Appeal to Women’s Experience in Ethics: Lessons from Feminism and the Challenge from Postcolonial Critique

Appeal to women’s experience for moral delineation in theological ethics has been perplexed by the issue of cultural diversity and colonialism as raised by postcolonial critique. This paper aims to examine the debates from Third-World feminism and Christian feminism in dealing with difference and solidarity, leading to the call for contextual analysis and related power mappings. Margaret A. Farley’s proposal for sexual ethics in Just Love will then serve as an example to discuss how the search for common morality among cultural diversity may prevent or reinforce colonial agendas and other privileges.

Discourses on Conflict Women: Surfacing the Women in Marawi in News-mediated “Development as Discourse

Like myths in folklore, “development as discourse” constructs women. I argue that these representations of women, particularly in seven selected online articles produced by news media and development institutions about the recovery of Marawi City in the Philippines after nearly five months of conflict in 2017, obscure women’s genuine aspirations and actual participation in rehabilitation efforts. Using the lens of Third World feminism and postdevelopment thinking, I point out how these media discourses on development mythologize women. Parsing “development as discourse” is essential not only for exposing the contradictions in media representations of women but also for surfacing the possibilities of reinterpreting the myths. Critical writing and reading can demythologize and liberate conflict women and other silenced Others.

Poetic Negotiations: Salad Bowl Feminism in Selected Poetry of Fehmida Riaz, Pat Mora and Joan Loveridge-Sanbonmatsu

The research attempts to evaluate the depiction of women's oppression in specific postcolonial contexts at the hands of the interlocked power pattern formed by manifold factors like patriarchy, class conflict, religion, ethnicity and imperialism in the selected poetry of the renowned Pakistani poetess Fehmida Riaz, the Latino American Poetess Pat Mora, and the Japanese poetess Sanbonmatsu. It applies the theory of Postcolonial Feminism to bring to the fore the oppression of postcolonial women at the intersection of gender, class, race, religion and culture, hence, offering a critique of Western Feminist discourse and its slogan of sisterhood, which tends to erase heterogeneity in women's situations across the globe. The theory of Third World Feminism as well as the portrayals in these poetic compositions from a variety of postcolonial social formations, highlight the fact that postcolonial women are not a monolithic and archetypal suffering category as presented in Western discourses; instead, their resistant agency and subversive subjectivity also stands at the center of their creative writings.

Mernissi, Fatima

Fatima Mernissi (1940–2015) was a sociologist, writer, feminist, and activist, and above all a free thinker and an avowed humanist. She was committed to dialogue, dismantling all sorts of boundaries, whether between East and West, South and North, women and men, rural and urban, illiterate and educated, activism and academia, as well as that between fiction and scholarly writing. Her work is multifaceted, intersectional, fluid, and organic. In her scholarly writings Mernissi was concerned with identifying and critiquing the different structures that intersect to oppress women, ranging through colonialism, nationalism, patriarchal interpretation of Islam, capitalist development, and imperialism. She was also dedicated to shedding light on subaltern women’s agency, amplifying their voices for the hearing of decision-makers and development planners. She significantly contributed to the emergence of “Third World feminism,” fostering pan-African and transnational feminist solidarity. Credited as one of the founders of “Islamic feminism,” she inspired Muslim women all over the world to advocate for women’s rights from a faith-based position. At the end of her life she identified as a Sufi, committed to fostering civic bonding and synergy between civil-society actors, intellectuals, and ordinary women and their communities, always struggling against elitism and egoism. Mernissi wrote over sixteen books, edited a significant number of volumes, and authored numerous articles. Some of her books have been translated into over twenty-five languages. She directed many writing workshops and was the founding member of numerous research groups and organizations. Mernissi was also the recipient of prestigious awards, among them the Prince of Asturias Award in 2003 and the Erasmus Prize in the Netherlands in 2004. The Guardian ranked her among the top 100 most influential women in the world in 2011. Another recognition—that of which she would perhaps have been most proud—is the acknowledgment and love ordinary women and their communities, with whom she mixed and worked for decades, continue to vow for? her after her passing.

