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The Way Out West: Development and the Rhetoric of Mobility in Postmodern Feminist Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Elizabeth A. Pritchard
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Summer 2000 , pp. 45 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by Hypatia, Inc.

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