Postcolonial Feminism

Question 1

Why is there no coherent narrative between Feminism and Postcolonialism?

Answer 1

• Re-males and recentres resistant discourses by women
• Must be historicized and placed in context of a variety of historical resistance to colonialism

Question 2

What fundamental aspect do Postcolonial and Feminist theory share?

Answer 2

Both stand for a transformational politics, for a politics dedicated to the remove of inequality

Young, 2016

Question 3

How is the nation state often imagined in colonial theory?

Answer 3

• As a woman; resistance itself is feminised
• Women are cast as wives and mothers and are literally and figuratively reproduce the nation

Loomba (1998)

Question 4

9What is the association of the nation with family translated to the colonial situation?

Answer 4

• Colonial state as the parens patriae, controlling but also supposedly providing for its children
• Way of expressing racial or cultural relations:
• White man’s burden constructed as a parental one – looking after and disciplining children into obedience

Loomba (1998)

Question 5

How does the Image of nation or culture as woman marshal and undercut female power?

Answer 5

Nation as a mother protected her son from colonial ravages but also herself ravage by colonialism and in need of her son’s protection

Loomba (1998)

Question 6

What does postcolonialism try to address in the hegemony of western feminism?

Answer 6

Look to re-orient western feminisms to produce a plurality of feminisms, each with a specific history and set of political objectives

McEwan (2001)

Question 7

What is trap is it important not to fall into when postcolonialism tries to destabilize the hegemony of western feminism?

Answer 7

Trap of cultural relativism though, which places all geographies of feminism equally, which does not disrupt colonial power relations in terms of gender inequality and patriarchal power

McEwan (2001)

Question 8

How does McEwan (2001) reconceptualise the role of women in public and private sphere?

Answer 8

Reconceptualise motherhood being a private occupation forced on women as a chosen political occupation with important social and economic repercussions

McEwan (2001)

Question 9

How does western feminism reinforce universalism and difference that is similar to the colonial project?

Answer 9

• Western feminists criticized for universalizing their own particular perspectives as normative
• Creates stereotype of ‘Third World Woman’ that ignores diversity of women’s lives in the South across boundaries of class and ethnicity
• A form of ‘othering’ that reprivelages western values, knowledge and power

McEwan (2001)

Question 10

What does Spivak (1990) call for so that Western Feminists can address their shortcomings?

Answer 10

• Hyper self-reflexivity
• That their knowledges are situated, i.e. cultural specificity and therefore their partiality
• ‘Unlearn’ their privilege as loss –> working back critically through one’s history, prejudices and learned responses

Spivak (1990)

Question 11

What does the coupling of postcolonialism and feminism call for?

Answer 11

• Allow for competing and disparate voices among women rather reproducing colonialist power relations where white, middle class women have power to speak for their ‘silenced sisters’ in the South

McEwan (2001)

Question 12

How has a discursive space not yet be created for postcolonial and feminist theory to be combined?

Answer 12

• Women can be integrated into discursive spaces of geographical traditions but gender differences are erased
• Or women can be located outside the territory of tradition and their difference celebrated but it is notcritical

McEwan (1998)

Question 13

What is the trouble with uncovering the way in which British women travellers contributed to geographical knowledge production within Imperial culture?

Answer 13

• Runs the risk of reprivileging former imperial powers (the ‘West’) as the producer of this knowledge
• Colonial representations by white women may be read critically but the imperial gaze is still privileged with a silencing of the colonized ‘other’

McEwan (1998)

Question 14

What are the problems of contact zones?

Answer 14

Problem with contact zones is that the interactions with and responses to Europeans are not articulated in the imperial archives

McEwan (1998)

Question 15

How can Spivak’s framework be used in uncovering agency of the colonized in the imperial archives?

Answer 15

• Although impossible to avoid privileging colonizers voice in exploring white women’s representations of colonized people and landscapes
• Can explore resistance to their presence or subaltern agency within their narratives

McEwan (1998)

Question 16

How Feminists propose moving beyond essentialism?

Answer 16

• Do not contrast a singular, essential ‘feminine’ experience that can be contrasted with an equivalent masculine one –> apply this to a reading of the ‘Other’ as well [Idea of essentialism]
• Produce a more nuanced reading of gendered imperial knowledge by acknowledging class, ethnicity, sexuality etc
• A geographical approach here shifts away from emphasis from women travellers as a category to specific regions in their imperial setting and activities of these women in these contexts

McEwan (1998)

Question 17

Why does a discussion of ethnicity assume an implication with gender?

