White Woman's Burden Research Articles

‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized, gendered politics of volunteer tourism

ABSTRACTTalking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.

Creolizing the White Woman's Burden: Mary Seacole Playing "Mother" at the Colonial Crossroads between Panama and Crimea

This essay examines how the creolized formations of race, gender, and empire in Mary Seacole's 1857 memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, challenges Victorian discourses on motherhood and racial purity. Seacole creates an interstitial "Creole" female subjectivity through her creolization of the racial, culinary, and medical aspects of Victorian motherhood. These nursing, cooking, and healing rituals performed by Seacole as a "doctress, nurse, and mother" during the Crimean War allow the memoir to articulate an alternative model of mixed-race motherhood subverting the prevailing nineteenth-century anxieties and stereotyping about the sexual promiscuity of Jamaican womanhood. By reading "Creole" subjectivity as a nonconformist and interracial form of cultural creolization, this essay showcases how the "Creole" subject's maternal and culinary practices can destabilize Victorian racial boundaries and power relationships between colonizer and colonized, home and battlefield, and Britishness and otherness, and further cultivate a space for re-conceiving a creolized empire.

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

The White Woman's Burden: “Feminist” War Rhetoric and the Phenomenon of Co-optation

This article takes a critical stance towards the rhetoric of protecting and liberating Afghan women in the wake of the “war on terror”, in this paper called “feminist” security rhetoric. An increased gender awareness in general and in relation to war in particular has influenced the ways in which war stories have been expressed over the last two decades. References to UN Resolution 1325, on women and security in post-conflict situations, will serve as both an indication and illustration of “feminist” security rhetoric, the co-optation phenomenon included, a practice that absorbs the meanings of the original concepts to fit into the prevailing political priorities. The rhetoric of the former Norwegian defence minister, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, is presented as a case study of this phenomenon. The Norwegian (and the Nordic) gender equality model has mainly been analysed from a welfare perspective, seldom from a post-colonial war(fare)/peace perspective. By analysing Norwegian “feminist” security rhetoric, I also want to push feminist rhetoric to create a space that is sensitive to post-colonial perspectives as well as political philosophy. I thereby intend to question both cultural relativism and aggressive cosmopolitanism dressed in various feminized outfits, aiming instead to suggest some common ground for feminist post-colonial voices to meet the voices of Western feminists who oppose the tendency to see whole cultures as internally homogeneous and almost externally sealed. These voices may together constitute a potent oppositional discourse to Western feminized security rhetoric.

Lady Missionary in the Memsahib's Depiction

The “Lady Missionary” is quite a favourite topic for exploring both the theological concern of “Women's work for Religious Cause” as well as the more feminist approach of “Women's work for Women's Cause”. And yet, there is not much work done when it comes to the literary representation of this enterprising woman of the colonial era despite the fact that she is not absent in literature. Missionary women play central or less significant side-roles in many works of colonial literature; Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus are only a few famous examples to cite at random. Research on how the contemporaneous secular white ladies see and show these religious (often dubbed “dogmatic”) “mish” women is even sparser. Taking this stance lays bare not only the complex heterogeneity of white females out in the colonies and of the “white woman's burden”, but also the intra-racial tensions that are otherwise usually overlooked or deliberately hooded over. So, to focus on this yet unexplored arena, this paper delves into Anglo-Indian literature to find out how the Memsahib chooses to depict the Lady Missionary in her fiction.

The White Woman's Burden: from colonial civilisation to Third World development

Gender discourse and scholarship continues to be dominated by Western paradigms, generally leading to an abstract mapping of gender stratification instead of a critical reflection on the very institutions that shape such lines of inquiry. Not unlike Kipling's illustration of the white man's burden, which treats other cultures as ‘childlike’ and ‘demonic’, mainstream theories and studies on gender continue to reflect the white woman's burden, which seems to disparage the identity, voice and contexts of women of colour. This article reviews the historical and current roles of white women in white colonial and postcolonial projects. The review is intended to explore and understand reasons which may be currently contributing to doubts about the white woman's burden in the Third World.

The white woman's burden: whiteness and the neo-colonialist historical imagination in The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005)

John Hillcoat's film The Proposition (2005), written by Nick Cave and set in a late 1880s Australian outback, is a colonial ballad of rape, murder, revenge and fratricide. The central narrative arc is concerned with relations between men, the English Captain Stanley and the Irish Burns gang representing, respectively, the law and the lawless, civilizing imperialists and wild colonials. Drawing on Richard Dyer's White, this article explores the gender-coded white racial imagery of the film and argues that the figure of the white woman signifies what is really at stake: a cultural and racial logic of whiteness as definitive of the ‘Australian’.

