Feminism

The United Nations international conferences in Mexico (1975) and Copenhagen (1980) revealed tensions between First World and Third World women. Clearly divisions along lines of nationality, race, class, caste, religion, and sexual orientation needed to be inserted into women's experiences of oppression. By the Nairobi Conference (1985) the myth of "global sisterhood" had been abandoned and feminism became as heterogeneous as the women who supported it across the globe.

The 1980s witnessed a lashing out against white middle-class feminists' universalizing and homogenizing discourses that erased the voices of women who differed in race, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Although the contestations had already been initiated by black women, an even stronger challenge came from women of color (of other ethnicities: Latina, Chicana) and Third World women from postcolonial societies in Asia and Africa. Chandra Talpade Mohanty theorized in a 1986 article about the location of Third World women "Under Western Eyes." The writings of Trinh T. Minh-ha and Gloria Anzaldúa powerfully critiqued white women's hegemony in conceptualizations of feminism and feminist struggles. Sophisticated theorizing by Gayatri Spivak, Minh-ha, and Mohanty established that women in formerly colonized societies had cast aside old lines of dependency on the "center."

These influential and groundbreaking texts on issues of race, ethnicity, region, sexuality, and class forced remappings of feminism within and beyond the United States. Henceforth, histories of women were more consciously inclusive, emphasizing multiculturalism and incorporating the experiences of African-American, Latin-American, Asian-American, and Native-American women. Thus feminism was strengthened by voices from the "margins." "Identity" and "location" became important concepts, pushing the boundaries of earlier conceptualizations to acknowledge that all oppressions are interrelated and that identity politics cannot be separated from other aspects of liberation.