Key Issues and Trends of Postcolonial Feminism

Postcolonial feminism is a response to Western Eurocentric feminism, which did not pay attention to racial differences, feelings and the position of women in the once colonized territories. The search for gender justice has led to the emergence of new theories and models reflecting the problems of oppression of women in the Afro-Asian world. The feminism of the postcolonial wave has focused on the issues of women’s political participation, the preservation of patriarchal survivals in the family and the state, economic and social inequality, the impact of globalization and integration processes on the position of women in society. The lack of unity regarding the assessment of the influence of Western culture on traditional societies and the position of women in postcolonial countries has led to the emergence of many approaches to the interpretation of gender processes and the role of women in the modern world. An analysis of the variants of postcolonial feminism such as: womanism, stiwanism, motherism, nego-feminism and others allows us to draw conclusions about their engagement in global or national practice.

Unveiling a postcolonial neoliberalism: hybridised controls and emancipatory potentials for tea-plucking women in Sri Lanka

PurposeDrawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, the purpose of this paper is to explore a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which the authors call postcolonial neoliberalism. It unpacks the peculiarities of hybridised practices of management controls therein to reflect on its construction and consequences.Design/methodology/approachA seven-month ethnographic study was carried out in a Sri Lankan tea estate to understand both the nature and the practices of these controls.FindingsPostcolonial neoliberalism has been animated by a hybrid form of management controls encompassing colonial action controls, postcolonial cultural controls and neoliberal results controls. This created an emancipatory space for female workers to engage in some confrontations to attain some compromises.Originality/valueThe message is that the hybridised controls are central to the construction of this form of postcolonial neoliberalism and to its reproduction. However, as these controls accompany a gendered form, female workers find a condition of possibility for some emancipatory potentials within the neoliberal development policy.

Obraz kobiety w twórczości Anandy Devi

Ananda Devi, an accomplished modern writer from Mauritius, creates texts that are difficult to classify according to their style and genre. The author is reluctant to accept the treatment of her writings as feminist, particularly Western European feminist, they are surely closer to postcolonial feminism and eco-feminism. Nevertheless, the status of women, their rights and tolerance for otherness are the key elements of Devi’s artistic expression. Her characters rebel against the patriarchal society, they endeavour to discover their own place and identity, which frequently means regaining control over their bodies in the first stage of the transformation. Devi’s female characters live close to nature, where they find comfort, some of them go through a regress to the world of animals and plants.

Tricity Vogue’s ‘blueing up’ as sedimented resistance: Extravagant costume and the expanded field of dressing up

My focus in this article is to understand the way theatrical costume is performed in subcultural cabaret spaces, specifically The Blue Lady Sings Back by London-based cabaret singer Tricity Vogue. This show premiered at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the area of Vauxhall in South London that already has an embedded history of hedonistic pleasure. With reference to Dorita Hannah’s ‘expanded’ notion of costume as a ‘body-object-event’ and Jasbir Puar’s broader understanding of categories of race, gender and sexuality as events and bodily encounters, I seek to understand the way theatrical feminine costume enfolds dissident and marginalized histories of resistant urban space and site. In this show, Tricity Vogue undertakes multiple costume changes that embody various histories and contexts of cabaret performance: as Bollywood dancer Madhuri Dixit, as a European Marlene Dietrich-like cabaret singer and as a Josephine Baker-esque character in a banana skirt. All of this whilst wearing a blue stocking and blue body paint, effectively ‘blueing’ up. This steps into an uncomfortable territory in what could be seen as cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping and speaking for others. This concern also has currency within the contemporary burlesque community who are acutely self-conscious and politicized as regards this kind of costume and performative appropriation. Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of feminist killjoys (2017) will be employed to better understand these difficult conversations about dressing up with Aoife Monks’ (2010) discussion of multiple costume changes being used as a strategy for ‘undoing’ stereotypes and rethinking a feminist ‘we’. By also drawing on diva studies, which builds on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘diva citizenship’, and postcolonial feminism, I will argue that the costumed cabaret body becomes a medium for women to politicize and reframe pleasure through the costumed spectacle of cabaret’s various erotic and exotic muses.

Viewing of Women as Culture and Domain in “Perchavan” by Qaisra Shahraz

Postcolonial Feminism serves as a critical thought to reset the idiom of suppression by identifying the cultural codes which involve women as the ‘Other’ in the Third World countries. This paper is an effort to point out the process of gender fixation in Pakistan which determines the cultural roles for women. This paper tries to define that the system of positioning of women in Pakistan, establishes the term women, as culture and domain. The paper tries to investigate the ideological problem in Pakistan for structuring the women’s identity in their sexual cum biological caricatures in groups instead of their talents. The paper tries to explore that Qaisra Shahraz in “Perchavan” is trying to identify that the term ‘women’, initiates a debate on women not as the emblem of culture, yet women appear to be the culture themselves against all the ethnographic standards of gender remapping in any definition of culture. This study, about the Pakistani women, is an effort to show that Shahraz in “Perchavan” tries to expose, that women are treated as the culture in Pakistan. However, the women in the process of regional nomenclature become portable objects and ultimately they become the domain of society.