Hearts of darkness: white women write race

The Empire is Written - A Very Fine Negress - Britannia Rules The Waves - Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Women's Circus Epic - Bonding and Bondage: Nancy Cunard and the Making of the Negro Anthology - Laying Down the White Woman's Burden: Arlen's The Green Hat and Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie

Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England (review)

Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England, by Linda RozmovitsThe title of this compact and elegant study is misleadingly broad. The first chapter does indeed attest that Shakespeare's moral authority had attained a quasi-religious stature by mid-nineteenth century, but the remaining chapters of the book focus on a single work, The Merchant of Venice. With a sure grasp of cultural history, Rozmovits shows how this play, frequently produced on stage and regularly taught in classrooms, helped Victorian England reflect on the roles of women and Jews in a modern liberal society between 1870 and 1920.Rozmovits's second chapter, Portia: The White Woman's Burden, situates the play's heroine in the debate over the changing status of women. Whereas some viewed the Lady of Belmont as a model of the New Woman, most Victorians considered a rejoinder to that movement, an emblem of female submissiveness. For them, most significant action was not donning male disguise to defeat in the trial scene of Act 4, nor clever disclosure of that triumph in Act 5, but betrothal speech, where she surrenders myself and what is mine to husband, i.e., her lord, governor, king. Whether submissive or assertive, Portia evoked more conversation about the appropriate degree of independence for unmarried women than did about the appropriate treatment of Jewish aliens in a Christian society. Today, despite our own feminist movement, the emphasis is on the Jewish question, and even Rozmovits takes half of book to explain how Victorians used to think about England's growing Jewish population.Rozmovits describes the critical and commercial success of Henry Irving's landmark productions of the play over a twenty-five-year period and summarizes the artistic choices he made to render sympathetic and the play tragic. Were interested readers to consult standard stage histories of the play by Toby Lelyveld and James Bulman, they might conclude that she gives insufficient credit to Edmund Kean for being the first to break with the deeply ingrained stage tradition of the villainous Jew in his production of 1814. They might also challenge Rozmovits's belief that Irving cut the play's fifth act only during the opening run, and they might also discover that one of Irving's most memorable bits of stage business, Shylock silently walking in the moonlight across the bridge and deserted streets to his home (p. 74), from which Jessica has eloped, was borrowed from Verdi's Rigoletto. Rozmovits claims that Irving reduced Shylock's references to his daughter in order to marginalize Jessica, first for disobedience in eloping with a Christian and second for entering an interracial marriage. Unfortunately, the passages in question also contain bawdy puns (stones= testicles, flesh=penis), and so invited excision on grounds of taste and propriety, which (she agrees) was common practice at the time. Rozmovits's case for the marginalizing of Jessica seems surer for Victorian school texts, whose editors pruned lines and contrasted disloyalty with Portia's obedience. …

Burdens of history: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865-1915

In this study of British middle-class feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Antoinette Burton explores an important but neglected historical dimension of the relationship between feminism and imperialism. Demonstrating how feminists in the United Kingdom appropriated imperialistic ideology and rhetoric to justify their own right to equality, she reveals a variety of feminisms grounded in notions of moral and racial superiority. According to Burton, Victorian and Edwardian feminists such as Josephine Butler, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Mary Carpenter believed that the native women of colonial India constituted a special 'white woman's burden.' Although there were a number of prominent Indian women in Britain as well as in India working toward some of the same goals of equality, British feminists relied on images of an enslaved and primitive 'Oriental womanhood' in need of liberation at the hands of their emancipated British 'sisters.' Burton argues that this unquestioning acceptance of Britain's imperial status and of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority created a set of imperial feminist ideologies, the legacy of which must be recognized and understood by contemporary feminists.

The white woman's burden: British feminists and the Indian woman, 1865–1915

Historians of empire and of women have paid scant attention to the fact that British feminism matured during an age of empire, and that British feminists participated in the assumptions of national and racial superiority implicit in their culture. The purpose of this essay is to explore the ways in which modern British feminism was influenced by coming of age during this period of Britain's imperial rule. Josephine Butler's campaign on behalf of Indian women is one example of imperial feminism in action. A review of feminist periodical literature reveals that British feminists constructed the image of a helpless Indian womanhood on whom their own emancipation in the imperial nation state ultimately relied. Thus, in both practice and theory, the Indian woman served as a foil against which British feminists could gauge their own progress. In their quest for liberation and empowerment, Victorian and Edwardian feminists collaborated in the ideological work of empire, reproducing the moral discourse of imperialism and embedding feminist ideology within it.