54 Power Representation, and Feminist Critique presses most if not all the women in these countries. And it is in the production of this third world difference"that Western feminisms ap propriate and " colonize"the constitutive complexities which characterize the lives of women in these countries. It is in this process of discursive homogenization and systematization of the oppression of women in the third world that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse, and this power needs to be defined and In the context of the West's hegemonic position today, of what Anouar Abdel-Malek(1981)calls a struggle for" control over the orientation, regulation and decision of the process of world development on the basis of the advanced sector s monopoly of scientific knowledge and ideal cre- ativity, Western feminist scholarship on the third world must be seen and examined precisely in terms of its inscription in these particular re- lations of power and struggle. There is, it should be evident, no universal patriarchal framework which this scholarship attempts to counter and resist--unless one posits an international male conspiracy or a monolithic, ahistorical power structure. There is, however, a particular world balance of power within which any analysis of culture, ideology, and socioeco nomic conditions necessarily has to be situated. Abdel-Malek is useful here, again, in reminding us about the inherence of politics in the dis- courses of"culture Contemporary imperialism is, in a real sense, a hegemonic imperialism, ex ercising to a maximum degree a rationalized violence taken to a higher level than ever before--through fire and sword, but also through the attempt to control hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centers of the West, all of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by monopoly and finance capital, and supported by the benefits of both the scientific and technological revolution and the second industrial revolution itself.(145-46) Western feminist scholarship cannot avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining its role in such a global economic and political frame work. To do any less would be to ignore the complex interconnections between first and third world economies and the profound effect of this on the lives of women in all countries. I do not question the descriptive and informative value of most Western feminist writings on women in the third world. I also do not question the existence of excellent work which does not fall into the analytic traps with which I am concerned In fact I deal with an example of such work later on. In the context of an overwhelming silence about the experiences of women in these coun tries, as well as the need to forge intermational links between womens political struggles, such work is both pathbreaking and absolutely essen