The task of attending to cultural difference amongst women while also ‘bridging’ these differences is deeply contested in feminism. This concern arose in response to criticisms that ‘hegemonic’ feminism is indeed part of the colonial project. These critiques demonstrated that the notion of feminism as a universal movement for all women is deeply problematic and founded on the exclusion of sex, race, and class differences. Subsequently, the aim to recuperate a notion of the universal that refuses these exclusions is of central concern to contemporary feminism. As feminism comes to grip with the impact of globalization on women in different parts of the world, this impetus to engender understanding and alliances across cultural difference is more salient than ever. This thesis explores one response to the dilemma which I term the ‘feminist decolonizing impulse’. Only recently emerging from the field of contemporary feminist theory, this impulse and the key authors which inform it has not be examined in any substantial way. This is where the original contribution of this thesis lies. My main focus is to explore the central aim of this emerging set of ideas and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. I argue that the central aim of the decolonizing impulse is to build feminist alliances and coalitions that are premised, first and foremost, on women’s heterogeneity. It thus purports to offer a re-constructed vision of the ‘universal’. This is a universalism where differences and particularities are privileged in advance of any announcement of the ‘universal’. To do this, I first establish how the ‘feminist decolonizing impulse’ emerged from different fields of scholarship, including postcolonial studies, indigenous political thought, Third World, postcolonial and poststructuralist feminisms. I then map the major features of the ‘feminist decolonizing impulse’ by examining the work of important authors who have given shape to this impulse. To discover the strengths and weaknesses of the decolonizing impulse, I engage with the work of two prominent contemporary feminist theorists, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Martha C. Nussbaum. Both Mohanty and Nussbaum aim to advance a model of cross-cultural feminism, though go about this in vastly different ways.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/253986 |
| Creators | Bronwyn Wex |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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