The Contributions of Decolonial Feminism: Creating Space for Global South Women to ‘Speak Back’

Abstract

In this paper, I provide insight into how the voices and agency of women in the Global South have become silenced and how the discourse about Global South women presents them as the Other, a homogenous group of women characterised by their feminine gender and their being ‘Third World’. Within the management and organisation studies (MOS) discipline, the lives and work of those in the Global South are framed by the gaze of the West, imposing a sense of superiority and perpetrating their Otherness. Moreover, the voices and lived experiences of indigenous Global South women are often ignored and the full contribution they can make to MOS is under-theorised and under-researched, thereby under-valued. As a result, little is known about how these women construct their identity as women and their work and organisation/organising experiences in the context of their social, cultural and historical location. In this paper, I challenge this colonial tradition by introducing decolonial feminist theory to address the silenced voices of women from the Global South and provide a space for Global South women to become producers of knowledge and a visible part of the discourse about work and organisation/organising. Decolonial feminist theory recognises Global South women’s capacity of for intellectual autonomy and their capability to create and organise. By this means, this theoretical perspective embraces meaningful engagement with women whose voice and agency has been removed and facilitates the production of knowledge from the perspective of Otherness, specifically the gendered colonial difference.