Postcolonial Theory and Feminism

NICOLE GEORGE
University of Queensland, Australia

Postcolonial theory and feminist discourse

The intersections between postcolonial theory and feminism are complex. Feminist
postcolonial thinkers have made important contributions to feminist debate, with
notable figures including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Inderpal Grewal,
Trinh T. Min-ha, Uma Narayan, Jackie Huggins, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Barbara
Smith, and bell hooks, among many others. But, as this entry will demonstrate, there
are also tensions between feminists and among feminist postcolonial thinkers about
the implications of invoking feminist critique in a postcolonial context.
Postcolonial theory examines and responds to the legacies of colonialism and impe-
rialism. Key strands of inquiry focus on the ways in which colonial experience has
shaped human existence both in colonized and colonizing societies and the histori-
cal and contemporary impact colonization has exacted on cultures, societies, models of
political and social organization, and modes of linguistic communication. These stud-
ies are normatively directed toward exposing and subverting the power hierarches that
shaped colonial-era race relations and illustrate the contemporary legacies that have
accrued from these interactions. Edward Said’s (2003) work on orientalism, alongside
the writings of other noted thinkers such as Homi Bhaba, Ashis Nandy, Franz Fanon,
and Gayatri Spivak, has emphasized the subordinating impacts of the colonial experi-
ence for indigenous peoples. They have documented the ways in which colonization
upheld European norms as the standard against which the comportment of all other
peoples, their modes of thinking, and their cultural achievements were comprehended
and assessed. According to Said, subaltern populations were invariably classed as lesser,
wanting, or (in Said’s terms) the other, when compared to European standards. This pro-
cess of othering lent legitimacy to the idea that the colonial conquest of non-European
peoples and lands contributed to the “enlightenment” of “indigenous” populations, who
were, according to the colonial logic, uplifted and civilized through their contact with
colonial institutions of law, education, and faith. These arguments helped to make the
exploitative aspects of colonization (in economic and humanitarian terms) palatable
to European people, who were encouraged to think of colonization as a “civilizing”
mission, despite the fact that this mission often resulted in the denial if not complete
obliteration of local cultures.
It has been argued that there is some overlap between feminism and postcolonial
theory because both, as intellectual projects, have emerged in response to hegemonic
systems of oppression—racialized and/or gendered—and seek to challenge how these
systems have become normalized. In this regard it is important to acknowledge
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2341
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the extent to which patriarchal structures underpinned the colonial enterprise.

Indeed, postcolonial feminists have developed important criticisms of colonization
as “man-sized” projects that rendered women (European and indigenous) invisible
(Oyěwùmí 1997, 124). Some describe indigenous women’s experience in this context
as “double colonization” (Oyěwùmí 1997, 122), that is to say a “two-fold process of
racial inferiorization and gender subordination” (124).
In similar ways, ideas about gender and appropriate gender relations often lay at
the heart of colonial efforts to rank subaltern populations and establish order among
them. True to colonial logic, the comportment of indigenous men and women was often
judged in ways that referenced European norms of gendered propriety and domesticity,
eroticizing and exoticizing indigenous women in the process. Indigenous women also
found that their chiefly authority within customary or tribal environments was often
denied as colonial authorities looked to organize societies according to their own ideas
about the rightful roles of women and men, even inflating and extending the author-
ity of male chiefs in ways that deviated from usual customary practice. Postcolonial
feminists are therefore quick to contend that, if women have a diminished standing
in contemporary postcolonial societies, this is explained in large part by the historical
introduction and construction of gendered difference and the colonial “invention” of
the category “woman.”
But postcolonial thought does not always sit in harmony with feminism, and com-
plex debates occur among and between feminists, postcolonial thinkers interested in
gender, and other thinkers who, perhaps with some disclaimers attached, call them-
selves postcolonial feminists. This complexity stems from a distrust of universalizing
discourses of global sisterhood that aim to unite women around the globe in their
struggle against masculine domination enabled by patriarchal structures. Some con-
tend that this is a homogenizing rhetoric that fails to acknowledge the contemporary
inequalities between North and South that are legacies of colonial-era racial hierar-
chies. Against this backdrop, questions of gendered subordination may not emerge for
women as the most pressing and urgent concern. They may be seen to ignore, too conve-
niently, the disparities that make gender discrimination something quite different when
it is experienced in metropolitan or postcolonial contexts. Claims to global sisterhood
may also ignore the solidarities that have existed between women and men who have,
together, lived with and resisted the impacts of past forms of colonial dispossession and
who continue to work against impending threats of neocolonization (Holst-Petersen
1984).
Then again, indigenous women working alongside men in liberation movements
have, in some contexts, also come to know dissatisfaction when masculine priorities
have shaped the long-term direction of struggles for self-determination. As contribu-
tors and sometimes as leaders in these movements, women were often asked to put their
particular concerns regarding the need to overcome the gendered impacts of coloniza-
tion to one side and to work in solidarity with men in the cause of liberation. This was
justified with the promise that, once independence was achieved, greater recognition
would come to the demands of women. But, in many postcolonial contexts, women
also found that efforts to build the postcolonial state often relied upon articulations
of culture, as the basis of a new and distinctive national identity, that were restrictive
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and subordinating for women. In some cases, these processes of identity formation
have feminized women’s contributions to the life of the nation and their roles in the
preservation of culture or livelihood. When women activists question them and remind
male-dominated postcolonial elites of their capacities to contribute to nation building
in ways that go beyond the feminized realms of reproduction, caring, and community
service, they may be criticized by those same elites for pedaling ideas that are said to be
inauthentic and alien to the value systems that hold their societies together.
In this situation, activists have sometimes invoked global policy frameworks, such
as those developed within the UN system, that institutionalize women’s rights to bod-
ily security, reproductive autonomy, and representation in decision making to legiti-
mate their demands for recognition on local contexts. But this kind of advocacy does
not always win support and may invite recrimination from parochial elites who fear
the recolonizing impacts of human-rights-based policy frameworks. In this scenario,
women activists in postcolonial contexts who choose to embrace a “feminist politics”
navigate a difficult political pathway, borrowing “concepts and a vocabulary” from an
Enlightenment tradition that legitimated dispossession as part of the colonial enterprise
and, at the same time, taking a critical stand against articulations of local indigenous
culture that are expressed as the foundation of postcolonial nationhood (Holst-Petersen
1984, 46).
Sally Engle Merry (2006) has examined how gender activists, in these contexts, have
engaged in creative processes of rights “translation” to mediate opposition to their advo-
cacy by demonstrating how women’s rights claims have a resonance with local cultural
and customary practices and tradition. But it is also important to appreciate how the
space available to women to redeem their rights can be constrained. This has been a
particular challenge in postcolonial contests where elites resort to authoritarian forms
of control to maintain political power, and/or where political power becomes fused with
discriminatory agendas, in nationalist and gendered terms, as part of that effort to main-
tain control (George 2016). Similar difficulties may arise for women when global powers
forge strategic and legitimizing alliances with illiberal postcolonial states, choosing to
ignore the gendered abuses that may be sanctioned daily by the local elites they count
as allies.

