Rather than starting from lived experiences, this body of feminist writing tends to start from the assumption of certain differences between first and third world women, and between women and men in the third world, and analyse material realities on this basis. At the same time, within the third world, the same meaning and content are assumed to apply throughout, for example to the sexual division of labour, reproduction, the family, marriage, household, patriarchy, the veil etc. For instance, the difference in meaning in wearing veils in different times and places are ignored, and an arithmetic correspondence between numbers of women wearing veils and extent of oppression is assumed. Mohanty gives the example of different meanings of veiling in pre and post- revolution Iran. Iranian middle-class women veiled themselves during the 1979 revolution to express solidarity with their working class sisters in opposition to the Shah and western cultural colonisation, while in contemporary Iran, the law dictates that all women must wear veils.

Mohanty says her critiques can also apply to third world scholars writing about their own cultures, particularly urban middle class scholars who take their own position as the norm in writing about rural or working class sisters. Her argument holds for anyone who tries to set up their own standards as the yardstick by which to 'encode and create cultural others' (p.55). However, it is possible to escape this trap. Some researchers, including westerners, have avoided colonising the subjects of their research by focusing on local particularities and by deconstructing, rather than taking 'colonial preconceptions' as their starting point.