Introduction

Feminist Theory
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Feminist theory and the ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700116645874
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Celia Roberts
Lancaster University, UK

Raewyn Connell
University of Sydney, Australia

This issue of Feminist Theory presents a collection of contemporary feminist

research and analysis from the postcolonial world. Such a collection highlights
the geopolitics of knowledge in feminism. Our call for papers began:

Recently there has been renewed debate about global issues in feminism, which goes
beyond the discussions of gender in development, women’s role in transnational insti-
tutions, and postcolonial theory, to the contemporary global diversity and politics of
feminist theory.

The proposal for a special issue grew from discussion of Raewyn Connell’s paper
‘Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale’, which traced the domin-
ance of the North in globally-circulating feminist thought, emphasised the wealth
of knowledge produced around the global South and argued for a more democratic
global structure for feminist theory (Connell, 2015). The argument is given urgency
by Veronika Woehrer’s careful analysis of the relative absence of Southern feminist
scholarship in European and North American feminist course outlines and text-
books (Woehrer, 2016).
There are practical reasons why Northern theory usually predominates.
Feminist theory, though it grew out of social movements, is now embedded in a
knowledge economy where the universities and publishers of the United States and
western Europe are central. The leading journals in the international league tables,
the biggest doctoral programmes, the main funders, the most prestigious associ-
ations, the biggest libraries and databanks, are all located in the global metropole.
As the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1997) points out, there is a specific
division of labour in the mainstream global economy of knowledge. Theory is
normally produced in the metropole and exported to the periphery, while the

Corresponding author:
Celia Roberts, Department of Sociology, Bowland North, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK.
Email: celia.roberts@lancaster.ac.uk

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periphery normally produces data and exports this raw material to the metropole.
All academic disciplines show these patterns; viewed as a whole, feminist, women’s
and gender studies are no exception.
In this economy of knowledge, scholars in the periphery face serious difficulties
in getting their work read internationally. Given the privilege of English in the
global knowledge system, native speakers of other languages either have restricted
international audiences or must face the heavy costs and nerve-wracking chances of
translation. Publishers’ profit calculations mean that many more books are trans-
lated out of English than are translated into English, and most journals do not pay
for translation.
To get published in a leading journal and have a good chance of being read
internationally, one must be fluent in the concepts and methods such a journal
recognises. One must connect with the debates currently interesting intellectual
workers in the metropole. One must write in the style and format normally used
by the metropolitan professional circles from which that journal draws. These
are the criteria that journal reviewers, as well as editors, naturally apply. A
contribution that does not match this style, enter these debates or use these
concepts will normally be seen, not as interestingly different, but as profession-
ally deficient.
It is not surprising, then, that much of the scholarship produced in countries of
the periphery follows a specific formula: theory and methodology from the metro-
pole, plus empirical content from the periphery. Such intellectual dependence is
what Hountondji called ‘extraversion’, and it is genuinely difficult to break out of.
Articles submitted to Northern journals from researchers in the global South nor-
mally follow this formula.
Over the last three decades, nevertheless, there has been growing criticism of the
inequalities, exclusions and distortions produced by this economy of knowledge.
Postcolonial theory in the humanities is the most celebrated, but critiques and
explorations of alternatives have also developed in the social sciences. In feminist
theory the best-known critiques have come from expatriate intellectuals, exempli-
fied by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s famous paper ‘Under Western Eyes’ (1991).
Expatriates working in the global North have the advantages of location, including
familiarity with the academic world of the metropole, at the cost of exile and at
least initial marginality.
Mohanty later observed how her work had been absorbed into metropolitan
gender studies as a postmodern declaration about difference, and this potential for
containment is strikingly shown by the history of postcolonial critique as a whole
(Mohanty, 2003). By and large, this critique has been absorbed into the metropol-
itan academic world as a new specialisation. We now have units in ‘postcolonial
studies’ as add-ons to the mainstream curriculum in Northern universities and
publishing programmes. An introductory course in gender studies will normally
have a lecture near the end called ‘postcolonial feminisms’, certainly quoting
Mohanty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and probably Gloria Anzaldúa and
Patricia Hill Collins.

