Postcolonial Feminist Scholarship Research Articles

Saving Brown Women from Brown Men? “Refugee Women”, Gender and the Racialised Politics of Protection

Abstract White feminist scholarship in the Global North has drawn attention to the challenges facing women seeking protection under international refugee law (IRL). Whilst these efforts have improved outcomes for some women, they have largely failed to reconfigure the ways in which gendered experiences of persecution are conceptualised and represented. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, this article suggests that white feminist scholars have been largely complicit in a script that essentialises the experiences of women originating from the Global South. Where gender is taken into account, women from the Global South are typically understood and represented through a neo-imperial frame as disempowered, helpless “victims”, or as “Exotic Others” who need to be rescued from their “backward” cultures. The framing of “Refugee Women” as a homogenous and undifferentiated category ignores the complex intersections of race and gender shaping both women’s experiences and the racialised politics of protection. Moreover, because white feminist approaches have a colonial “blind spot”, they ignore the ways in which the international refugee regime is deeply entangled with the history of colonialism. In so doing, they replicate and reinforce racialised representations of Black and Muslim men as perpetrators of violence against women.

Negotiating the Melancholy of Alterity : The Oppositional Digital Visual Culture of East-Asian American Women Artists

Through the interview of four East-Asian American women artists of diverse backgrounds, alongside semiotic analysis of their selected works, I investigate their oppositional digital art practice as well as their general online experiences. The digital sphere replicates the same forms of racially and sexually based oppression that occurs in the non-digital world in rapidly diverging forms. The main findings demonstrate that digital technologies offer novel ways for East-Asian American artists to resist oppression, visibilize their struggles, and explore their identities. Oppositional techniques can be sorted into three broad categories describing the archival, discursive, and voyeuristic capabilities of digital space. These categories describe a broad range of practices including generating alternative autobiographical histories, forging larger communities of resistance, and subverting the white male gaze. East-Asian American women artists actively challenge structural power through innovative multimedia methodologies that challenge mainstream representations in which they are regarded as subhuman, and resist essentialized roles and fixed markers of East-Asian culture and identity. Their diverse experiences converge upon the common goal of resisting hegemonic order and fostering a supportive space in which the voices of their community can be heard. Drawing on movements like postcolonial feminist scholarship from Anne Anlin Cheng, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Saidiya Hartman, as well as Third Cinema, I argue that social media sites and other internet communities expand and enable the development of a digital postcolonial aesthetic and art practice for East-Asian American women artists, allowing them to exercise agency over their artistic and historical narratives.

The many and different Muslim women’s voices unheard in Feminist theory

The many and different Muslim women’s voices unheard in Feminist theory

Veiling Between Denigration and Glorification in Algeria

Veiling is a cultural practice that has created controversial debates since colonial intervention in Algeria. Such debates either condemn veils as “oppressive” or deify them as markers of cultural authenticity, and women are often seen either as “victims” of an “oppressive” culture or as “dignified” guardians of a “glorious” culture. Informed by postcolonial feminist scholarship exposing the political motivations of the debates associating women with culture, this paper outlines the history of the controversies about veiling in Algeria, where women’s bodies still serve as a battlefield in power-motivated struggles. The ongoing interpretation of Algerian women’s experiences within dichotomized discourses has harmful consequences on both women and their cultural practice. While veiling is getting mystified due to denigration and glorification, women’s lives are affected in different ways by the polemical debates. The most tangible effect is the violence endured by women because of the growing tensions between the two sides of the debates, which have intangible effects that are also detrimental. These debates are shaping and distorting the attitudes of so many women about veiling. Examined sources show that women’s opinion is divided between advocates and detractors of veiling, and arguments are repetitive of the same inconsistencies created throughout the long history of the power-motivated debates. Interpreting women’s attitudes in the light of dissonance theory shows that both women who advocate veiling and those who condemn it repeat inconsistencies often motivated by defensive purposes, which obscure vision and undermine scrutiny and inquiry in what would help settle the conflictual issues.

