Reclaiming Third World Womanhood in U.S. Higher Education

• In Event: World-Making Feminist Pedagogies and Praxes

Abstract

This study combines narrative inquiry with transnational feminism/s to bring a nuanced perspective of Third World female student experiences in U.S. higher education. The study utilizes Talpade Mohanty’s concept of Third World womanhood. The purpose is to identify how Third World women students assert agency and contest colonial and orientalist stereotypes. This study also examines how gender and foreignness act as dynamic, interrelated categories in doubly-othering this population. Findings indicate that Third World women students experience being typecast and perceived as poor, civilizationally backward, ignorant, and regressive, which predicates the (over‑)representation of Third World women as lacking agency. Third World women students are largely invisible in the literature on decolonization and higher education, and this study fills an important gap.

Author

• Bhavika Sicka, Old Dominion University