Postcolonial and decolonial subaltern feminisms

ABSTRACT

The encounter between postcolonialism and feminism, since the 1980s, has brought about important theoretical and political contributions to both fields, reverberating in the debate on gender to the present day. This article examines how the geopolitical division between North and South has influenced the global feminist debate, engendering a conflictual feminist discourse. This article intends to highlight the political dimension of conflict in those feminist representations brought forward by postcolonial and decolonial interventions, which denounce colonial dynamics inside the movement and question the scope of its representational capacity. I propose the term ‘subaltern feminisms’ to understand these internal dynamics, as put forward by Third World feminisms, in their postcolonial and decolonial diversity. I first explore the theoretical and political transformations that facilitated the encounter between postcolonialism and feminism. I go on to develop the concept of ‘subaltern feminisms’, proposing it as an analytical category that highlights the conflictual dimension within the global feminist agenda. I then argue that decolonial feminism assembles different Latin American subaltern feminisms by articulating and reinstating decolonization as a political project. Finally, I critically examines the concept of ‘coloniality of gender’ as a feminist contribution to the ‘decolonial turn’.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial feminism
• decolonial feminism
• subaltern feminisms
• decolonial turn
• coloniality of gender

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the blind reviewers and editors of this article, especially to Gianmaria Colpani and David Lloyd. The reviews were fundamental to strengthening my central argument and to improving the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The article was translated by Vera Peixoto. All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are hers.

2 Syed Farid Alatas, ‘Academic Dependency and the Global Division of Labour in the Social Sciences’, Current Sociology, 51(6), 2003, pp 599–613; Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007; Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses (eds), Epistemologias do Sul, São Paulo: Cortez, 2010.

3 Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘The Possibilities of, and for, Global Sociology: A Postcolonial Perspective’, in Julian Go (ed), Postcolonial Sociology, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013, pp 295–314; Raewyn Connell, ‘Social Science on a World Scale: Connecting the Pages’, Sociologies in Dialogue, 1(1), 2015, pp 1–16.

4 For the notion of democratic antagonism, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd Edn, London: Verso, 2001.

5 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism: The New Critical Idiom, New York: Routledge, 2005.

6 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism.

7 Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp 271–313.

8 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, p 207.

9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967.

10 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p 138.

11 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p 129.

12 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

13 Deepika Bahri, ‘Feminism in/and Postcolonialism’, in Neil Lazarus (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp 199–220.

14 Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida, ‘Intervenções feministas: pós-colonialismo, poder e subalternidade’, Estudos Feministas, 21(2), 2013, pp 689–700.

15 See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University California Press, 2010.

16 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature, London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

17 Bahri, ‘Feminism in/and Postcolonialism’, p 202.

18 Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 1998, p 98.

19 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back.

20 See Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, 20(2), 1994, pp 328–356.

21 See Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

22 Nancy Fraser, ‘Progressive Neoliberalism versus Reactionary Populism: A Hobson’s Choice’, in Heinrich Geiselberger (ed), The Great Regression, Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2017, pp 40–48.

23 Sonia E. Alvarez, ‘Feminismos Latinoamericanos’, Estudos Feministas, 6(2), 1998, pp 265–284.

24 See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998.

25 Sonia E. Alvarez, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro and Marcela Ríos Tobar, ‘Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms’, Signs, 28(2), 2003, pp 537–579; Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, ‘Etnocentrismo y colonialidad en los feminismos latino-americanos: complicidades y consolidación de las hegemonias feministas en el espacio transnacional’, in Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal and Karina Ochoa Muñoz (eds), Tejiendo de otro modo: Feminismo, epistemología y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala, Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2014, pp 309–324.

26 Breny Mendoza, ‘Transnational Feminism in Question’, Feminist Theory, 3(3), 2002, pp 295–314.

27 Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York and London: Methuen, 1987.

28 Céli Regina Jardim Pinto, ‘Feminismo, história e poder’, Revista de Sociologia e Política, 18(36), 2010, pp 15–23.

29 Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal and Karina Ochoa Muñoz (eds), Tejiendo de otro modo: Feminismo, epistemología y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala, Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2014.

30 From a Black feminist perspective, see Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism’, Feminist Review, 17, 1984, pp 3–19.

31 See Karina Bidaseca and Vanessa Vazquez Laba (eds), Descolonizando el feminismo desde y en América Latina, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot, 2011.

