Scattered Hegemonies

In most cultures gender is usually divided into power differences. Stereotypically men dominate in most aspects according to society in comparison to women. However this essay tries to prove and explain the importance and significant impacts in feminists’ views and how those views are diverse in different regions around the world in reference to the prolific writer Caren Kaplan and her essay: Scattered Hegemonies.

In Kaplan’s Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity, Kaplan along with her research group “were looking for ways to broaden and deepen the analysis of gender in relation to a multiplicity of issues that affect women’s lives” (Kaplan, 1). The collaborated effort that was formulated to work across differences in culture, discipline, and profession, results in the advocacy for the condition of feminist thinking, working, and writing. This essay focuses on feminist theory that often tends to be a homogenizing influence among women and men from First and Third World countries; also including the complications of one’s identity and culture in the views and thoughts of a feminist. In theory, Caren Kaplan uses homogenization in finding one logic, one system of capitalism, among women coming from completely different backgrounds, hence the politics of location. Her theories take in account with the “politics of location” and helping us to understand a bigger and better idea of one’s identity and culture from the point of view of gender. According to Kaplan, “many advances and contributions to the study of gender and colonial discourse have been made; we strongly feel the need for viewpoints of feminists for various locations around the globe” (Kaplan, 3). With inclusive studies of various feminists’ viewpoints all over the world, it broadens the focus on gender ideology and the significant differences of feminists’ ideals depending on one’s location.

In the essay Scattered Hegemonies, Kaplan informs her readers that problematizing a theory, more specifically, a feminist theory, is the key interest in her study. In raising questions about the historical specificity of some of the primary terms in use in cultural criticism today, inquiring into the system of effects that structure postmodernity Postmodernism, has a huge affect on the way one’s identity is conjured, and how a nation’s culture influences the people of the country. Postmodernism is a movement that goes against the already existing modernistic views, and usually results in the revolutionary changes in art, literature, and architecture. Asking how postmodernisms and post colonialisms are variously deployed by feminists and other in different locations provides an opportunity to trace the direction of flows of information and theory in transnational cultural production and reception. Postmodernism is viewed as a critique of modernist agendas as they are manifested in various forms and locations around the world. It is a “concept that exists precisely because of anticolonial critiques, opposition to Western hegemony, and a consideration of sociopolitical formations in diverse location” (Caren Kaplan, pg. 4), which facilitates the various differences in feminist’s theory all over the world. Although many advances and contributions to the study of gender (political views amongst men and women) and colonial discourse (diverse views of ethics, culture, etc. in different countries) have been made, viewpoints of feminists from various locations are needed. This is