Postcolonial Feminism

Enacted February 24, 2014 and effective until August 1, 2014, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act targeted Ugandans of minority sexual orientations and gender identities—many of whom self-identify as 'kuchu'—by imposing life sentences for homosexual sex and same-sex marriage. The original Anti-Homosexuality Bill introduced in 2009 promised even worse for kuchus: it would have mandated that all Ugandans report known homosexuals and threatened execution for serial offenders and other perpetrators of “aggravated homosexuality.” In the context of Ugandan political conflict, emerging international human rights norms, and global asymmetries of power, Uganda has become an ideological battlefront where competing actors—both US-based and Ugandan—advance their respective visions of a just and righteous global society. These factors mandate that US-based activists and organizations painstakingly consider how (or whether) they can advocate responsibly and effectively for international human rights related to gender identity and sexual orientation. Through interdisciplinary lenses and critical analysis, this paper explores three questions:

• How is Uganda distinct from other sites of antigay legislation?
• How have US-based organizations impacted Ugandan discourse and policy toward kuchus?
• How can US-based rights advocates and activists campaign for kuchus without doing them further harm?

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

El artículo “El caso peruano de esterilización forzada. Notas para una cartografía de la resistencia,” propuesto para el dossier “Género, Violencia y Política en la Historia Reciente Latinoamericana” de la presente edición, es una breve introducción al caso (1996-2000) desde el panorama (no exhaustivo) de la resistencia conformada por mujeres indígenas, organizaciones feministas, organizaciones en pro de los derechos humanos, sociedad civil organizada, investigadores, periodistas y artistas. Sobre todo, se requiere consignar aquellas intervenciones en el espacio y esfera públicos que han dibujado la lucha por alcanzar la justicia (penal y/o social) frente a los miles de casos de esterilización forzada en el Perú, ayudando al reconocimiento legítimo de los derechos sexuales y los derechos reproductivos sobre todo de las mujeres. Es decir: una cartografía del terreno en el que se desplaza el movimiento de resistencia social.

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

Women’s movements have a long, diverse history. Yet, the diversity and plurality of these female voices and modes of action have been often occulted. Feminist ARTivists are increasingly expressing their demands across the continent, notably through hip hop or visual arts. We welcome papers on ARTivism and Afro-feminisms, Xicana Feminism, and Indigenous feminism in North, South and Central America.

This paper considers perspectives on marriage in the Queer and feminist community reviewing key contemporary thinkers on the subject and using direct interviews and material from radical Queer activists and academics in the field.  It examines problems inherent in the fight for gay marriage and examines the ways gay marriage intersects with issues of race and class. I conducted dozens of interviews over the course of the research involved in this project.  Many of them  were broadcast in a documentary entitled, “Beyond Gay Marriage, broadcast on KPFA in 2010 and podcast by Race, Poverty & the Environment http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer. Quotations from these interviews are interwoven in the text without specific footnote. Unattributed direct quotations are excerpted from the transcript of Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010).

According to the logic of the gendered modernity/tradition binary, women in traditional societies are oppressed and women in modern societies liberated. While the binary valorizes modern women, it potentially erases gendered oppression in the West and undermines feminist movements on behalf of Western women. Using U.S. newspaper text, I ask whether female genital cutting (FGC) is used to define women in modern societies as liberated. I find that speakers use FGC to both uphold and challenge the gendered modernity/tradition binary. Speakers use FGC to denigrate non-Western cultures and trivialize the oppressions that U.S. women typically encounter, but also to make feminist arguments on behalf of women everywhere. I argue that in addition to examining how culturally imperialist logics are reproduced, theorists interested in feminist postcolonialism should turn to the distribution of such logics, emphasizing the who, where, when, and how of reinscription of and resistance to such narratives.

The Life of a Kashmiri Woman: Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation
Nyla Ali Khan
 New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2014, 137 pp. Reviewed by Ather Zia
The biography under review can also be categorized as a memoir authored by Nyla Ali Khan, who is a Kashmiri-American academic. Khan is the granddaughter of Begum Akbar Jehan—the subject of this book—and her husband Shiekh Mohammad Abdullah. Shiekh was the founder of the National Conference party and the first Muslim Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.[1] Jehan is well known as a political activist, especially for playing a pivotal role in Shiekh’s political missions that ranged from Quit Kashmir movement to plebiscite and finally succumbing to India’s hegemony in Kashmir. Shiekh’s increasing acquiescence with Indian policies cost him the carte blanche that the Kashmiri masses had granted him. Since his death in 1982, the public discourse around his legacy has become deeply hostile. From 1948 till the early seventies, Shiekh was seen as an unrelenting figure of Kashmiri nationalism. The Indian government ousted him from power in 1953, after which he was incarcerated multiple times. The political travails of Shiekh’s life thrust Jehan into the center-stage and forced her to singlehandedly carry forward their political mission and domestic duties.

