5 - Qualifications: everyday critics, multi-sited critics, and multiple critics

Summary

Introduction

As we have seen, poor village women in Bangladesh and self-employed workers in India working to improve their lives or those of their families, women activists and feminist scholars of activism around the world working on the challenges of development in their communities, and international and local human rights activists working to change local, national, and international understandings of human rights such that they respect women's human rights have much more in common than their geography, resources, and immediate concerns would suggest. Using the Third World feminist method of social criticism, these women (and men) promote inquiry, opportunities for deliberation, and institutional changes that facilitate broadly informed and inclusive deliberations. Anyone can be a critic in her everyday or professional life. She may be an insider, outsider, or multi-sited critic, though critics with this last perspective are unique and frequently provide insights unavailable to inside or outside critics. The only qualification for Third World feminist social critics is that each critic acknowledge her criticism is an essential complement to criticisms from people with other critical perspectives. Because social change is ideally an informed, collective, and uncoerced process, social decision making needs to be informed by many and different critical voices.

Together, filling a range of roles, critics reveal and even anticipate potentially exploitative power inequalities. At the training of the Bangladeshi women's groups, the researcher, the women, and Save the Children program officer all had different critical perspectives.