A Defense of the French Feminists: Countering Spivak’s Arguments in “French Feminism in an International Frame”

What is it about?

This article challenges Spivak’s critique of French feminism by presenting the latter as a tool to theorize the diverse subjectivities of third world women through their operation in an intimate “ecto-patriarchal” space. Using Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things and Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu short story “Lihaaf,” I indicate their alignment with French feminism as they depict third world women gaining autonomy over their selves and thereby exceeding ethnocentric boundaries without negating their contextual specifications. I mainly argue that French feminism enables third world women to rethink their subjectivities by exceeding self-replicating patriarchal discourses that have historically silenced them through a symbolic clitoridectomy.

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