Advocacy Project, Part III: Cross-Cultural Analysis

Advocacy Project, Part III: Cross-Cultural Analysis

This paper serves as Part III of your advocacy project. Your job is to construct a 2-3 page (double-spaced, 12-point font, one-inch margins) narrative that provides a cross-cultural analysis of the gender relations/women’s movement in your region. Your paper should be thesis-driven and provide ample evidence from both primary and secondary sources in support of your assertions. Proofread your papers carefully, include footnote citations, and attach a formal bibliography to the paper.

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Reading requirements:
• To prepare for the theoretical work this paper demands, re-read Dipesh Chakrabarty’s article: “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations no. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992): 1-26. Available on JSTOR.
• Think about how Chakrabarty discusses the challenges of “doing” Indian history. This is the sort of work you will do for this assignment. Of course, Chakrabarty is a professional historian, and his article is 26 pages long. Do not feel pressure to do the same level of work. Rather, the idea here is to get you to think about the challenges facing Western historians when they construct histories of non-Westerners.

Research requirements:
• You should consult the primary and secondary sources that you used for your first two papers for this project. You do not need to engage with all of the sources, but, rather, use them as evidence when appropriate. You may use Chakrabarty as a source for this paper, if you wish.
• No additional outside research is required.

Here are some questions/themes to consider in your paper:
• Where do you see tension between the stories told by your primary sources and the analysis offered by your secondary sources? The assumption here is that the primary sources represent the “purest” voices on the “woman question” in your region, and that your secondary sources were written by Western scholars.
• What are the difficulties of examining gender relations/women’s movements in your region from the position of a Westerner?
• What do you think your status as a Westerner adds to the study of your region? In other words, how could a Western perspective be useful?

Note: The obvious approach to this paper would be to say that, as a Westerner, you can’t possibly understand the experiences of women in another part of the world. All historians, no matter what we are examining, grapple with the reality that “we are not them.” I am asking that you move beyond this hurdle to engage with the more specific question of cross-cultural analysis. We might agree that gender equality is desirable. But what if a feminist revolution (recognizing that such a thing is a Western construct) would destroy a traditional society? Where do you see this tension in both the history and contemporary status of gender relations in your region? This is not the place to offer your opinion on what ought to happen next; rather, your job is to acknowledge the difficulties of assessing the exportation of feminist ideology/the idea of women’s movements from the West to your region.