Neoliberal Turns in Global Humanitarian Governance

In this article we seek to extend recent debates on how the promotion of self-reliance through vocational training and entrepreneurship has become the new neoliberal mantra among refugee-supporting agencies, policymakers and humanitarian actors. More specifically, we do so in the context of corporate and celebrity-endorsed humanitarian partnerships and initiatives that single out refugee women and girls. Informed by postcolonial feminist scholarship and guided by Carol Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach we compare IKEA’s partnership with the Jordan River Foundation (JRF) in Jordan and Angelina Jolie’s support for the RefuSHE project in Kenya. While differences between the two problem representations exist, both initiatives seek to empower refugee women by activating latent entrepreneurial abilities. These, we conclude, reinforce a saviour/saved humanitarian logic while also obscuring the gender division of responsibilities and precarious nature of artisanal labour.

When culture equals femicide: ‘affluent polygyny’ a South African dilemma

Polygyny is still prevalent in South Africa though the country is ravished by the AIDS pandemic. This article aims to highlight the effects of affluent polygyny on South African women. The findings were very much indicative of the dangers of entering into these arrangements because of socio-economic issues and the high rate of unemployment. This dependency causes women to agree to marry already married men for financial stability. Postcolonial feminist scholarship advanced by black women who were subjected recolonization as their ideas and concepts is the theoretical underpinning for this paper. This theory highlights the complexity of marginalisation of women in affluent polygyny in a previously colonised country. The article asserts that postcolonial feminist theory provides a further understanding of how women suffer at the hands of polygynists. The theory of Gender and Power is also used to understand the gendered relations of affluent polygyny in contemporary times because in African traditional societies, polygyny is perceived as a sociological issue.Key words: polygyny, postcolonial feminist theory, affluence, HIV/AIDS, gender and power

From Female Shamans to Danish Housewives: Colonial Constructions of Gender in Greenland, 1721 to ca. 1970

Taking its inspiration from post-colonial feminist scholarship, particularly the writings of Greenland scholar Karla Jessen Williamson, this paper sets out to trace the ways in which conceptions of gender in Greenland changed as a consequence of the eighteenth-century colonial encounter with Christian missionaries and a Danish trade monopoly. According to Jessen Williamson, pre-colonial Greenlandic conceptions of gender were characterized by a certain social indifference to gender, and the absence of a given hierarchy of male dominance/female subordination—a situation of genderlessness. During the process of colonization, European morals of sexuality and hierarchies of gender were introduced, along with hierarchies of race. The paper focuses on two historical periods, the 1700s and the 1900s. We see the first period as characterized by intricate intersections of gender, race, and class, as well as transformations of existing norms of gender and sexuality. As for the second period, the paper investigates how the notion of genderlessness might provide a background for understanding the different implications of the process of modernization for different groups of women in Greenland. Our aim is to contribute to a continued discussion of different understandings of gender in Greenland and elsewhere.

In Search of Identity: A Comparative Feminist Exploration of Muslim Female Sexuality in Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Shahraz’s The Holy Woman

A critical exploration of Muslim female sexuality through the feminist analysis of the various female characters in Twilight in Delhi and The Holy Woman, by Ahmad Ali and Qaisra Shahraz respectively, is the central focus of this paper. Theoretical insights have been drawn from Islamic feminism and Postcolonial feminist scholarship for the contextual understanding of female sexuality. Focusing specifically on the issue of female sexuality and marriages, in both of the novels, this paper demonstrates that Muslim women in the postcolonial Pakistan seems to have gained a certain measure of agency as compared to the plight of women in the colonial milieu of Ali’s novel. However, examined closely, as this paper will highlight, women in both of the novels, still in certain ways, remain helpless victims of sexual victimization. This comparative analysis of novels based in two varied settings of colonial and post-colonial Muslim societies reveals that female sexuality remains a stifling point of contention which is predominantly controlled by men.

