Decolonizing Feminism
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Decolonizing Feminism

Transnational Feminism and Globalization

Margaret A. McLaren

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eBook - ePub

Decolonizing Feminism

Transnational Feminism and Globalization

Margaret A. McLaren

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About This Book

What does it mean to decolonize transnational feminist theory in the context of globalization? As a project concerned with multiple power structures, feminist theory must address the historical legacies of colonialism, postcolonialism, and more recently, decoloniality. This book offers essays organized around a coherent set of research questions about how to conceptualize an inclusive feminist politics. This has been, and continues to be, a central project in feminist theory, particularly in light of neoliberal globalization. International and interdisciplinary in scope, this book introduces the key issues in, and addresses the most significant challenges for, contemporary transnational feminist politics. In the context of rapid globalization, it explores the theoretical frameworks for thinking through significant concepts in feminist theory and activism: rights, citizenship and immigration, feminist solidarity, decolonizing methodologies and practices, and freedom. From diverse socio-political locations and multiple and interdisciplinary perspectives authors propose new ways of thinking about feminist knowledges, methodologies, and practices. Ideal for students and scholars in Gender and Globalization, Transnational Feminism and Feminist Theory more broadly, the volume contributes to the ongoing project of advocating a decolonizing feminist approach to pressing social issues.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781786602602
Edition
1

