But his reprimand was not deserved, and he will not listen to me, and she will not even let me speak."

I remember minding particularly that the injunction to be silent came from my mother, who told me so early, because she had no one else to tell, about her sufferings in her conjugal home. I remember my mother's anger and grief at my father's resort to silencing "neutrality" that refused to "interfere" in the domestic tyrannies that his mother inflicted on my mother. The same mother who complained about her silence enjoined me to silence, doing what she had to do, since my failures to conform would translate to her failures to rear me well. 

[...]

I am arguing that my eventual feminist contestations of my culture have something to do with the cultural dynamics of the family life that surrounded me as a child, something to do with my early sense of the "politics of home." ...How could my loyalty and respect for "my culture" fail to be tainted by the fact that there was little justice or happiness for my mother in her house?

So it is strange, and perhaps not strange at all, that my mother adds her voice to so many others that blame my being "Westernized" for my feminist contestations of my culture. And I want to remind her, though I cannot bring myself to it, of her pain that surrounded me when I was young, a pain that was earlier than school and "Westernization," a call to rebellion that has a different and more primary root, that was not conceptual or English, but in the mother-tongue. One thing I want to say to all who dismiss my feminist criticisms of my culture, using my "Westernization" as a lash, is that my mother's pain too has rustled among the pages of all those books I have read that partly constitute my "Westernization," and has crept into all the suitcases I have ever packed for my several exiles. 

I would argue that, for many of us, women in different parts of the world, our relationships to our mothers resemble our relationships to the motherlands of the culture in which we were raised...

Uma Narayan, "Contesting Cultures: 'Westernization,' Respect for Cultures, and Third-World Feminisms"

[sapanaas]

Both mothers and mother-cultures often inspire the same sorts of complicated emotional responses from their feminist daughters - love and fear, the desire to repudiate and the desire to understand and be understood, a sense of deep connection and a desperate desire for a distance. Acquiring one's own "take" or perspective on one's mother-culture seems no less vital and inevitable than developing one's own sense of one's mother, perspectives were love and loyalty often coexist, uneasily and painfully, with criticism. And no matter how far from them we move, we carry with us the shapes of their influence in much of what we do, even in our contestations and reworkings of the very lessons they taught us. Those who perceive our feminism as merely a symptom of our "Westernization," or accuse us of lack of "respect" for "our cultures," fail to see how complicated are an individual's relationships to powerful influences that shape both their conformities and their conflicts, fail to see the closeness between us and the contexts in which we have become both daughters and feminists.

Uma Narayan

[kickmyassintofitness-blog]

We need to move away from a picture of national and cultural context as sealed room, impervious to change with a homogeneous space ‘inside’ them, inhibited by ‘authentic insiders’ who all share a uniform and consistent account of their institutions and values

Uma Narayan, Contesting Cultures: "Westernization," Respect for Cultures, and Thirs-World Feminists from Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminisims, Page 49 from Feminist Theory: A Reader

[zwischenstadt]

The fashionableness of development rhetoric that justifies educating or providing employment to women on the grounds that that it benefits their families, their communities and their nation suggests that showing the benefits to women alone is insufficient and needs buttressing by all these additional goods that will be secured by their emancipation. This problematic rhetoric is rendered all the odder by the book’s comparisons of women’s oppression to Slavery and the Holocaust. Would readers not find it odd if calls to end slavery insisted abolition was good for development or if condemnations of the Holocaust insisted on genocide being bad for the economic prosperity of Germany? The book suggests that support for women’s importance as economic resources from Lawrence Summers, the World Bank and Goldman Sachs is inspirational. I suspect I am not the only feminist who finds concern for poor women from the folks on this roster disturbing. Lawrence Summers sparked an uproar when, as President of Harvard, he stated that innate differences between men and women might be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. The World Bank is an institution centrally responsible for imposing Structural Adjustment Policies on many poor countries, forcing them to cut funds used for education, public health, water and sanitation, and safety-net programs in order to repay their national debt. Numerous feminist critiques have shown that the impact of these cuts most brutally affects poor women in these impoverished countries. Goldman Sachs is the company Matt Taibi describes in “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine,” (Rolling Stones July 2009) as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Taibi argues persuasively that Goldman Sachs has engineered and profited off every economic recession and bubble since the Great Depression.

Uma Narayan's critique of Kristof's Half the Sky

"Women - Rights-bearers, Economic Assets or Stranded Starfish?"