This week's readings explored multiple perspectives on Decolonial feminist theory and colonialism's influence on ideas about women, womanhood, and culture. As the theorists explain, colonialism affected every aspect of life and effectively undermined the cultures of people across the Global South. Two major areas of contention are over land and gender. For colonialist powers to gain power they needed to control and regulate nature, in terms of natural resources and "natural" gender and sex paradigms. Through exploring the consequences of this control, decolonial feminist thought, theorizes about how decolonizing the world would alter nature, gender, and specifically womanhood in the modern era. Winona LaDuke states for her people, " land ownership is much more a concept that we belong to the land than the land belongs to us" (2001:1), illustrating that unlike in colonial culture, nature, including people, is not something to be conquered. LaDuke also illustrates the foundational belief system that leads to the capture and ownership of people. Primarily, LaDuke and Tamez utilize the capture and destruction of native land as a reality-based metaphor for the capture and destruction of women and specifically matriarchal systems of culture. Mohanty's idea of the monolithic classification and categorization of 'third world women' reflects the sense of ownership of …show more content…
Mohanty challenges not only the western categorization of 'the third world woman' but the idea that 'women' itself is a worthy category.