Part 1

DECOLONIZING EPISTEMOLOGIES, METHODS, AND KNOWLEDGES

Chapter 1

Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy

Linda MartĂ­n Alcoff
Feminist philosophy is a project analogous in many respects to the project of decolonizing philosophy. The decolonization of philosophy requires the contextualization of master discourses in order to be able to discern and understand the persistent colonial content that may be operating in our most cherished ideas and arguments. This pits it in opposition to a liberalism that separates ideas from their genealogy or location, such as process-oriented or formal approaches, or a postmodernism that, in the guise of an anti-foundationalism about meaning, would reject the determinate effect of material contexts. Much of feminist philosophy has been working to put context back into philosophy, to understand male-embodied experience as working behind common ideas about the self, for example, and to highlight the social location and identity of knowers as part of how real-world justification and judgment occurs.
Yet, feminist philosophy’s relationship to decolonial projects is fraught with specific challenges, as this chapter will discuss. The current trend toward decolonizing is not simply an add-on of the colonial difference or an extension of intersectionality to include another form of difference but an attempt at shifting standard paradigms and methodologies about the way we understand our problematics in regard to gender. Inevitably, the decolonial challenge has generated new questions about how to articulate a transnational feminist agenda based on the imagined collectivity of women.
Imagining a global collectivity of women poses daunting challenges, as Simone de Beauvoir noted many decades ago, since women are dispersed across every community rather than collected together in any region or any specific social layer of society.1 As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued, there is no way to achieve unity based on a shared unified experience, or on common treatment, or even on similar ideational representation across our diverse contexts.2 There are too many differences of kind in each of these categories, far beyond differences of degree. If we were to try to fashion a collectivity based on female identity that did not deny or cover over these substantive differences, it would end up being too abstract and minimal to do effective political work.
Beauvoir herself is most productively read as offering an analysis of the situation of a certain cultural and class grouping. In this restricted sense, her account has much to teach and can inspire useful questions we might put to diverse contexts in which women are “made.” She inspires us, for example, to ask about how the specific bodily aspects of women’s experiences—such as menstruation, pregnancy, heterosexual coitus—are affected by our social context. In this way, we can draw a catalog of helpful questions from Beauvoir without taking her diagnosis of the oppression of women, based as it is on middle-class French women, to be universally applicable.
Some decades after Le Deuxìeme Sexe was published, however, theorists took up Beauvoir’s assertion that women are made and not born in new directions to argue that the category “woman” itself is so universally problematic and even dangerous that it has lost its utility for a collective social praxis.3 Gender identity, some argued, is necessarily a prison house of coercive performances, rigid boundaries, and identitarian logics.4 Sometimes this claim is based on the formal characteristics of language to suggest that concepts and categories inevitably produce exclusions and marginalization, but sometimes it is based on social histories of the way in which gender categories came about. Haslanger, for example, defines gender (as well as race) as the effect of social oppression and calls for their elimination.5 She and others such as Butler also argue that the concept of gender is unable to accommodate the empirical facts about the actual bodily variation among human beings, and as a result, this variation is systematically suppressed. There are many real and material dissimilarities among those designated female that encompasses physical and biological features as well as psychological and social ones. And it is also the case that what we mean by gender changes through history and across cultures. Yet all this variation is of course a challenge to the naturalistic ways in which male supremacy is justified based on invariant gender characteristics. Hence, some today hold that the very category of gender itself exists only for the purposes of oppression.
As a result, primarily in the global North, both feminist political practice and feminist theory have been defined in increasingly generic and oppositional terms of critique and resistance to identity itself, or the negative or critical project of undoing gender, dismantling identities, and escaping cultural scripts. Just as some have argued that racism creates race, some feminists argue that sexism creates gender; some even argue it creates sex. In the case of racism, such arguments rely primarily on the history of global political economy, but in the case of sexism, the primary arguments, as I’ve suggested, hinge on making a case for the disconnect between bodily variance and the necessarily binary nature of gender categories. As a result, the deconstruction of gender is not made as a contextually specific argument that accounts for specific historical and cultural contexts where concepts of difference emerge but as an argument that ranges over all contexts, synchronically and diachronically, encompassing all of humanity.
Thus, in the guise of producing an orientation to feminism that will avoid exclusions and recognize difference, this generalized stance of resistance to gender identity has become a new universal with little attempt at either intersectional or decolonial theorization. The argument of this chapter is that a uniform take on gender deconstruction needs a decolonial critique. If gender identities are in every case mediated by other vectors of identity categories and communities—changing their form and their degree of intensity—then we need to think through what the intersectional mediations of gender mean for our universal deconstructive politics.
Discerning the grounds of gender identities, after all, is not merely elusive because of the elusiveness of substances, or because we have mistakenly taken a social kind to be a natural kind, but because there is actual material diversity across contexts of gender meanings and gender formation. Whether our perceived gender identity is taken to place us on a pedestal or rendered us as the mule of the world, or, alternatively, whether gender is a more positive and livable form of life in a given community depends on mediations of intersecting systems of meaning and practice. Acknowledging such differences of kind may seem to destabilize gender and make it a fitting subject for just the sort of deconstruction I have described. But putting gender under erasure, in Heidegger or Derrida’s sense, is distinct from pluralizing it and circumscribing its explanatory scope. To deconstruct gender is to argue that the concept can never be adequate to its referent and that it can never be modified or contextualized.
Against this view, I want to insist on the open-ended nature of the question decolonial theory is putting on the table: what would it mean to decolonize our approach to questions about the nature and the politics of gender, including the meaning of gender itself?
The intersectional approaches to questions of gender oppression have too often focused on race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality without attending equally to nationality, religion, geographical region, disability, and political status (i.e., citizenship). Intersectional feminism has usefully underscored the differences in our lives and families and histories that generate different priorities and interests. But this can yield a picture of a pluralist feminism with compatible, though distinct, orientations. Decolonizing feminism may push us toward a paradigm shift of a different order in which founding categories and concepts, of “women” and “oppression,” are more radically contested. We must be prepared to understand that when gender is mediated by these varied forms of identity—such as sexual, ethnic, racial, national, and religious—there may be varied political effects and meanings. It is not just that the content of the identity scripts may vary across cultural contexts, but the manner of identity formation or subject formation may also vary as well as the political effects of gender-based social organization. It is a piece of colonial hubris to assume without investigation that any gender-based division of labor will be oppressive: this is to assume that gender will always operationalize in the same way, as I will explore in what follows.
If gender cannot stand alone because its form is always the product of mediated processes, then we should reconsider whether we can theorize a universal response to gender, or a resistance to gender, or a solution to gender, while ignoring the hybrid nature of gender. Taking intersectionality seriously means that we cannot separate gender off from other social identities as having its own unique identitarian logic. Taking up the decolonial challenge means a willingness to acknowledge coloniality within the framing assumptions used in feminist theory itself.