32 Chandra T. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, boundary 2, 12(3), 1984, pp 333–358.

33 Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’, p 334.

34 Chandra T. Mohanty, ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles’, in Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonising Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, pp 221–251.

35 See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

36 See Mohanty, ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited’, p 223.

37 Mohanty, ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited’, p 224.

38 Bahri, ‘Feminism in/and Postcolonialism’, p 202.

39 In the past twenty years, another potentially unifying issue has been the identification of the specific violence directed against women in politics, exemplified in the Brazilian context by the controversial impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party) in 2016 and the shocking murder of Marielle Franco (Socialism and Liberty Party) in 2018. See Mona Lena Krook, Violence against the Women in Politics, Oxford: Oxford Press, 2020.

40 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

41 In Portuguese and Spanish, the verb ‘decolonize’ includes the letter ‘s’ (descolonizar), generating disagreement around its interpretation. While the words are generally interchangeable, the version without ‘s’ in both Portuguese and Spanish (decolonizar) is associated to the ‘decolonial turn’. See Walter D. Mignolo, Desobediencia Epistémica: retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2010, p 19.

42 For a systematization of the main influences and concepts that make up the decolonial turn, see Luciana Ballestrin, ‘América Latina e o giro decolonial’, Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política 11, 2013, pp 89–117.

43 Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves, ‘Abya Yala’, in Ivana Jinkings (ed), Enciclopédia Latino-Americana, 2006, available at: http://latinoamericana.wiki.br/verbetes/a/abya-yala (accessed 30 October 2021).

44 See Karina Bidaseca, ‘Reconociendo las superfícies de nuestras hendiduras. Cartografiando el Sur de nuestros Feminismos’, in Karina Bidaseca, Alejandro de Oto, Juan Obarrio and Marta Sierra (eds), Legados, genealogias y memórias poscoloniales en América Latina: escritas fronterizas desde el Sur, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot, 2014, pp 243–244.

45 See Alvarez, Friedman, Beckman et al., ‘Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms’.

46 See Sirin Adlbi Sibai, La cárcel del feminismo: Hacia un pensamiento islámico decolonial, Madrid: Akal Ediciones, 2016; Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism, London: Pluto Press, 2021.

47 See Luciana Ballestrin, ‘Post-democracy and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Latin America: The Rise of the Left Turns and the Brazilian Democratic Failure’, in Vladimir Puzone and Luis Felipe Miguel (eds), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp 259–283.

48 Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi, ‘Post-neoliberalism in Latin America: Rebuilding and Reclaiming the State after Crisis’, Development and Change, 43(1), 2012, pp 1–21.

49 See the problematic and provocative essay by Jorge Castañeda, ‘Latin America’s Left Turn’, Foreign Affairs, 85(3), 2006, pp 28–43. For a critical perspective, see Maxwell Cameron, ‘Latin America’s Left Turns: Beyond Good and Bad’, Third World Quarterly, 30(2), 2009, pp 331–348.

50 See Fabrício Pereira da Silva, ‘Padrões de Participação em Governos de Esquerda na América Latina: Brasil e Venezuela em perspectiva comparada’, DADOS Revista de Ciências Sociais, 59(3), 2016, pp 651–681.

51 See Leonardo Avritzer, Lilian Cristina Bernardo Gomes, Marjorie Corrêa Marona and Fernando Antônio Carvalho Dantas (eds), O constitucionalismo democrático latino-americano em debate: soberania, separação de poderes e sistema de direitos, Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017.

52 Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal and Karina Ochoa Muñoz, ‘Introducción’, in Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal and Karina Ochoa Muñoz (eds), Tejiendo de otro modo: Feminismo, epistemología y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala, Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2014, p 36.

53 See Marlise Matos and Sonia E. Alvarez (eds), O feminismo estatal participativo brasileiro, Vol. 1, Porto Alegre: Editora Zouk, 2018.

54 Patrícia Chávez, Tania Quiroz, Dunia Mokranis and María Lugones, Despatriarcalizar para descolonizar la gestión pública, Cuadernos para el debate y la descolonización, La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2011.

55 See Macarena Gómez-Barris, Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

56 For example, in the Southern Cone, Cristina Kirchner (Argentine), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil) and Michele Bachelet (Chile) were three women presidents in the left turn context. The Dilma Rousseff government also sought to name women for several executive positions. And after 2010, parliamentary representation in Bolivia incorporated the principle of gender equality.

