Feminism, Postcolonial

Abstract

This entry considers the complex terrain of theoretical interventions into the fields of postcolonial studies and feminist studies. In the 1970s, postcolonialism was inaugurated within the field of literary studies, but early postcolonial theoretical texts did not engage with the concept of gender within the histories and legacies of colonialism and post‐colonialism in a sustained manner. Likewise, in the 1980s, postcolonial feminist scholars began to expose the latent ethnocentrism in some Western feminist scholarship, which focused on objectifying and victimizing the “third world woman,” in order to construct the “third world woman” as a cohesive, unified object of study. Postcolonial feminism emphasizes that although gender identities are relational and historical, as opposed to fixed or essential, they also remain crucial categories of analysis.