Postcolonial Feminism

Critiquing Western nation-centered perspectives on gender, race, class, and sexuality, interrogating the colonial legacies that still impact relationships between first- and third-world peoples and providing innovative ways for understanding difference in a transnational world mark a few of the primary commitments of postcolonial feminism. Postcolonial feminism can be understood in relation to postcolonial theory generally. Perspectives with similar commitments include third-world feminism, which centers on the experiences and ideas of women from so-called third world countries, and transnational feminism, which explores the construction of gender across nation-state boundaries in the context of globalization. Postcolonial feminism emerged in the humanities and social sciences in the late 1980s with key figures such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. It has been utilized in communication since the mid 1990s in the work of scholars such as Radha S. Hegde, Raka Shome, and Radhika Parameswaran. As a perspective rather than a unified theory, postcolonial feminism begins with two related projects: (1) critiquing hegemonic Western feminism emerging out of the United States and Western Europe and (2) formulating culturally, geographically, and historically grounded feminist theories and politics in relation to broader transnational processes.

In the first project, postcolonial feminists share with postcolonial theorists a critique of Western depictions of the East. Postcolonial feminists contend that Western feminism often adopts and reproduces many of the same troubling representations of the East and the other as Western humanism. More specifically, depictions and treatment of third-world, subaltern, or marginalized women often reproduce colonization by featuring third-world woman as a monolithic object who is a victim of the universal conditions of patriarchy or male domination. In this homogenizing of all women, third-world women are often talked about not only as victims, but as powerless and as traditional. Furthermore, concepts such as reproduction, family, and patriarchy often get used to describe women's experiences, ignoring the geographical, cultural, and historical particularities [Page 767]that make those experiences meaningful. The outcome is a denying or silencing of agency and the ability of individual women to create and respond to their unique situations.

In addition to challenging the ethnocentric universalism in which Euro-American beliefs and ideologies end up the norm by which all other cultural, political, and familial formations are evaluated, postcolonial feminists also are concerned with issues of power. All people are subjects of the cultural and social relations out of which they emerge, but when the third-world woman is featured as a coherent entity, power relations appear unilateral and unchanging across time, place, or culture. Power is viewed in binary terms of powerless and powerful where women are powerless and men are powerful. In line with the broader postcolonial critique of first-world, third-world binary oppositions, postcolonial feminists argue that the depiction of third-world women as powerless is not unlike the binary between Western and third-world women where Western women are secular and liberated as opposed to the veiled and traditional other.

The second project of postcolonial feminism—developing culturally, historically, and geographically specific feminist theories and politics in relation to transnational processes—involves centering the perspectives of third-world women, offering alternative theories about gender and gendered practices, and investigating the way that global flows of capital and culture impact people's gendered experiences. Fundamentally, postcolonial feminism centers third-world women as the creators of knowledge. Uncovering, translating, and interpreting texts written by third-world women is central to this project. Additionally, this work complicates the theorizing of gender and gendered practices by re-interpreting practices that have been figured as backward, traditional, or otherwise problematic. For instance, the Muslim hijab or veil has often been construed as a symbol of oppression; however, many Muslim women have argued that for them, the hijab is a source of personal freedom. Additionally, although silence has often been considered a negative concept within Western feminist theory, Hegde has shown through ethnographic research in South Asia how, in some instances, silence is a rich site for women's agency. Within communication studies, the postcolonial feminist approach has often been utilized to frame ethnographic research on gender as well as to critique media representations of non-Western women.

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