57 Miñoso, ‘Etnocentrismo y colonialidad’, p 314.

58 Ochy Curiel, ‘Hacia la construcción de un feminismo descolonizado’, in Miñoso, Correal and Muñoz (eds), Tejiendo de otro modo, p 333.

59 Miñoso, Correal and Muñoz, ‘Introducción’, p 32.

60 Miñoso, Correal and Muñoz, ‘Introducción’, p 32.

61 María Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia, 25(4), 2010, pp 742–759.

62 Arturo Escobar, ‘Mundos y conocimientos de otro modo: el programa de investigación modernidad/colonialidad latinoamericano’, Tabula Rasa, 1, 2003, pp 58–86.

63 Arturo Escobar, ‘Prefacio’, in Miñoso, Correal and Muñoz (eds), Tejiendo de otro modo, p 12.

64 Escobar, ‘Prefacio’, p 12.

65 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 11(2), 2000, p 342.

66 Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del poder’.

67 Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality’, Transmodernity, 1(1), 2011.

68 See Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System’, International Social Science Journal, 44(4), 1992, pp 549–557.

69 Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del poder’, p 373.

70 Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del poder’, p 379.

71 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

72 See María Lugones, ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, 2 (spring), 2008, pp 1–17; Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’.

73 Karina Bidaseca, ‘Los peregrinajes de los feminismos de color en el pensamiento de María Lugones’, Estudos Feministas, 22(3), 2014, pp 953–964.

74 Bidaseca, ‘Reconociendo las superfícies de nuestras hendiduras’.

75 Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, pp 746–747.

76 Claudia Lima Costa, ‘Equivocação, tradução e interseccionalidade performativa: observações sobre ética e prática feministas descoloniais’, in Karina Bidaseca, Alejandro de Oto, Juan Obarrio and Marta Sierra (eds), Legados, genealogias y memórias poscoloniales en América Latina: escritas fronterizas desde el Sur, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot, 2014, p 281.

77 Lima Costa, ‘Equivocação, tradução e interseccionalidade performativa’.

78 Lugones, ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, p 7.

79 Lugones, ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, p 2.

80 Lugones, ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, p 8.

81 Lugones, ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, p 10.

82 In a critical review of Oyewùmi’s work, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf criticises Oyewùmi’s argument that gender is not a relevant category in many African societies, particularly the Yoruba. According to her, Oyewùmi’s study did not consider sexuated bodies and their implications in different aspects of social life. See Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, ‘“Yorubas Don’t Do Gender”: A Critical Review of Oyeronke Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses’, African Identities, 1(1), 2003, pp 122–142.

83 Chilla Bulbeck offers an interesting criticism of ‘declension narratives’ of colonialism, that is, narratives that consider gender exclusively as a colonial imposition and construct a reversal of the story, ‘claiming that colonised women had status and power which they lost under the white patriarchal rule of colonists, both male and female’. See Chilla Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p 19.

84 See Santiago Castro-Gómez, El tonto y los canallas: notas para un republicanismo transmoderno, Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2019.

85 Segato has also offered a critique of Oyewùmi’s work from an anthropological perspective. See Rita Segato, ‘Gender, Politics, and Hybridism in the Transnationalization of the Yoruba Culture’, in Jacob Kẹhinde Olupona and Terry Rey (eds), Òrìşà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, pp 485–512.

86 Rita Segato, ‘Gênero e colonialidade: em busca de chaves de leitura e de um vocabulário estratégico descolonial’, E-cadernos CES Online, 18, 2012, p 119, available at: http://eces.revues.org/1533 (accessed 30 October 2021).

87 Julieta Paredes, Hilando fino desde el Feminismo Comunitario, 2nd Edn, La Paz: Comunidad Mujeres Creando Comunidad, 2014.

88 Paredes, Hilando fino desde el Feminismo Comunitario.

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Luciana Ballestrin

Luciana Ballestrin is Political Science Associate Professor in the International Relations undergraduate course, coordinator of the Political Science postgraduate program and editor of the South American Journal of Political Science at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Politics, Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil. She is co-editor of Feminist Political Theory: Contributions to the Gender Debate in Brazil (Zouk, 2020) and author of various articles and chapters on postcolonial and decolonial theories from a Latin American view. She works in contemporary political theory, particularly, by seeking to advance the dialogue between postcolonialism and democracy. Her current research focus on the global crisis of liberal democracy and the de-democratization processes at national and international levels.