-
The Way Out West: Development and the Rhetoric of Mobility in Postmodern Feminist Theory
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 15, Number 3, Summer 2000
- pp. 45-72
- Article
- Additional Information
In this essay, I trace a rhetorical affinity between feminist postmodern theory and an Enlightenment narrative of development. This affinity consists in the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness. Although feminists deploy this rhetoric in order to accommodate differences and to accustom readers to the instability that results from such accommodation, I show how this rhetoric works to justify Western colonial development and to efface women's very different experiences of mobility in the early twenty-first century.