Corporeal Identities, Maternal Artivism: A New Decolonial Approach to the Study of Latin American Women Artists

Stemming from Grosfoguel’s decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer away from the alternative between Eurocentric universalism and third world fundamentalism in the production of knowledge, this article aims to respond to this query in relation to the field of the art produced by Latin American women artists in the past four decades. It does so by investigating the decolonial approach advanced by third world feminism (particularly scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and by rescuing it from—what I reckon to be—a methodological impasse. It proposes to resolve such an issue by reclaiming transnational feminism as a way out from what I see as a fundamentalist and essentialist tactic. Following from a theoretically and methodological introduction, this essay analyzes the practice of Cuban-born artist Marta María Pérez Bravo, specifically looking at the photographic series Para Concebir (1985–1986); it proposes a decolonial reading of her work, which merges third world feminism’s nation-based approach with a transnational outlook, hence giving justice to the migration of goods, ideas, and people that Ella Shohat sees as deeply characterizing the contemporary cultural background. Finally, this article claims that Pérez Bravo’s oeuvre offers the visual articulation of a decolonial strategy, concurrently combining global with local concerns.

GERAK MUSLIMAH DI ANTARA MARAKNYA FEMINISME DAN ISU RADIKALISME: ANALISIS PEDAGOGI

There are various styles of feminism that have been developing today. Generally, there are terms called classic feminism and contemporary feminism. Classical feminism consists of liberal, Marxist, Radical, and Socialist feminism and they tend to be atheistic. Whereas contemporary feminism that is increasingly developing in almost all parts of the world is the third world feminism, multicultural feminism, religion feminism, and ecofeminism. This contemporary feminism includes atheists and theists. This discussion of feminism are explored in this article by interpreting freedom and equality between the Indonesian and Islamic contexts. On the other hand, the issue of radicalism is an issue that is widely discussed with the existence of several events that lead to terrorism and the desire to establish a system of caliphate on the earth of the motherland. Deradicalization of radicalism is characterized by selfishness, symbolism, and closed textual corpus. They should be transformed into a more moderate understanding. Therefore, as Indonesian moslem women, these two things need to be explored further because they affect women as the first madrasa and the nation pillars. Moslem women must be equipped with several important components in positioning themselves as a’ whole person’ in this millennial century. Those components are knowing the purpose of creation, building world views, recognizing self-potential, and becoming productive individuals in the domestic and social spheres. The creation of an Indonesian Moslem woman with a firm, virtuous, productive and knowledgeable principle is a nation milestone as a daughter, mother, wife and public sector. The women who become ‘ a whole person’ will be able to contribute in overcoming religious and national polemics.Abstract There are various styles of feminism that have been developing today. Generally, there are terms called classic feminism and contemporary feminism. Classical feminism consists of liberal, Marxist, Radical, and Socialist feminism and they tend to be atheistic. Whereas contemporary feminism that is increasingly developing in almost all parts of the world is the third world feminism, multicultural feminism, religion feminism, and ecofeminism. This contemporary feminism includes atheists and theists. This discussion of feminism are explored in this article by interpreting freedom and equality between the Indonesian and Islamic contexts. On the other hand, the issue of radicalism is an issue that is widely discussed with the existence of several events that lead to terrorism and the desire to establish a system of caliphate on the earth of the motherland. Deradicalization of radicalism is characterized by selfishness, symbolism, and closed textual corpus. They should be transformed into a more moderate understanding. Therefore, as Indonesian moslem women, these two things need to be explored further because they affect women as the first madrasa and the nation pillars. Moslem women must be equipped with several important components in positioning themselves as a’ whole person’ in this millennial century. Those components are knowing the purpose of creation, building world views, recognizing self-potential, and becoming productive individuals in the domestic and social spheres. The creation of an Indonesian Moslem woman with a firm, virtuous, productive and knowledgeable principle is a nation milestone as a daughter, mother, wife and public sector. The women who become ‘ a whole person’ will be able to contribute in overcoming religious and national polemics.

From Women and War to Gender and Conflict?

This chapter charts a brief history of the conceptual tools used to understand gender relations with respect to wars and armed conflicts. The chapter begins by summarizing some of the dominant theories of second wave feminism, including radical feminism, liberal feminism, black, lesbian and Third World feminism. It explores critiques of feminist theory, as well as the roles of equality and agency in feminist studies on women and war, the tensions between Western feminism and feminism outside of the West, and the impact of a constructivist analytical lens on feminist scholarship. It depicts how specific violent conflicts influenced feminist thinking in the 1990s and the early 2000s, tracing a genealogy from genocide in Rwanda and the war in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to 9/11 and the War on Terror.