Setting up a graduate women's studies program in Thailand: the M.A. Program in Women's Studies at Chiangmai University. (Women's Studies Education in Thailand).

THAILAND AND THE WORLD'S WOMEN'S STUDIES EDUCATION

For women's studies practitioners working outside Western Europe and North America, the charge that women's studies is trivial and a Western import sounds so painfully familiar. For feminist activists, who do not have blond/brown hair and blue/green eyes, their fight for gender equality has long been inhibited by the charge that we are copycats of Western feminists.

Yet, for many students from Third World countries who have trekked to Western countries for advanced degrees in women's studies, we have recognized a grain of truth in these charges. As widely acknowledged, certain strands of feminist theories and knowledge have been highly Euro- and US-centric. Researchers, whether from the First or the Third World, have perpetually used these theories to make sense of women's conditions in the Third World. Their theoretical lenses have been carved from "under Western eyes," to use Chandra Talpade Mohanty's phrase: this is not to belittle early feminist research in the Third World but to point out the evolution of knowledge about Third World women which in its early conception has been tainted with feminists' unconscious imperialist biases.

In the 1990s, we begin to see a silver lining in the theoretical landscape of women's studies. An increase in the number of Third World and underprivileged First World women in world-famous academia has paved new theoretical paths. Binary thinking in feminist thoughts and victimism feminism are gradually becoming a passe: feminists have realized women are not simply victims of patriarchy but also its important agents and contestants. The increased popularity of a both-and approach, in lieu of the either-or one, has opened up new research horizons and turned feminist scholarship into one of the most exciting and demanding scholarly field that cannot be easily dismissed. But this is the scenario in the US and UK.

Outside the Western hemisphere, although women's studies is a growing field, charges against women's studies and feminism as Western and irrelevant remain having inhibitive effects on the growth of women's studies education. Meanwhile, joining this discourse is, unfortunately, some feminist theorists, who yearn for a genuine indigenous women's studies knowledge and, thus, giving disapproving voices to feminist theories and practices with Western origins.

Feminism and women's studies need not be viewed in this either-or lense. The view that women's studies is essentially Western has served to legitimize the withholding of institutional support for new initiatives in women's studies education. Moreover, it is a view that has led feminists to become important mouthpieces for nationalism/regionalism, a political ideology which has either directly or indirectly contributed to the creation and preservation of gender inequality in the past century.

To counterbalance the charge of serving Western imperialism, critical feminist theorists have posited West and Non-West as intertwined and relational categories: the West is not simply that which originated from and resides in Western Europe and North America. The West--its mentality and colonial legacy--is alive, well nourished, and growing in non-Western countries. For clarification, the "West in us" and Westernized Third World feminisms are distinct concepts. To discern the "West in us" we must to turn our attention inward to identify the colonial legacies that have shaped our worldviews and everyday life. Whereas the term "Westernized Third World feminisms" is an accusation which negates the agency of feminists in/from the Third World by deeming their practices neither fully indigenous nor fully western.