Central to Mohanty’s transnational mission is the project of building a "non-colonizing feminist solidarity across the borders," through an intersectional analysis of race, nation, colonialism, sexuality, class and gender.

She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from where she earned a master's degree in Education, specifically in teaching English in 1980.

)—and 'women'—real, material subjects of their collective histories—is one of the central questions the practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address.

Mohanty states that Western feminisms have tended to gloss over the differences between Southern women, but that the experience of oppression is incredibly diverse, and contingent upon historical, cultural, and individual reasons.

Major themes addressed include the politics of difference, transnational solidarity building, and anticapitalist struggle against neoliberal globalization.