UNDER WESTERN EYES 55 tial. However, it is both to the explanatory potential of particular analytic strategies employed by such writing, and to their political effect in the context of the hegemony of Western scholarship that I want to draw attention here. While feminist writing in the U.S. is still marginalized (except from the point of view of women of color addressing privileged white women), Western feminist writing on women in the third world must be considered in the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship-1. e. the production, publication, distribution, and consump tion of information and ideas. Marginal or not, this writing has politica ffects and implications beyond the immediate feminist or disciplinary dience. One such significant effect of the dominant"representations f Western feminism is its conflation with imperialism in the eyes of particular third world women. 4 Hence the urgent need to examine the political implications of our analytic strategies and principles My critique is directed at three basic analytic principles which are present in(Western) feminist discourse on women in the third world Since i focus primarily on the Zed Press women in the third world series my comments on Western feminist discourse are circumscribed by my analysis of the texts in this series. 5 This is a way of focusing my critique. However, even though I am dealing with feminists who identify them elves as culturally or geographically from the"West, as mentioned earlier, what I say about these presuppositions or implicit principles holds for anyone who uses these methods, whether third world women in the West, or third world women in the third world writing on these issues and publishing in the West. Thus, I am not making a culturalist argument about ethnocentrism; rather, i am trying to uncover how ethnocentric universalism is produced in certain analyses. As a matter of fact, my argument holds for any discourse that sets up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i. e. the yardstick by which to encode and rep- resent cultural Others. It is in this move that power is exercised in dis course The first analytic presupposition I focus on is involved in the strategic ocation of the category"women"vis-a-vis the context of analysis. The assumption of women as an already constituted coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally.(The context of analysis can be anything from kinship structures and the or ganization of labor to media representations. The second analytical pre supposition is evident on the methodological level, in the uncritical way proof"of universality and cross-cultural validity are provided. The third is a more specifically political presupposition underlying the methodol ogies and the analytic strategies, i. e. the model of power and strugg