Postcolonial feminist studies

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• Theorizing difference
• Understanding social divisions
• Exploring inequalities.
• Identity, community and belonging.
• Controversy, resistance and change
• Writing the social

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• Why is a state of uncuriosity about what it
  takes to produce a pair of fashionable sneakers
  so comfortable? What is there about being
  uncurious about how any military base affects the
  civilians living in base towns that seems so
  reasonable? I have come to think that making and
  keeping us uncurious must serve somebodys
  political purpose. I also have become convinced
  that I am deeply complicit in my own lack of
  curiosity. Uncuriosity is dangerously comfortable
  if it can be dressed up in the sophisticated
  attire of reasonableness and intellectual
  efficiency We cant be investigating
  everything! (Enloe 2004 3)

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• Feminist methodologies
• Situated knowlege
• Expanded objectivity
• Objects of subject/knowledge subjects
• Outsiders/within
• Standpoint theoretical field.

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Post-colonial feminist studies
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Post-colonial feminist studies
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Post-colonial feminist studies
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Post-colonial feminist studies
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Post-colonial feminist studies
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Post-colonial feminist studies

• Provincialising Europe (clousure)
• Pluralising Modernity
• Challenging the linear temporality of progress
  and development.
• Gender, sexuality and racism(s).
• Racialisation and female subjectivity.
• Imperialism and knowledge production.

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• The concept of intersectionality
• Gender as racialised and classcoded.
• Production of femininities and masculinities
• Women at the core of ethnic and national
  boundaries
• Engendering globalisation (ideologies and
  policies affecting women operate in connected
  ways across state-boundaries).

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• The concept of intersectionality (uses and
  abuses)
• Explotation / Normalisation processes.
• Sensitizing concept
• Feminist theory and its limits.
• (National) feminism(s)

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• Racism(s) and the specificity of the Swedish
  model
• The construction of cultural differences and
  migrant women as a problem to be solved.
• Banal nationalism located in the welfare state.
• Subordinated inclusion (the field of production
  and reproduction)

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• Crisis and re-structuring of the modern welfare
  state and of national identities.
• Race and the field of the political.
• The diversification (and feminisation) of
  migration.
• The ambiguity of the actual situation.

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Post-colonial feminist studies

• The role of welfare institutions (racialised
  citizens)
• Discourses of gender equality at the core of the
  construction of national belonging
• Development of a blatte (black ) transethnic
  identification.
• Clear links between class and race/ethnicity in
  the construction of migrants
• Multiculturalism as fixed difference

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Women friendly?

• Women in the Latin America diaspora in Sweden.
• A political diaspora?
• Hibridity in the field/ Outsiders-within
• Exploring the social from the standpoint of women
• Women as knowledge subjects

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Women friendly?

• Contested concepts culture and community.
• Changes in gender relations before migration.
• The notion of trauma
• Unpacking gendered racialized responses to the
  welfare state
• Gendered racism(s)

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Women friendly?

• Relevant (gender,class and racialised)
  differences in the ways migration and exile is
  understood.
• Nostalgia as a patriarchal discourse
• Mothering (migrant men) and reproducing (status)
  within communities.
• Diversified gender and family relations

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Women friendly ?

• You know how they areif they get in you never
  get them out. Especially then, when we were so
  well we did not know the language, no jobsand
  they smile and smile while they check if your
  damn toilet is clean. No, no and no. They offered
  me help when I divorced. We had been here for
  eighte months. But I said to my children, here at
  home we can scream, fight whatsoever, but for
  them, we are okyou have problems, you come to
  me, never to them. The time showed that I was
  right. Those that asked for helped were not
  helped

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Women friendly?

• What about your husband, the father of the
  children?
• Well, as most Latin American. In Chile I thought
  that I had to take children to meetings and so
  because his meetings were more important than
  mine Here in Sweden he continued to go to
  meetingsand well. As my mother says, thank God
  that I was here so I could leave him. (Amalia)

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Women friendly?

