Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1111/hequ.12570

Publication Title

Higher Education Quarterly

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

22 pp.

Abstract

This study combines narrative inquiry with Third World feminism to bring a nuanced and scopic perspective of Third World women student experiences in US higher education. Specifically, it utilises Talpade Mohanty's concept of Third World womanhood to visibilise the experiences of five Third World international female students. Understanding womanhood as transnationally fluid and contextual, I investigate how women international students from the Third World perceive themselves to be misrepresented or homogenised in Western higher education. I also examine how gender and foreignness act as dynamic, interrelated categories in doubly‐othering this population. The purpose is to identify how Third World women students enact agency and contest reductive stereotypes. Findings reveal that Third World women students confront a range of exclusions in the US university, including being typecast as poor, needy, and civilisationally lacking, which predicates the (over‐) representation of Third World women as constrained and backward. Third World feminism emerges as a powerful intervention to unsettle colonial and oriental discourses in education and empower minoritised women to determinate selfhood.

Rights

© 2024 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "The interview transcripts that support the findings of this narrative inquiry are available upon reasonable request from the author's Google Drive. Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the data, including the perspectives and experiences of university students, the transcripts are not publicly available to maintain confidentiality and protect the privacy of the participants."

ORCID

0000-0001-8757-1639 (Sicka)

Original Publication Citation

Sicka, B. (2024). Reclaiming & reasserting Third World womanhoods in U.S. higher education. Higher Education Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12570

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