 Serene Khader expands on this analysis to show how culturalist explanations result in underestimating the agency of women in the global south, creating the view that their agency is only possible when they completely reject their religion or culture. This is a problem not only in the social sciences but also in postmodern feminist theory, and it occludes possibilities of universalist feminism because the oppressed Third World woman constructed in this way requires uplift, not dialogic engagements in which there might develop a larger understanding of the complex nature of sexism as well as the multiple possibilities of liberation from sexism. In some writings, the Third World woman is reified to such a degree that no serious political engagement about how to formulate shared feminist aims is possible.