Farewell to Empire is not a one-off act but an extremely complex process that has lasted many years. The decolonisation and de-Sovietisation of Ukrainian society is possible only by overcoming the mental effects of colonialism. Existence from revolution to revolution, and in consequence from revolution to war, was an experience shared by at least three generations of Ukrainian writers. However, each generation has either had different experiences with the previous political system, or none at all. Yet their lives are now connected with it through the experiences of previous generations. In the case of the contemporary analysis of Ukrainian women’s prose, the postcolonial perspective, combined with gender studies and a feminist critique, provides an extensive theoretical background for distinguishing the consequences of colonial/totalitarian practices and resistance strategies. In these narratives, women are the subjects and they speak in their own names. By analysing the literary re...

Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning is a resource for teachers and learners seeking to participate in the creation of radical and liberating spaces in the academy and beyond. This edited volume is inspired by, and applies, decolonial and feminist thought – two fields with powerful traditions of critical pedagogy, which have shared productive exchange.

The structure of this collection reflects the synergies between decolonial and feminist thought in its four parts, which offer reflections on the politics of knowledge; the challenging pathways of finding your voice; the constraints and possibilities of institutional contexts; and the relation between decolonial and feminist thought and established academic disciplines. To root this book in the political struggles that inspire it, and to maintain the close connection between political action and reflection in praxis, chapters are interspersed with manifestos formulated by activists from across the world, as further resources for learning and teaching.

These essays definitively argue that the decolonization of universities, through the re-examination of how knowledge is produced and taught, is only strengthened when connected to feminist and critical queer and gender perspectives. Concurrently, they make the compelling case that gender and feminist teaching can be enhanced and developed when open to its own decolonization.

Sycorax shapes a powerful figure and narrative thread through colonial and postcolonial thinking. This essay, written in the 1990s, lays out some of the influential ways in which the figure of Sycorax influenced postcolonial feminist methodologies.

A unique collection by leading scholars that explores the interplay of gender and globalization through an intersectional and postcolonial lens.

This insightful volume examines crucial questions, issues, and cases related to gender on a global scale. Drawing on an intersectional, postcolonial framework, the text exposes students to a variety of perspectives on how globalization has affected gender issues, and conversely how gender has informed global issues.

Readership : Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender is intended for Gender and Globalization courses out of Sociology and Gender Studies departments at the second- to fourth-year level.
    "The clear strength of Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender is its extraordinary breadth, which reflects the theoretical and methodological sophistication of global gender studies as a field."
    --Kimberly A. Williams, Mount Royal University

    "Every chapter is rooted in a feminist, queer, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and Indigenous framework. The contributing scholars/activists write with great knowledge about their subject matter but their passionate commitment to a better world is what really resonates."
    --Mythili Rajiva, University of Ottawa

This collection of essays examines how Southeast Asian women writers engage with the grand narratives of nationalism and the modern nation-state by exploring the representations of gender, identity and nation in the postcolonial literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Bringing to light the selected works of overlooked local women writers and providing new analyses of those produced by internationally-known women authors and artists, the essays situate regional literary developments within historicized geopolitical landscapes to offer incisive analyses and readings on how women and the feminine are imagined, represented, and positioned in relation to the Southeast Asian nation.The book, which features both cross-country comparative analyses and country-specific investigations, also considers the ideas of the nation and the state by investigating related ideologies, rhetoric, apparatuses, and discourses, and the ways in which they affect women’s bodies, subjectivities, and lived realities in both historical and contemporary Southeast Asian contexts. By considering how these literary expressions critique, contest, or are complicit in nationalist projects and state-mandated agendas, the collection contributes to the overall regional and comparative discourses on gender, identity and nation in Southeast Asian studies.

