Decolonial Feminist Research Articles

A decolonial feminist inquiry into women’s agency in the urban landscape in 19th-century Iran

ABSTRACT Proposing a socio-historical and decolonial analytical lens, I challenge the current dominant discourses surrounding Iranian women’s agency in emerging public spaces in the late 19th century. I scrutinise the urban landscape in late 19th-century Iran, drawing from a variety of archival data, such as first-hand memoirs, travelogues, and official reports, to situate Iranian women in a broader sociohistorical context and present a nuanced understanding of their presence in emerging public spaces. To do so, I compare texts written by the non-locals with those written by local observers with a specific focus on their characterisation of women and their presence and agency in the newly emerging public spaces during this time. Having used grounded theory methods to carry out the initial examining and coding of the data, I investigate the degree to which the images portrayed by the local and non-local texts take into account the material circumstances of women. I deconstruct the dominant knowledge about Iranian women’s portrayal and reconstruct a layered sociohistorical interpretation of the findings, thereby proposing an alternative decolonial narrative of women’s agency in public spaces in 19th-century Iran. I contend that the prevalent historical portrayal of women’s agency, particularly in public spaces, is markedly shaped by one of the narratives of the late 19th century, i.e. that of the non-local Western observers. Building on a comparative analysis, I argue that to produce alternative decolonial place-based feminist knowledge, it is imperative to re-engage with domestic texts. By revisiting these sources, feminist scholars can question and deconstruct the dominant knowledge on women’s presence in urban landscapes and reconstruct a more accurate and diversified feminist narrative that acknowledges women’s dynamic interplay with the local and global forces which in itself is a decolonial feminist practice.

Decolonizing meanings climate crisis and land-based adaptions: From Indigenous women's perspectives in Western Canada

This paper explores the critical issue of decolonizing meanings within the context of the climate crisis and land-based adaptations, specifically focusing on Indigenous women's perspectives in Western Canada. The study focuses on the intricate relationship between Indigenous knowledge, culture, and the environment, emphasizing the unique insights that Indigenous women bring to the discourse surrounding climate change and adaptation. Drawing on the decolonial feminist research approach, community engagement, and participatory research methods, the paper highlights the diverse ways Indigenous women conceptualize the climate crisis and respond to the impacts of the climate crisis on their traditional lands. It critically examines the colonial legacies that have shaped environmental policies and interventions, often marginalizing Indigenous voices and perspectives. The findings advocate the importance of centering Indigenous women's knowledge and experiences in climate change discourse and policy-making. By decolonizing meanings, the paper advocates for a more inclusive and equitable approach to land-based adaptations that acknowledges the resilience and wisdom embedded in Indigenous land-based learning and practice. This research contributes to the ongoing dialogue on sustainable and culturally sensitive strategies for addressing the climate crisis, fostering a deeper understanding of the intersections between gender, Indigeneity, and environmental justice.

Embodying intimate border violence: collaborative art-research as multipliers of Latin American migrant women’s affects

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the decolonial feminist potential of multi-layered arts-research collaborations for critical research committed to advancing migrant justice. It reflects on the art-research collaborative project, ‘stitching voices, stitching bodies’, investigating the gendered, racialised, colonial and geopolitical dynamics of violence and resistance of Latin American migrant women. Collaborators included the author and visual artist Nina Franco, twenty anonymous Latin American survivors of violence, three Latin American women activists and a filmmaker, a British-Caribbean sound engineer and an Irish-Caribbean video editor. Through our art-research methodological engagements, the relationship between the researcher, artists and participants was significantly altered as we alternated between and simultaneously occupied those positions. Exchanging and complementing our skills and sensibilities, we tried new ways of working and overlapped various layers of expression to collectively produce knowledge that enhanced understandings of and multiplied affects concerning intimate border violence. Through our art, we were able to envision, explore and represent intimate border violence, coloniality and resistance to these in audio-visual and visceral ways that grasped and multiplied embodied affects not only for research participants and collaborators but also audiences.

The Black Woman in Caribbean Photography: Intersectional Narratives between Race and Gender

This article examines the evolution of the representation of Black women in the Caribbean photographic universe, establishing two significant moments: the foundation of the figure of the “Black woman” as a sign in nineteenth-century photography and the shift in paradigm in the work of contemporary Caribbean artists, with an emphasis on the photographic works of Renée Cox, from Jamaica, and María Magdalena Campos and Susana Pilar Delahante, both from Cuba. Some arguments from decolonial feminism, in the voice of María Lugones, are taken as theoretical sources, with an emphasis on the intersectionality between race and gender as an interpretative key to assess the evolution of the sign “Black woman” in Caribbean photography.

