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Postcolonial feminism is a relatively new type of feminism that emerged in response to earlier waves of feminism and postcolonial theory. It seeks to address the adverse cultural, economic, and political effects of colonialism on non-Western women in developing and especially colonized countries, which are typically at odds with mainstream feminism. Therefore, a vital issue in feminist activities is the analysis of the boundaries of global politics and the boundaries between the bodies and discourses (Richardson & McLaughlin & Casey, 2006). Postcolonial feminism pursues to undermine the claim of the universality of Western feminist theory by emphasizing the issues and experiences of women in marginalized societies, in addition to emphasizing that women in other societies have not been properly represented in this theory. The postcolonial perspective of feminism unlike traditional feminism, is not only concerned with being ‘feminine’ but also, points out more complex and deeper issues such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, social, cultural, and historical concepts. According to Kristen Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford (1986) a postcolonial feminist suffers from “double colonization”. The term refers to the ways that women struggle with both the oppression of colonialism as well as patriarchal dominance simultaneously (Peterson & Rutherford, 1986). Not only that, a postcolonial feminist also has to resist the control of Western white feminists of colonizer countries who give a false account of their colonized counterparts by forcing silence on their cultural, social, racial, and political specificities, as a result, Western white feminists represent themselves as oppressors of their “sisters” (Tyagi, 2014).
In this article, I examine two considerable struggles of postcolonial feminist theory. In so doing, firstly, “Third World” feminists’ opposition to their misrepresentation in the nationalist discourses that lock women up in traditional and religious stereotypes is examined. In the second place, the article explores the Western white feminists’ contribution to mistreating Third World women by neglecting race, class, and social and historical contexts while declaring the problems of colonized women.
Postcolonialism feminists believe that postcolonialism and feminism develop a tense relationship which is brought about by the notion that postcolonial theory is an absolute male-centered ideology that along with eliminating feminine concerns, exploits women as well. Postcolonial feminists and critics of postcolonialism hold postcolonial theorists accountable for misrepresenting women in nationalist discourses and they phrase the question “Where are the women in the theorizing of post-coloniality?” (Davies, 1994). For instance, Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1977) study draws little attention to women and their social activities. As well as Said (1977), Homi K. Bhabha’s “Nation and Narration” (1990) while discussing different aspects of the colonizer as subject and colonized as target and victim, makes no reference to specifics of gender and its impact on his model.
Nationalism is one of the most powerful factors that has fed colonialism. It has brought up some movements toward women’s liberation in Africa, the Middle East, and South America, however, it has allocated an uneasy relationship with feminism. Tyagi (2014) states that while feminism has ventured to warrant a community of women that goes beyond geographic and cultural boundaries, nationalism has overstressed these boundaries for countering hegemonic occupation. In “Indian Nationalism, Gandhian ‘Satyagraha,’ (1992) Katrak discusses that Mahatma Gandhi used gender representations in order to resist British colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s, predominantly to achieve Indian nationalism, not for the healing to free women from a patriarchal society. She also states:
Gandhi’s specific representations of women and female sexuality, and his symbolizing from Hindu mythology of selected female figures who embodied a nationalist spirit promoted […] a ‘traditional’ ideology wherein female sexuality was legitimately embodied only in marriage, wifehood, domesticity- all forms of controlling women’s bodies. (Katrak, 1995. pp 395–6)
Moreover, African nationalist discourse was also male-centered. As Anne McClintock states in “Imperial Leather” (1995) African women’s agency was delimited to motherhood and domestic tasks. Likewise, Kirsten Holst Peterson (1995) argues that the desire behind the wave of African writings in the 1960s was complicated and a valuable heritage to fight for, against cultural imperialism. During that period, women’s concerns were ignored and were sacrificed to honor the past in addition to reinstituting African self-confidence (Peterson, 1995).
Consequently, nationalism discourses are substantially male-centric which establish control on women by stereotyping them into traditional domestic objects, yet they are not the only oppressors of colonized women. Surprisingly, Western white feminists are another major contributor to the oppression of colonized women’s identity.
Western white feminists through their representations of colonized women have overlooked the cultural, historical, and racial features of Third World women. They do so by forcing white feminist models on Third World Women. In this section, the notion of race and refutation of socio-historical conditions that are the theme of Western feminist theorists’ perspective on Third World women is going to be analyzed.
One of the main themes of postcolonial feminist theory is its struggle over the association of white feminists and their indigenous equivalents. Gayatri Spivak in her “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism (1985) censures “The Madwomen in the Attic” (1997) which is an examination of the literary novel Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë a feminist perspective written by Gilbert and Gubar. Spivak criticizes Gilbert and Gubar (1997) for neglecting the colonial aspect of Jane Eyre while they honor Jane as a feminist heroine without considering the role of Western feminists in inscribing Third World women’s struggles and problems. Spivak believes that Jane could not have been successful in her self-determination and marriage if it was not for oppressing Bartha Mason who was from Jamaica (Spivak, 1985). In “The Madwomen in the Attic” (1997), the writers never took Bartha Mason into account individually and in her own right. They refer to Bartha as Jane’s “truest and darkest double, she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self that Jane has been trying to repress” (140). In Jane’s words, Bartha is “whether beast or human being, one could not tell” (Brontë, 1947). Bertha’s savagely cruel and depraved behavior points out an assumption in colonial theories that people who are not born with the same race or are degenerate beings, perhaps are not fully human (Tyagi, 2014).
Several critics and theorists pointed out the difficulties that black women had to cope with while working with famous feminist discourses. For instance, Hazel V. Carby (1997) identifies and scrutinizes the conditions of Western white feminists in the 1970s and how black women were narrowly discussed within their discourses. Carby (1997) explains that Western feminism undergoes an ethnocentric bias since they assume that the solutions that they work towards in battling against their oppression can be germane to all women in the world regardless of their socio-historical contexts. Thus, ignoring these racial and socio-historical issues has hindered feminists from adopting feasible solutions.