Answer 17

• Discussion of ethnicity also by implication a discussion of gender and sexuality as women are the biological ‘carriers’ of the ‘race’ (Davin, 1978)
• Freedom that British women experienced in West Africa were without doubt related to ethnicity –> narratives must be read with critical eye

McEwan (1998)

Question 18

What are some documentated accounts of resistance to the colonzied by the Other?

Answer 18

Accounts of sensational cannibalism in Kingsley’s (1897) narratives but few writers have analysed the possibility that West Africans themselves may spread rumours of own cannibalism to main social order, prevent attacks of other villages or discourage European powers progressing further inland

Question 19

Examples of postcolonial and feminism theory in Jane Eyre?

Answer 19

• Jane as both coloniser (British) and the colonised (woman)
• All women are enslaved by male despotism but British woman claims moral and spiritual superiority over her Eastern sisters
• Bertha represents British fears of both foreigners and women – “blood-red” moon, a symbol of women’s menstrual cycles, is reflected in her eyes, suggesting her feminine, sexual potency

Bronte (1847)

Question 20

How does Smith’s capitalist ruling appartus link to the colonial state?

Answer 20

• Smith’s capitalist ruling apparatus is premised upon abstracting places, people and events into generalized categories
• This very process of abstract that the colonial state establishes racial, sexual and class ideologies
• Helped to reinforce the creation of difference

Mohanty (1991)

Question 21

What were the characteristics of the English gentlemen?

Answer 21

• Natural and legitimate ruler
• Drew on social Darwinism, chivalry myths, scientific discourses and literary tradition of Empire

Mohanty (1991)

Question 22

How were the physical details of race and sexual seperation converted to?

Answer 22

• Converted to a moral plane: ideal imperial agent as authority and fidelity
• White men as “naturally” born to rule is grounded in discourse that colonized people are incapable of self-government

Mohanty (1991)

Question 23

How was there a dynamic relationship between class and the patriachy under British rule?

Answer 23

Evident in agrarian regulations –> granting property rights to men, exclusion of women from ownership

Mohanty (1991)

Question 24

What was the sexualisation of the Indian middle class in 19th Century?

Answer 24

• Bhadralok = Bengali new class of ‘gentlefolk’
• Bhadralok notion of middle class Indian womanhood draws on Victorian ideas of purity and home-bound nature of women
• Creation of this class of women led to middle-class Indian feminist struggles: nationalist struggles against an Imperial state

Mohanty (1991)

Question 25

What question about bringing a women-centered approach to colonialism is Haggis (1990) asking?

Answer 25

Whether it is gendering colonialism or colonising gender?

Haggis (1990)

Question 26

What are Haggis’ (1990) to main critiques of applying a women centered approach to postcolonialism?

Answer 26

• Fails to locate class divisions between both colonial and colonised groups of women
• Serves to undergender the colonised people and contribute to silencing colonised women

Question 27

How are white women visible in the colonial project?

Answer 27

As memsahibs

• Neurotically possessive of their women
• Concerned with maintaining racial superiority through segregation and petty distinctions

Haggis (1990)

Question 28

What did Knapman argue that white women arriving in large numbers in Fiji cause and why?

Answer 28

• Arrival of white women in large numbers has been blamed for disturbing racially harmonious frontier between white men and Fijian women
• Intervening in the making of society on their insistence of racial segregation and purity

Haggis (1990)

Question 29

What myth is obscured in the ‘harminous frontier’?

Answer 29

• Myth obscured of the reality of racial conflict and dis-harmony between Fijians and white men in their colonial conquest
• White men imported Europeanness traits, which imposed racial segregation and exclusivity but in the name of the white women

Haggis (1990)

Question 30

What dualistic distinction does Haggis (1990) use in identifying the ideological construction of black men and white women?

Answer 30

• Similar dualism around Mind/Body distinction
• Mind, rationality and intellect attributed to white men
• In opposition, both blacks and women become mindless, emotional creatures, rendered dependent to white men
  
  • Note this is achieved through different images

Haggis (1990)