Examining meaning-making and decolonial resistance in Pakistani women's stories of navigating coloniality and gender

Although Pakistan attained independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, the effects of colonial violence endure in the psychosocial realities of Pakistani people. Centering the stories about coloniality of two women leaders working in nongovernmental organizations, this article examines how psychological processes of meaning-making and decolonial resistance manifest in women's engagement with (de)coloniality in Lahore, Pakistan. I draw from transnational and decolonial feminisms and critical psychologies to highlight how two women's contextually shaped realities reflect colonial legacies interlaced with local and global inequities, and to document the ways women construe and resist coloniality-driven gender injustices. Using thematic narrative analysis, findings show that these women make sense of and resist coloniality through an intersectional approach, historical counter-narratives, and reimagination. The article discusses how context-specific decolonial strategies demonstrate women's agency and resistance within transnational feminist praxis, contributing to pluralistic and justice-enhancing approaches. The findings contribute to decolonizing psychological research by documenting Pakistani women's psychological processes and advancing non-Eurocentric knowledge and practices.

A French Materialist and Decolonial Perspective on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today

This short commentary is part of a book symposium about Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, edited by Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel. It discusses certain chapters from a French materialist lesbian feminist perspective, as well as from a decolonial feminist perspective. Introducing Colette Guillaumin’s sexage proposal and referring to Monique Wittig’s analysis of the heterosexualization of women and of the “straight mind,” the essay recalls the importance of Black feminists in the United States and elsewhere and proposes a theory of the interlocking social-structural relations of sex, race, and class as complementary elements moving toward a renewal of Marxist-feminist reflections from a historical perspective that also accounts for the colonial roots of today’s discussions on care and reproductive labor.

A Feminist Critique of International Practices

Abstract Feminist social theories, especially intersectional and decolonial ones, have been footnotes at best in practice-oriented research in international relations. This disciplinary exclusion of gender studies’ concepts from “international practice theories” (IPTs) or the "practice turn" has marginalized inquiries into power and reflexivity in action. As a result, IPTs have failed to theorize how practitioners’ reflexivity is shaped by local manifestations of systemic lines of difference like race, gender, coloniality, or class. This Theory Note argues that intersectional and decolonial feminist approaches can address this gap. We demonstrate that positionality and privilege condition practical reflexivity by shaping (1) normative interpretations of the world, (2) the content of social critique, and (3) the reception of such critique. Taking feminists as foundational theorists of international practices is critical to addressing some ontological challenges encountered by current IPT scholarship. In this Theory Note, we develop a productive conversation between the two bodies of literature around concepts of background knowledge and competence, which allows for a better understanding of the interplay of structural power and individual reflexivity in everyday interactions.

‘Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: cooking on TV gets a decolonial makeover’

ABSTRACT With the proliferation of food-based content on streaming platforms like Netflix and the decolonial turn in food studies, feminism and media studies, we see the emergence of programs that deviate from prior colonial tropes of food exploration. One such case study explicated in this article is Iranian-American writer and cook Samin Nosrat’s Salt Acid Fat Heat, based on a popular and equally ground-breaking book of the same title by her. A close reading of the four parts of the series, and its production content and choices helps unpack how it is moving toward manifesting a decolonial feminist approach with regards to narratives about food.

Sterilizing body‐territories: Understanding contemporary cases of forced sterilization in the United States and China

AbstractIn the summer of 2020, shocking headlines reverberated across global media outlets, revealing harrowing stories of forced sterilizations and reproductive abuses committed against Uighurs in China and immigrant women in the United States. The simultaneity of these events sheds light on essential aspects of a transnational order characterized by mass surveillance and detention, a defining feature of diverse contemporary political regimes. This article explores how reproductive violence intertwines with systems of detention and mass surveillance through these two cases. I do so by weaving together the decolonial feminist framework of body‐territory and the principles of reproductive justice that allow for a nuanced examination of how the control of the reproductive lives of Uighur and immigrant women reinforce the mechanisms of exclusion and surveillance embedded in state infrastructures. The demand for the right to bear children and to parent them under dignified conditions, free from violence, is increasingly pressing in a world where reproduction has become an instrument of surveillance and containment. This article engages in an ethnographic exploration of electronic paper trails, adopting what Geiger and Ribes aptly termed “trace ethnography.”