Afrikanische Intellektuelle arbeiten seit langem an einem neuen kulturellen Selbstbewusstsein ihres Kontinents und stellen dabei globalgesellschaftliche Großkonzepte wie Demokratie, Freiheit, Gender, Menschenrechte und Kosmopolitismus rigoros auf den Prüfstand. Sie analysieren das Nachwirken kolonialer Strukturen und formulieren – auch mittels kritischer Aneignung lokaler Praktiken – dezidiert postkoloniale Handlungsmaximen. Der Band versammelt die wichtigsten Beiträge afrikanischer Denkerinnen und Denker wie Achille Mbembe, Thaddeus Metz, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyewùmí, Mogobe B. Ramose, Tsenay Serequeberhan und Kwasi Wiredu zu diesen Themen und führt vor, was Afrikanische politische Philosophie in Zeiten internationaler Migrationsbewegungen heißen kann.

Drawing on fieldwork carried out in 2012-2013, this article explores the dynamics of identity and otherness within selected women’s intercultural associations in Italy in the light of the following issue: how to acknowledge differences among women - based primarily on ‘race’, ethnicity, legal status/citizenship, class and age - whilst maintaining a common political project. This article focuses on the contexts which facilitate the formation of such a project by promoting the contesting of rigid categorisation of women on grounds of nationality or culture. It first focuses on what is referred to as “a starting point a bit displaced”, secondly on the desire to move beyond divisions on nationality grounds and thirdly on the concept of hybridity as a bridge between women. At the same time, the article confronts those issues that might conceal power differentials among women and argues in favour of a notion of feminist reflexive solidarity.

Die Pädagogin und Journalistin Fiona Lorenz starb im Juli 2014. Der noch von ihr überarbeitete Beitrag zum Thema Frauenquote erschien postum 2017 im Sammelband zur Genderpolitik. Die Autorin, die in den 90er Jahren Frauenbeauftragte an der Universität Trier war und zum Thema "Lebensraum Universität" promoviert hat, räumt in ihrem Beitrag mit einigen der gebetsmühlenartig wiederholten Behauptungen zur angeblichen grundsätzlichen Benachteiligung von Frauen in Deutschland auf und eröffnet neue Perspektiven im Sinne der Freiheit des Individuums.

Esculpir el género. Nuevas fronteras de la mutilación genital femenina es una reflexión crítica en torno al cuerpo sexuado, o generizado, como atractor de violencia contra las mujeres. Con este objetivo, el libro realiza un análisis comparativo y transcultural entre diferentes formas institucionalizadas de mutilación genital femenina que constituyen la in-corporación o encarnación de la identidad sexual como constructo cultural, situando dentro de estas formas institucionalizadas de violencia tanto las mutilaciones sexuales rituales (ablación, escisión, infibulación y diversas prácticas de sociedades lejanas), como las nuevas formas de mutilación occidental, (clitoridectomías pediátricas por reasignación de sexo y la nueva moda de la cirugía estética genital). El recorrido crítico poscolonial que realiza este texto por los discursos elaborados en torno a estas prácticas revela no sólo la alterización y estigmatización de las “otras” culturas y la victimización de “la monolítica mujer del Tercer Mundo”, sino además cómo este diferimiento se instrumentaliza para construir por oposición la ilusión de la igualdad y la libertad como logros de la sociedad occidental.

Objective: Accurate assessment of pain is central to diagnosis and treatment in healthcare, especially in pediatrics. However, few studies have examined potential biases in adult observer ratings of children’s pain. Cohen et al. (2014) reported that adult participants rated a child undergoing a medical procedure as feeling more pain when the child was described as a boy as compared to a girl, suggesting a possible gender bias. To confirm, clarify, and extend this finding, we conducted a replication experiment and follow-up study examining the role of explicit gender stereotypes in shaping such asymmetric judgments.

Method: In an independent, pre-registered, direct replication and extension study with open data and materials (https://osf.io/t73c4/), we showed participants the same video from Cohen et al. (2014), with the child described as a boy or a girl depending on condition. We then asked adults to rate how much pain the child experienced and displayed, how typical the child was in these respects, and how much they agreed with explicit gender stereotypes concerning pain response in boys versus girls.

Results: Similar to Cohen et al. (2014), but with a larger and more demographically diverse sample, we found that the ‘boy’ was rated as experiencing more pain than the ‘girl’ despite identical clinical circumstances and identical pain behavior cross conditions. Controlling for explicit gender stereotypes eliminated the effect.

Conclusions: Explicit gender stereotypes—e.g., that boys are more stoic or girls are more emotive—may bias adult assessment of children’s pain.