Debates on questions of representation: Challenging

gendered discrimination in local and global contexts

Postcolonial feminists have raised important questions about the ways that the lives
of women within postcolonial societies are represented and discussed. They have fre-
quently expressed frustration over the power disparities that characterize relationships
between feminists from the global North and those from the global South. The body
of feminist scholarship examining the way global and local influences impact on the
standing of women in the global South is large, but it is a much smaller proportion of
this scholarship that is authored by Southern women themselves. This raises questions
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about who commands the authority to speak on the experiences of women in postcolo-
nial settings and the ability of women to themselves build and disseminate knowledge
on their own terms.
Gayatri Spivak has reflected on this question and the diminished opportunities that
cast the “subaltern as a female … deeply in shadow” (2006, 32). She compares this
scenario with the imperialist posture of colonial periods, which she describes as “white
men saving … brown women from brown men” (33). This framing calls attention
to the problems that accrue if we too easily assume that external efforts to challenge
gendered inequity, as it is understood by the outsider, will result in unproblematic
and empowering outcomes for local women. These kinds of savior narratives, as noted
by Spivak, may repeat the logic of colonial interventions of the past that aimed to
“uplift” women but simultaneously subordinated whole populations, their systems of
knowledge, and their values.
The Huggins–Bell debate occurring in Australia’s settler–colonial context and waged
over representations of gender violence in Indigenous Australian communities is
instructive for showing how indigenous feminists have responded to these framings
of gender discrimination in their societies. This debate began in 1989 and ran into the
1990s, occurring between a white feminist anthropologist, Diane Bell, who, in collab-
oration with an indigenous informant, Topsy Napurrula, sought to “break the silence”
on the high rates of rape and sexual abuse that were being suffered by Australian
Indigenous women in their communities. Bell argued that this phenomenon should no
longer be hidden but be considered “everyone’s business” (Bell and Napurrula Nelson
1989, 403). But Australian Indigenous feminist critics led by Jackie Huggins contended
that this effort to expose the violent experiences of women in Indigenous communities
had the perverse impact of further diminishing the standing of Indigenous women
rather than empowering them. Bell argued her claims were framed by an ambition,
as Stringer puts it, to “confer authority upon Aboriginal women who have suffered
victimization through violence” (Stringer 2012, 21). Bell’s critics alleged that her
position was better understood as that of a “rescuer,” “self-appointed to decipher the
political meaning of [Indigenous women’s] suffering” (Stringer 2012, 21).
The key contention here was that the focus on gendered violence within Australian
Indigenous communities ignored how other, lateral forms of violence were also present
in these contexts. From this perspective, the experiences of gendered violence were
argued to be occurring within communities that were traumatized and diminished as
a result of Australia’s violent history of racial domination. The “everyone’s business”
focus on gender violence in Indigenous Australia focused on uplifting victimized
Indigenous women but ignored too readily, it was argued, the “generative role” that a
brutal history, denying Aboriginal nationhood and culture, has played in fueling this
phenomenon (Stringer 2012, 22).
These views have motivated postcolonial feminists’ broad critique of the “reductive”
and homogenizing ways the non-Western or “Third World woman” has been con-
structed in Western feminist scholarship. For figures such as Chandra Mohanty (2003,
19), “Western eyes” have too easily developed pejorative depictions of non-Western
custom as gender discriminatory without adequate consideration of the global and
local forces that contribute to gendered forms of discrimination. Without this kind of
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balance, feminist research may simply repeat the belittling narratives that have been so
well established since colonial times.
Feminist scholars have not been immune to these criticisms, and since the 1990s
research has been published that is attentive to the extent to which multiple truths
of women’s lives may evolve from differential positionings or standpoints. From an
intersectional feminist perspective, it is also true that there is no “one” authentic local