Queering the norm, norming the queer: remaking Man through linguistic citizenship

ABSTRACT This article centres multilingualism in relation to gender, sexuality, culture, and race, presenting the narrative of one participant, Samson, who self-identifies as a black, queer, man and refers to several linguistic varieties that he has some proficiency in. The narrative emerged from an interview conducted in which Samson discussed his language portrait, a multimodal biographical method. Thematic analysis was used as a starting point in interpreting how Samson discursively constructs language in relation to gender, racial, sexual, and cultural positions. To unpack Samson’s constructions of self and others we bring decolonial feminist theoretical approaches in conversation with linguistic citizenship. We argue that Samson is trying to undo the normative conceptions of a range of identity categories and that he narrates several different discursive and social strategies to develop new subjectivities for himself and to create new relationalities. In his decolonial project of being, he tries to queer the norm and norm the queer. Samson’s story provides us with the possibility of living and languaging outside of colonial structures.

Decolonial Feminism and the Open Borders Debate

Decolonial Feminism and the Open Borders Debate

“Eu tenho a fama de ser um pouco transgressora!”: perspectivas interseccionais de enfermeiras negras

This study used the theoretical-methodological framework of intersectional and decolonial feminisms, conceiving the need to problematize discrimination/oppression of gender, race, class, professional training and others, as phenomena in the field of social psychology. The objective of this study was to analyze the perception of self-declared black nurses regarding the hierarchies of knowledge and power in health care work. Seven nursing professionals who work/have worked in hospital units of the SUS in the State of Rio de Janeiro from March 2020 to the moment of the fieldwork were interviewed. The results were divided into two analytical categories: 1.“The Doctor is the demigod!” and the “Doctor without a doctorate!”; 2. Knowledge-power hierarchies and racial relations in health. The results showed that according to their perception, the medical category still exerts a discursive hegemony mainly in general hospitals and psychiatric hospitals. Nurses who hold a managerial/leadership position reported experiences of discrimination linked to gender, race, professional class, among others, and that they react to these through a posture of confrontation and fight against racist and sexist structures. It was concluded that the research shows the importance of questioning the socio-sexual and racial division of work in health and its implications, of acknowledging the protagonism to black women in research, and also the importance of the role of these women within health care in the SUS.

Denaturalizzare il sesso. Nicole-Claude Mathieu e l’analisi antropologica delle classi di sesso

This essay presents some of the main contributions of Nicole-Claude Mathieu’s work to anthropology and feminist theory. The first section is devoted to framing Mathieu’s production within French materialist feminism. The ethnologist repeatedly recalls how the forms of oppression experienced by women as a minority group in social relations of sex and the struggles that ensue underlie the epistemological transformations that invest disciplinary knowledge from a feminist perspective. Next, the article addresses the three different ways of conceptualising the relationship between sex and gender and the introduction of the category of social sex to denaturalize sex, understood as a political category. Its analysis is thus compared with some of the contributions of decolonial feminism regarding the category of gender. Just as in her study of the category of sex, we also find in the analysis of androcentrism in anthropology her ability to question the dominant frameworks of ethnological thought. In particular, Mathieu delves into the relationship between androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and naturalism to understand not only how they operate distortions in the production of ethnographic and ethnological knowledge, but also how they define the framework within which to define the relationship between Western “us” and non-Western “others” in reference to social relations of sex.

Docência e interseccionalidade: o que dizem as professoras

This article analyses the narratives of four black female teachers about the racism that permeated their bodies, highlighting the intersections that crossed them in teaching. The process of feminization of teaching, a stereotype linked to the gender marker, points to the exclusion of women in the sciences. Black decolonial feminism questions social arrangements based on a Eurocentric, patriarchal and colonialist vision and how they produce oppressions such as racism and sexism in academia. Through the lens of intersectionality, the narratives of the female professors show the impediment and access to spaces of power.

Indigeneity at the Limits of Transculturation: Decolonial Aesthetics in Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow

Abstract: Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. A philosophical question arises about the nature of gendered embodied experience and materiality: How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through a reading of Claudia Llosa's film The Milk of Sorrow ( La teta asustada ) (2009). The film, we show, reworks racial, gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism and its attendant figuration of resistance by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young Indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who, in encounter with popular culture and the global marketplace, renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her young town and country. We signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination.