• An then a nurse comes and asks me if I am
  religious (after her fourth pregnancy) . I did
  not understand at first, it was so bizarre.. And
  then she continued with a lecture about own
  decisions on body and sexuality I am sure she
  had been to some of these multi-kulti courses and
  learned that Latin American are Catholics I got
  the lecture because I am a blatte (Betty)

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Women friendly?

• All this racism. They are like this and they are
  like that. It shuts you up. Ive stopped telling
  things. I wanted to tell about a guy I was mad
  at, but I didnt say anything, because then the
  guys whole culture will be at the centre in the
  coffee-.break. I cant stand that.

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Women friendly?

• Here, I was alone in my little room and I tried
  to comfort myself thinking that at least Id been
  to Denmark for the first time. And then it was as
  it always is. No one was interested during the
  day, and then at night, when they had had half a
  bottle of whiskey in their room, then they
  approach me and say I know a girl who knows a
  girl from your country, do you know her?. And I
  move to another table and he continues and wont
  stop and then he starts calling me Carmencita
  this and Carmencita thatThey want you when its
  time for salsa, for music and dance.

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Engendering transnational diasporas

• Well, we could never get married in Colombia. We
  were against marriage but then we came to Sweden
  and I felt I wanted to do it have a party. So we
  told our families that we were going to marry and
  that we were going to make a video of all the
  ceremony so that they could be here with us. You
  know what they did? They send us a video, the
  same day of our marriage.The two families dressed
  as for a wedding And in the first scene, they
  were there, my family all well dressed, wishing
  us good luck. What was very moving was those who
  spoke but we had never met, they could say. Dear
  aunty I do not know you but I hope we can meet
  soon . You can watch the video, we got it as a
  present the day of our wedding . (Mercedes from
  Colombia)

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Engendering transnational diasporas

• My mother is working class. And both of them my
  mother and my father, have been activists in the
  unions. As I keep telling you my mother was very
  committed and very radical. But when my brother
  disappeared and we where forced to exile and
  she travelled through all Chile searching for
  him, nobody helped her with the exception of
  members of the Jehova congregation. They helped
  her a lot. And when she got sick and came to live
  with me in Sweden so that I could take care of
  her, the congregation here in Stockholm recieved
  her and supported her during her illness. What we
  did when she died was to put everything she loved
  the most in the ceremony. Both the red flag from
  her union, together with several rituals from her
  congregation. I believe she would have liked the
  funeral. (America)

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Engendering transnational diasporas

• Ask, them no one of them They have
  sisters,they have whatsoever but nobody
  criticises them because they were not there. It
  is not that all men are so, but well men can
  choose.
• You know what the community thinks of women that
  do not care for the people back home.
• Well, some women think it is unfair but I do
  this because I need it. It is true that men only
  travel for rituals and many men do not do that
  either. It is true that they are always
  unemployed so they never can send money. But who
  says they do feel well about that?
• You cannot count love as you count money. It is
  not about feminism the Swedish way. It is about
  family and love as we understand it.

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Engendering transnational diasporas

• Trasnsnational diasporic work as gender work.
• Women at the core of the doing of transnational
  households.
• Women as providers.
• Women as care-takers
• The need of transnational social policies.

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Social justice and Postcolonial feminism
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Social justice and Post-colonial feminism
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Social justice and Post-colonial feminism

• Saids approach pushes us to see the extent to
  which all knowledge is situated in- and
  participates in the making of the wordly
  realities that we inhabit. Such a proposition
  makes it much more difficult, or even impossible,
  to locate a single objective standpoint from
  which to accumulate knowledge. An hence this
  approach contests and undermines the authority of
  coercive systems of knowledge like Orientalism
  whose very claims of validity depende on the
  priviliging of one particular standpoint , i.e.,
  the West- by bringing to the surface a previously
  repressed, silenced, or ignored plurality of
  voices and perspectives. (Makdisi 2002 440)

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Social justice and Postcolonial feminism