Feminism without Borders

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity gathers Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s writing across roughly two decades, but it is more than a miscellaneous collection. Its movement from decolonizing feminist knowledge through demystifying global capitalism to reorienting transnational solidarity forms a political argument. “Without borders” does not pretend borders have disappeared. It refuses to let national, racial, and academic divisions delimit feminist responsibility while recognizing that borders exercise radically unequal force.

The opening classic, “Under Western Eyes,” shows how some Western feminist scholarship manufactures a singular “Third World woman”: poor, ignorant, bound by tradition, and awaiting rescue by modern women. The problem is not merely an offensive stereotype. This structure of knowledge produces Western women as free subjects and other women as victims without history or political difference. Mohanty insists that analysis begin with particular institutions, colonial histories, classes, racial formations, and local struggles rather than assuming women everywhere already constitute the same social group.

That critique does not entail cultural relativism. Mohanty neither declares external criticism illegitimate nor romanticizes local tradition; she opposes universal claims detached from power. Cross-cultural comparison must explain how its units were formed, who possesses interpretive authority, and which economic and political connections join apparently distant lives. Decolonization is not a retreat into separate truths but a practice capable of recognizing both difference and common structure.

The middle of the book places capitalism at the center. Essays on women workers trace how global production links factory, domestic, migrant, and informal labor while nationality and racialized wages divide workers. Women do not become sisters automatically through an innate common gender experience. Solidarity must be produced through connected but nonidentical positions in exploitation, organizing, and political education. Anticapitalism is not an optional ideology added to feminism, because work, bodies, education, and citizenship are already shaped by capital.

Mohanty also treats the university as a political site. Corporate education can turn multiculturalism into branding and radical knowledge into consumable coursework while imposing debt, casual labor, and managerial control. Feminist teaching must do more than add “diverse voices” to a syllabus: it should train students to follow relations between knowledge and institution and connect classrooms to antiracist, labor, and internationalist movements. Experience is not self-authenticating evidence but historical material to interpret collectively and transform into coalition.

The closing return to “Under Western Eyes” revises readings of the earlier essay as a rigid West/Third World divide. Globalization moves power across nations, while privilege and marginality intersect within every location. Mohanty’s “common differences” rejects both undifferentiated sisterhood and difference as a terminal point where action becomes impossible. The book still centers women workers and a South/North frame, giving less attention to trans life, disability, ecology, and platform capitalism; later transnational queer and decolonial work must extend it.

Its most important practical demand is to understand solidarity as labor rather than sentiment. Readers must investigate how their consumption, universities, states, and organizations enter other people’s working conditions, then accept responsibility without appropriating others’ voices. For FemRes, the book supplies a standard for “global feminism”: not collecting different women under one slogan, but building politics across borders from accurate histories, connected material interests, and shared struggles capable of accountability without erasing difference.