Third-world feminists hold Western feminists responsible for considering gender a monolithic operation and call attention to taking into account other contexts such as; race and class. According to Combahee River Collective (This Bridge Called My Back, 1981-1983, pp 213) which was a group of black lesbians in Boston who were active from 1974 to 1980, the white feminist movement was not fulfilling their (black people) particular needs. They also highlighted that for black women race and sex are not discrete. As they stated in their instrumental statement:
We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class and sexual oppression because in our lives they are expressed simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by White men as a weapon of political repression. Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that White women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race (This Bridge Called My Back, 1983. p 213).
The Combahee River Collective also fights against feminist separatism, arguing that only discussing gender oppression is never justifiable for black women who were always under sexual and racial abuse. Hence, Western feminists, on the one hand, failed to address gender issues such as race and class, on the other hand, they neglected the importance of social and cultural circumstances while looking into the conditions of Third World women. Regarding Western feminists’ failure in advocating solutions for Third World women, it is noteworthy to take harem and veil into account as means of stereotyping Third World women.
Western feminists ponder harem as a powerful tyranny of Muslim colonized women. As claimed by Mernissi (1995) in Islamic societies there exists an ideology in which the public ummah which consists of men is separated from the secluded world of harem and home which is for women and families. The veil is one of the main means for this separation that permits women to enter the public spaces without endangering the seclusion. Correspondingly, Sarah Graham-Brown (1988) professes that a harem is in fact a female society that is arranged with its own hierarchies and is pervaded by workers and visitors who are not members of its inhabitants. As a result, contrary to Mernissi’s (1995) argument that considers the harem a private space limited to women and families, other scholars believe that harems could be considered public constitutions in which women play important social and cultural roles, however, this aspect of harems is deceptive to Western feminists.
Chandra Mohanty in her influential article “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1995) argues against Western hegemonic scholarship and colonialism in Western feminism theory. The existence of “Other” in white Western feminist texts is a result of three analytical assumptions according to Mohanty (1995). The first assumption is the category of “Third World women” which is shown as a group of women with similar experiences, goals, and historical backgrounds (pp121). The second assumption introduced by her is the model of power Western white feminists refer to in their writings. They write about men as oppressors and women as oppressed which according to Mohanty is not an adequate concept since it only emphasizes the binary “men versus women” (Mohanty, 1995). The last assumption is Mohanty’s criticism against Western methodological practices which as Mohanty says are oversimplified by Western white feminists. They seek proof of powerless women to support their notion of “Third World Women” as weak victims (1995). Furthermore, she condemned the paralyzing concept of “sisterhood” as it portrays a sense of similar experiences and goals across women, as if all women are commonly victims of patriarchal dominance (Mohanty,1995).
As Bell Hooks (2015) puts it, feminist theory would have so much to provide if it depicted women’s ways in which racial and sexual contexts are immutably linked rather than setting the struggles in direct opposition or blatantly banishing racism (p. 53). Thus, on the account of struggles and problems discussed in this article, to arrive at solutions one needs to deliberate on new and attentive relations between all women across the world.
In this article by trying to stay under the word count limits, I attempted to explore Third World feminists’ hostility to the misrepresentation of their conditions in nationalist discourses which try to delimit and stereotype them through the lens of tradition and religion. Additionally, I analyzed the parts played by Western feminists in oppressing colonized women. They do so by failing to observe racial, sexual, cultural, social, and historical context while trying to give voice to Third World women. As a form of solution to these struggles, colonized women have not been trying to put an end to Western feminism, rather they thrive on portraying a new representation of themselves in which their racial and cultural backgrounds are also taken into account.
References
- Bhabha, Homi (1990). Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge.
- Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855. Jane Eyre. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999.
- Carby, Hazel V (1997). White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood. In Heidi Safia Mirza (Ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge.
- Davies, Carole Boyce (1994). Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge
- Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (2000). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Graham-Brown, Sarah (1988). Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Hooks, Bell. (2915). Feminist theory: from margin to center. New York: Routledge (179 pages). ISBN: 9781138821651 (hardback) & ISBN: 9781138821668 (pbk)
- Katrak, Ketu (1992). Indian Nationalism, Gandhian ‘Satyagraha,’ and the Engendering of National Narratives. In A Parker, M Russo, D Sommer & P Yeager (Eds.), Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge.
- McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge
- Mernissi, Fatima (1995). Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. New York: Perseus Books.
- Mohanty, Chandra (1995). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. In Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (Eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
- Peterson, Kirsten Holst & Rutherford, Anna (Eds.) (1986). A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-colonial Women’s Writing. Oxford: Dangaroo Press.
- Peterson, Kirsten Holst (1995). First Things First: Problems of Feminist Approach to African Literature. In Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (Eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
- Richardson, D., McLaughlin, J. & Casey, M, E. (2006), Intersections between feminist and queer theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (192 pages). ISBN-13: 9781403945310.
- Said, Edward (1977). Orientalism. London: Penguin.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1985). Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism. Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (Autumn), 235-61.
- This Bridge Called My Back. 1981-1983. Writings by radical women of color. Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua edition. Retrieved from https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Moraga_Cherrie_Anzaldual_Gloria_eds_This_Bridge_Called_My_Back_Writings_by_Radical_Women_of_Color-Kitchen_Table_Women_of_Color_Press.pdf
- Tyagi, Ritu. 2014. Understanding Postcolonial Feminism in Relation with Postcolonial and Feminist Theories. International journal of language and linguistics, Vol.1. No.2
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