Ain’t I a Mother?: The Forgotten Narratives of Korean Transnational Adoptees’ Birth Mothers

This study explores the forgotten histories and narratives of birth mothers of Korean transnational adoptees. By shedding light on the circumstances of relinquishing their children for adoption, I critique the system of transnational adoption in which patriarchy, coloniality, and the adoption industry intersect. This research aims to dismantle monolithic and patriarchal models of motherhood by uncovering the untold stories and lived experiences of birth mothers and by demonstrating how these mothers have continued and expanded their motherhood to search for their children, reconcile with their pasts, and embrace other returned Korean adoptees. To achieve the goals of my study, I ask: How do social factors such as class, marital status, gender, age, adoption industry, and colonial ideology cause the relinquishment of children for adoption? How have birth mothers transformed their motherhood to search for their children and reconcile with their pasts? To answer these questions, I employ transnational and decolonial feminist theories and qualitative methodologies to document birth mothers’ lived experiences and marginalized narratives.

A Decolonial Feminist Politics of Fieldwork: Centering Community, Reflexivity, and Loving Accountability

Abstract International studies scholarship has benefitted from insights from anthropology, peace and conflict studies, geography, and other disciplines to craft a thoughtful set of reflections and considerations for researchers to take with them “into the field” when they embark on “fieldwork.” In this essay, we map out a history of critical approaches to fieldwork, starting with the encounters that initially encouraged reflection on the positionality of the researcher and the power dynamics of research. Building on decolonial feminist scholarship, we show how a commitment to reflexive practice “in the field” has developed further, through a reflection on the self as a researcher and on “the field” as a construct. This ethical and political commitment prompts a rethinking of key concepts in fieldwork (and research more generally), including those of “the researcher,” “the research participant” (or “population”), “expertise,” and what constitutes “data” and “knowledge.” We argue that a preferable approach to critical fieldwork is grounded in feminist and decolonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist politics. This approach is committed not just to reflecting critically on “the field” and the interactions of the researcher within it but also to challenging the divisions, exclusions, and structures of oppression that sustain the separations between “here” and “there,” “researcher” and “researched,” and “knower" and “known.”

White privilege and professionalization: a decolonial and critical feminist perspective on professional nursing

This article offers a critical perspective linking invisibility with the political foundations of the dominant, Eurocentric model of modern nursing. Using critical feminist and decolonial feminist frameworks, this paper begins by analyzing gendered, reproductive labor in the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution in Britain and Europe and how the current dominant model of nursing was developed. The second part of the paper suggests a critical link between white supremacy, colonial violence and the professionalization of nursing work. Finally this paper calls on nursing scholarship to move beyond the narrow definition of nursing within the professional framework to include people who have done and continue to do the work of nursing despite being denied the title because of segregation and colonial violence.

Feminist Community Psychology and the Advancement of Women in South Africa

In this presentation, I offer a brief personal reflection of my entry and introduction to psychology. I start from positionsing myself to highlight how we do not come into institutions of higher learning and our disciplines as empty vessels but with histories that shape how we view the world. Drawing from social justice scholars and my earlier work, I point to how psychology needs to shift from locating ‘problems’ within individuals but instead acknowledge the structural imbalances that contribute to individual and collective dis-eases facing society. I go on to call for a decolonial feminist psychology that acknowledges the multiple oppressions faced by people in many formely colonised nations such as South Africa, with a particular focus on women. I further show how visual methodologies such as embroideries offer the potential for epistemic justice and decolonial possibilities by centering community members as co-constrctors of knowledge. I conclude by highlighting how hope carries the potential for psychological healing.

Intersectional perspectives on land relations of oil palm plantations: A decolonial feminist approach on Indonesia's bioeconomy

Indonesia's oil palm plantations, a critical sector for the country's bioeconomy, have attracted significant attention, especially due to the climate crisis. While the government sought to expand the national industry through boosting biodiesel policy, the European Union (EU) imposes a ban on imports of deforestation-linked commodities, including palm oil. Facing this development, this article seeks to analyse Indonesia's oil palm plantations from the perspective of land relations. Current research suggests that state incentives for a societal transformation towards a bioeconomy tend to exacerbate rather than reduce existing global social inequalities in the agricultural sector. While this critique is built mainly on studies that focus on land-labour relations in a broader way, the studies fall short of developing a more complex and sufficiently historicised perspective on the (re-)construction and (re-)configurations of intersecting categories of inequalities. Drawing on decolonial feminist approach on intersectionality, this article attempts to develop an analytical framework that considers the intersection of inequalities as historically mutually constructing social relations for the study of changing land relations in the context of the expansion of agro-industrial biomass production. The article shows how control over land access and use is reconfigured, perpetuating intersectional social inequalities. This paper argues that a just socio-ecological transformation must incorporate these complexities of social inequalities in order to change them. The aim of the paper is to urge the necessity of intersectional perspectives on social changes in the context of the bioeconomy.