The Missionaries' Position: Polygamy and Divorce in the Anglican Communion, 1888–1988

This article explores the Church of England's engagement with polygamy through a survey of policy debates about plural marriage that took place from the 1880s to the 1980s. With few exceptions, nineteenth and early‐twentieth century missionaries refused to allow men in polygamous marriages to convert to Christianity. This decision was formalised at the 1888 Lambeth Conference, but reversed one hundred years later at the 1988 Conference. The article uncovers factors that led to the recognition of alternative forms of marriage, and begin to expose the dynamics of repression and toleration in Anglican marriage discourse. Following recent postcolonial feminist scholarship, it argues that the church's inability to resolve its parallel but conflicting oppositions to polygamy and divorce formed a paradox which implicitly provincialized British Anglican gender understandings, and that the 1988 Lambeth Conference decision represents a tacit acknowledgement of the fundamental epistemic divide represented by this paradox.

Intersecting Feminist Theory and Ethnography in the Context of Social Work Research

This article explores the relationships among social work, feminist theory and ethnography in the context of social work research. The discussion reflects my research in the southeastern Caribbean. There are similarities between clinical social work and ethnographic research: both actively observing the actions of individuals and talking with them to gain an understanding of their lives from their own perspective. Two constructs generated from postmodern and post-colonial feminist scholarship served as cornerstones for this research, contextual diversity and reciprocity. These elements are also embedded in the ethnographic tradition and in the core mandates for social work practice. This writing provides a deconstruction of these concepts, discusses their grounding in the three disciplines, and illustrates their application in the research study through specific examples. The intersection of the traditions of social work, ethnography, and feminism were found to create a valuable research method that is especially compatible with social work research.

Doris Lessing, Feminism and the Representation of Zimbabwe

This article examines the complex intertwinements of feminism, anti-colonial Marxism and imperialism in the work of the recent Literature Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, particularly in her writings on colonial Africa and the travelogue African Laughter. The article outlines the implications of these intersections for the representation of Zimbabwe against some political, aesthetic and epistemological developments in Lessing's oeuvre. Through a reading of African Laughter, the article argues that a crucial tension is at stake between Lessing's political project of giving voice to black Zimbabweans and the western female protagonist as the authoritative subject of this project. The aim is to render an innovative perspective of Doris Lessing's status as a feminist icon, which she gained in the wake of her acclaimed novel The Golden Notebook (1962), by proceeding from postcolonial feminist scholarship .

Intercultural communication in child and family health: insights from postcolonial feminist scholarship and three‐body analysis

Concerns about intercultural communication practices in child and family health were raised during a South Australian ethnographic study. The family partnership model was observed as a universal pedagogic tool introduced into the host organisation in 2003. It has a role in shaping and reshaping cultural production within child health practice. In this study, we draw on insights from postcolonial feminist scholarship together with three-body analysis to critique the theoretical canons of care that inform intercultural communication in the child and family health setting. We contend that although the family partnership model may be very useful, its intended universal application is problematic in the context of multiculture. Issues of race, gender and class were seemingly unattended when using a communication approach based in historical scientific rationalism. Liberal interpretations of discourses of equity and empathy arising out of contemporary models of communication were often adopted by child and family health nurses and protected them from seeing the inherent binaries that constrain practice. Insights from postcolonial feminist thinking enabled us to recognise the problems of applying theory to practice in a linear fashion. We demonstrate the use of three-body analysis as a deconstruction strategy to refigure how theory might be understood and worked with in the multiculture that is Australia.

Continuing the dialogue: postcolonial feminist scholarship and Bourdieu — discourses of culture and points of connection

Postcolonial feminist theories provide the analytic tools to address issues of structural inequities in groups that historically have been socially and economically disadvantaged. In this paper we question what value might be added to postcolonial feminist theories on culture by drawing on Bourdieu. Are there points of connection? Like postcolonial feminists, he puts forward a position that aims to unmask oppressive structures. We argue that, while there are points of connection, there are also epistemologic and methodologic differences between postcolonial feminist perspectives and Bourdieu's work. Nonetheless, engagement with different theoretical perspectives carries the promise of new insights - new ways of 'seeing' and 'understanding' that might enhance a praxis-oriented theoretical perspective in healthcare delivery.