voice in postcolonial contexts, and differences of class, age, sexuality, ethnicity, and
religious affiliation all impact on the types of authority that women hold as feminist
activists and advocates in their communities. But, at the same time, it is also important
to ask whether and how feminist scholars from the West can produce supportive inter-
ventions that are not simply imposed on women in postcolonial contexts in ways that
disempower.
Aili Mari Tripp’s (2006) reflections on this point do not negate the utility of transna-
tional feminist advocacy that bridges Western–non-Western and colonial–postcolonial
boundaries, but they do indicate a need for caution. Tripp notes how transnational
feminist advocacy can often be hubristic, assuming that outside voices know better
and more while also oversimplifying and disregarding the complexity of local feminist
challenges and the efforts made by local women’s activists to confront these in ways
they deem appropriate. To support this claim, Tripp cites the flood of international
attention to the plight of Nigerian women sentenced in 2002 to corporal punishment
for adultery. She claims that, while international web-based advocacy flourished and
local officials were inundated with letters and petitions from foreign sources that
tended to demonize local officials and religious leaders, little consideration was given
to how this might incite a backlash against local women’s activists, or even precipitate
the fate of the women in question.
Tripp contends that a more constructive and supportive approach would have been
possible if international advocacy networks better heeded the calls from local women’s
groups to “assist” through efforts such as fundraising to pay for further judicial pro-
cesses and appeals rather than “impose” their values. Tripp concludes that transnational
solidarity between postcolonial and Western feminists is possible when both commu-
nities reflect together on the gendered difficulties that are shared. In this sense, debates
on gendered violence, such as the Huggins–Bell case, might begin by making clear that
this is a universal challenge, resistant to apprehension efforts, in all societies, not simply
those of the indigenous postcolonial world. Certainly it may be explained by differing
factors in all societies too. But the important point here, as Tripp asserts, is that begin-
ning feminist debate in this way reduces the tendency to “other” women in postcolonial
contexts as only the bearers of problems, and increases the chances of a more productive
kind of solidarity.

SEE ALSO: Alterity; Elites, Anthropological Study of; Feminism and Anthropology;
Feminism, First-, Second-, and Third-Wave; Gender and Globalization; Gender and
Human Rights; Gender and Law; Gender and Race, Intersectionality Theory of; Gen-
der and Sexuality: Contested Relations; Global Women’s Movement; Human Rights;
Postcolonialism; Postcoloniality; Scientific Expertise; Violence, Structural and Inter-
personal
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REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Bell, Diane, and Topsy Napurrula Nelson. 1989. “Speaking about Rape is Everyone’s Business.”
Women’s Studies International Forum 12 (4): 403–16. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(89)90036-8.
George, Nicole. 2016. “Lost in Translation: Human Rights, Gender Violence and Women’s Capa-
bilities in Fiji.” In Gender Violence and Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea
and Vanuatu, edited by Aletta Biersack, Martha Macintyre, and Margaret Jolly, 81–125. Can-
berra: ANU Press.
Holst-Petersen, Kirsten. 1984. “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African
Literature.” Kunapipi 6 (3): 35–47.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Mid-
dle.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 38–51. doi:10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.38.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “‘Under Western Eyes’: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses.” In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, 17–42.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónké. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Spivak, Gayatri. 2006. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” In The Post-
colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 28–37.
2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Stringer, Rebecca. 2012. “Impractical Reconciliation.” Australian Feminist Studies 27 (71): 19–36.
doi:10.1080/08164649.2012.648257.
Tripp, Aili Mari. 2006. “Challenges in Transnational Feminist Mobilization.” In Global Feminism:
Transnational Women’s Activism, Organising and Human Rights, edited by Myra Marx Ferree
and Aili Mari Tripp, 296–312. New York: New York University Press.