IDENTITY

It is useful in this context to begin with the case of Anders Behring Breivik, whose attack on his fellow Norwegians in the summer of 2011 aimed at instigating a race-based civil war that could conceivably bring down the multiculturalist, pluralist policies of his government. By specifically targeting Norwegians, Breivik hoped to bring the cost of multiculturalism home, in effect. His murders targeted the liberal Labour Party youth who he feared would chart the way for an even more pluralist future for Norway. His understanding of this pluralist future had everything to do with his understanding of feminism’s effect on Norway. And the connection he drew between rising immigration and feminism holds lessons that are useful for other areas of the world where a xenophobic, sexist right is on the rise. It is certainly relevant to the misogynist form of xenophobic nationalism the Trump presidency represents. Breivik’s ideology is now operating very much inside rather than outside the United States.
Like other European countries, Norway has moved from a nearly homogeneous ethnic society to a relatively harmonious multiethnic one in just a few decades. The firebombings and hate crimes that beset Germany and Denmark, as their immigrant populations increased, were rare in Norway, and social democratic policies ensured that immigrant workers would share in the famed social safety net and high standard of living the nation enjoys. Norway’s famed oil revenues ensured a good standard of living for all, even with high taxes, so the racist extremist reaction that has recently developed cannot be reasonably blamed on worsening economic conditions. Rather, it was simply the policies of inclusion that besotted Breivik and other racist extremists. It is important to remember that Breivik was not a lone madman but someone who held a more extreme version of views that many others in Norway and across Scandinavia persist in holding. One Swedish politician commented shortly after the 2011 attacks that if Norway had remained a “Norwegian Norway” this would never have happened.
Social identities—ethnic, racial, national, and religious—increasingly animate national and international politics, policy debates, and electoral party formations. Racist extremists like Breivik overplay the importance of these identities; misconstrue the political meanings of identity; collapse national and ethnic identities as if they were identical; and target specific identities as posing insurmountable obstacles to security, harmony, and national prosperity. In response to these sorts of reductive and essentialist approaches to identity, minimalism about identity can begin to look pretty attractive. Yet it’s clearly insufficient to approach the issue of identity simply in terms of its political effects, even its political dangers, or through the misconstrued ideas of maniacs. We need first to consider the issue of the actual social ontology of identity and identity formations before we can understand our political options in relation to them.
Let me return to Breivik. On the day of the attacks, Breivik distributed a manifesto of more than 1,500 pages titled “2083—A European Declaration of Independence.” In it he targeted a number of groups classified into two categories: first, non-Norwegians, especially Muslims; second, various Norwegians, such as liberals, supporters of the European Union (EU), and feminists, who were open to immigration. Feminists were especially targeted because he saw them as weakening Norway’s resolve to maintain closed borders, and thus opening Norway to the advances of non-Norwegians. The category of non-Norwegian that he targeted is of course an interesting one. We might first wonder, does it include the Indigenous Saami people? Perhaps it could, as long as the Saami don’t demand curricular inclusion or quotas in Parliament.6
But what is most interesting in Breivik’s formulations of identity categories is their slide from self-consciously political identities to social identities in a more physical form. In other words, Breivik does not explicitly target women but does target feminism, and does not target non-Norwegian Europeans but does target pro-EU Europeans, and only targets non-Norwegian non-Europeans who are trying to enter Norway or espousing a “political Islam.” One might think he has moved to chosen identities or self-consciously political identities and away from the racialist, determinist logic of another era. And this helps Breivik present himself as a rationally enlightened white nationalist, the kind who simply believes in a clash of cultures rather than an indefeasible race-based inferiority. But this distinction does not actually hold up in the manifesto. Feminists are identified by their opposition to traditions of Norwegian protective masculinity that might guard the country against external enemies, and the external enemies of Norway are identified by their ethnic, religious, and even racialized identity as Arabs and/or Muslims. And so what might look to be political categories determined by individual agency and chosen allegiances devolve into determined categories of social identity once again. In other words, Breivik closes the assimilation option along with the cultural amalgamation option. Non-Norwegian non-European immigrants can never be accommodated because they will never change, and Norwegians should never change: a change inside Norway can only be attributed to mongrelization, or racialized devolution.
Moreover, Breivik’s aim is, as the Swedish politician put it, a Norwegian Norway, not in the sense of a Norway with Norwegian traditions but in the sense of a Norway made up of people with Norwegian ethnic heritage. Thus, identity is still operating here in terms of older ideas of heritable, and thus biological, race, or something like it. One has an identity forever and passes it down to one’s children, and in this way the identity group remains a closed set with clearly defined borders. Just as Spain decided in the sixteenth century that conversos were not to be trusted, launching the Inquisition, Breivik and his compatriots believe that assimilation is unreliable.
The importance of gender in this analysis is one that is terribly familiar: women’s role is to maintain the purity of the racial reproductive line. White men may procreate with others as they like, but it is crucial that white women procreate exclusively with white men in order to reprodu...

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