Editorial

Ten years ago, in the inaugural issue of Nursing Inquiry, Editor Judith Parker introduced a journal that would offer Australian nursing scholarship to the world and, in turn, invite scholarship from around the world. She promised a journal that would be a forum for nurses actively to engage the postmodern ideas and critical methodologies that were then increasingly shaping scholarship across the academic and practice disciplines. In the pages of Nursing Inquiry, nurses would use these ideas and methods to re-examine taken-for-granted practices in nursing. She conceived the journal as a venue for complex ideas that would be made accessible to readers and would be demonstrably relevant to nursing practice. Looking back over the last decade, Nursing Inquiry has more than lived up to its promise, becoming the premier journal in nursing for the advancement of truly critical inquiry. I hope I will be forgiven for national stereotyping, but I have often said to colleagues and students that nobody in nursing does critical inquiry better than Australians and nothing embodies this talent better than Nursing Inquiry. The very first issue contains one of my favourite papers, namely, Kim Walker's article on nursing, science, and representation, a masterful discursive treatment of nursing identity and the quest for legitimacy. This paper and others by him and outstanding scholars such as Jocalyn Lawler, Trudy Rudge and Gavin Andrews is why I have saved every copy of this journal. Nursing Inquiry has provided a venue for the best in critical inquiry, taking on such diverse entities as evidence-based practice, research methodology, technological innovation, and clinical practices (such as wound care) by engaging their politics, poetics, and polemics. Although I have, at times, thought some authors went to unwarrantable extremes in advancing an agenda, I have always been intellectually challenged and aroused. This is no small feat given the numbers of journals available today and the too frequent recycling of the same old and tired ideas. And I do appreciate that, sometimes, going to extremes is required simply to move people anywhere from where they have been. This anniversary issue shows why the journal promises to remain the best in critical scholarship. Several papers in this issue offer new insights into nursing practice and ideas about nursing. Judith Parker uses psychoanalytic theories to address the confinement and containment functions of nurses. Sioban Nelson and Mary-Ellen Purkis trouble competency as it is conceived in Canadian nursing. Davina Allen showcases the contradiction between the idea of nursing as unmediated caring and the reality of nursing practice as an intermediary. And Elizabeth Peter and Joan Lischenko illuminate the moral ambiguities in the professed location of nursing vis-à-vis patients. The other papers in this issue offer a Foucauldian-inspired ethnographic treatment of men's sexual identity in a genitourinary clinic (Anthony Pryce), a Foucauldian-inspired analysis of post-World War II and contemporary posters advertising smoking (Annette Street), and a consideration of the promise of postcolonial feminist scholarship to promote health (Joan Anderson). All of these entries are characterized by vibrant critique and innovative treatment of subject matters of importance in nursing and health-care. They set a course and standard for nursing scholarship. So, Happy Birthday Nursing Inquiry! I wish you many more decades of success. You have done nursing scholarship proud.

Problems of Cross-Cultural Comparison: Analyzing Linguistic Strategies in Tanzanian Domestic Violence Workshops

Campaigns against domestic violence and projects designed to reform laws are increasingly part of the development initiatives undertaken in African nations. Such projects are subject to standard criticisms of development (e. g., its tendency to enhance the power of donors over recipients) and to more recent concerns raised by postcolonial feminist scholarship (e. g., its tendency to ignore how women's condition in developing nations emerges from relations between donors and recipients). Mindful of these criticisms, many gender and law reform projects begun in Tanzania in the 1990s were designed to foster egalitarian relations between donors and recipients as well as to change laws and legal practices with respect to domestic violence. In addition, many projects relied on interactive workshops to impart information about law reform while empowering local participants. This essay focuses on two domestic violence workshops held in Tanzania in 1998. Linguistic analysis is used to expose the multiple relations of power in these development initiatives. The article demonstrates that demands on the structure of interaction-that is, everyone must be encouraged to participate-can work against creating egalitarian relations and suggests that some challenges to reforming development lie at the level of linguistic interaction.

Toward a post-colonial feminist methodology in nursing research: exploring the convergence of post-colonial and black feminist scholarship.

In this paper, Joan M Anderson explores post-colonial feminist scholarship, generated through the convergence of black feminist and post-colonial scholarship, and examines its use as a theory and methodology for nursing scholarship.