52 Power, Representation and Feminist critique analytic categories employed in specific writings on the subject which take as their referent feminist interests as they have been articulated in the U.S. and Western Europe. If one of the tasks of formulating and understanding the locus of third world feminisms"is delineating the way in which it resists and works against what I am referring to as"West ern feminist discourse, an analysis of the discursive construction of third world women"in Western feminism is an important first step Clearly Western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogeneous in its goals, interests, or analyses. However, it is possible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of"the West"(in all its complexities and contradictions)as the primary referent in theory and praxis. My reference to"Western fem inism is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith rather i am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by writers which codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as(implicitly) Western. It is in this sense that I use the term Western feminist. Similar arguments can be made in terms of middle-class urban african or Asian scholars producing scholarship on or about their rural or working-class sisters which assumes their own middle-class cul- tures as the norm, and codifies working-class histories and cultures as Other. Thus, while this essay focuses specifically on what I refer to as Western feminist"discourse on women in the third world, the critiques I offer also pertain to third world scholars writing about their own cultures which employ identical analytic strategies It ought to be of some political significance, at least, that the term colonization has come to denote a variety of phenomena in recent feminist and left writings in general. From its analytic value as a category of ex ploitative economic exchange in both traditional and contemporary Marx isms(cf. particularly contemporary theorists such as Baran 1962, Amin 1977, and Gunder-Frank 1967)to its use by feminist women of color in the U.S. to describe the appropriation of their experiences and struggle by hegemonic white women s movements(cf especially moraga and An zaldua 1983, Smith 1983, Joseph and Lewis 1981, and Moraga 1984), colonization has been used to characterize everything from the most ev ident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the third world. 1 However so phisticated or problematical its use as an explanatory construct, coloni zation almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression-often violent-of the heterogeneity of the subject(s)in question My concern about such writings derives from my own implication and investment in contemporary debates in feminist theory, and the urgent political necessity(especially in the age of Reagan/ Bush)of forming stra