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But those concluding lectures probably won’t quote Bina Agarwal, Heleieth
Saffioti or Li Xiaojiang; and the same course’s opening lectures on the history of
feminism probably won’t mention Raden Adjeng Kartini, He-Yin Zhen or Huda
Sharawi – though those women are among the most powerful thinkers and import-
ant pioneers in world feminism. Paying attention to the intellectual production of
colonised and postcolonial societies is different from recognising a postcolonial
critique in the metropole. It is much harder for the mainstream economy of know-
ledge to do. Paying attention means learning about intellectual traditions in con-
texts that one may never materially visit; it means accessing good translations and/
or learning new languages; and it requires mental flexibility and careful, situated
listening. It is a challenging educational task to move beyond familiar curricula and
methods, to re-think what seems central in the contemporary age, to find time both
for ‘canons’ and for knowledge formerly on the margins.
There is an enormous wealth of feminist thought in the global periphery. Both
colonised and colonisers tried to understand what was happening to them, and this
always included a gender dimension. Colonisation itself was a gender-structured
process, colonial societies were strongly gendered in new ways and postcolonial
societies too have produced new configurations of gender relations. It is not acci-
dental that Spanish colonialism produced the woman-centred vision of the poet Sor
Juana in México, that Anglophone colonialism pioneered women’s suffrage –
within racial lines – in North America and the Antipodes or that Dutch colonialism
in the East Indies provoked the feminist educational thought of Kartini. The dis-
covery of ‘intersectionality’ in the metropole was long preceded by debates about
gender, race, class and caste in the colonised world from India to Brazil.
The collection of contemporary work in this special issue illustrates some of the
major concerns of feminist thought from postcolonial societies. These include the
formative social role of violence – starting with the massive violence of colonisation
itself – the complex links of violence and masculinity and postcolonial struggles to
control violence. Guita Grin Debert and Maria Filomena Gregori’s fascinating
article, ‘Conceptualising violence and gender in the Brazilian context: New issues
and old dilemmas’, reports on ethnographic studies of police and legal procedures
designed to help female victims of domestic and familial violence. Although
intended to address violence against women, these procedures, Debert and
Gregori argue, tend to figure domestic violence in terms of criminality and the
family, defanging feminist arguments about the entanglements of gender and vio-
lence. Colombian scholar Mara Viveros Vigoya’s think piece, ‘Masculinities in the
continuum of violence in Latin America’, makes a related argument about the
conceptualisation and origins of sexual violence in Latin America. She suggests
that the relationship between masculinities and violence is a ‘vicious circle’ pro-
duced in cauldrons of colonisation. Only an analysis of interlocking oppressions,
Viveros Vigoya argues, will lead to an understanding of contemporary forms of
violence against women in Latin America.
Many Southern feminist theorists address the role of the colonial and postco-
lonial state in shaping gender relations, and the dilemmas created by

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post-neoliberal and anti-colonial politics. Isis Giraldo, in her ‘Coloniality at work:

Decolonial critique and the postfeminist regime’, defends the political relevance of
theory, explores the significance of decolonial theory for feminism and describes
the diversity of decolonial feminist perspectives in Latin America. She discusses,
and revises, the influential concept of the ‘coloniality of gender’ proposed by Marı́a
Lugones. Turning to mass culture, Giraldo examines the figures of ‘femen’ in
Europe, and exoticised pop singers in the USA, through the lens of coloniality.
Silvana Tapia Tapia’s ‘Sumak Kawsay, coloniality and the criminalisation of
violence against women in Ecuador’ explores the effects of the integration of a
concept from Andean philosophy – Sumak Kawsay – in the Ecuadorean constitu-
tion on violence against women. Tapia Tapia argues that although such incorpor-
ation is ‘an expression of a decolonial promise’, pre-existing colonial ideas about
violence against women, which maintain penal, punishment-oriented framings,
limit its effectiveness in pushing forward feminist agendas. With strong resonance
with Debert and Gregori’s article, Tapia Tapia demonstrates how ideas about the
sanctity of the family dominate and restrict legal figurations of violence against
women. For her, there is much more work to be done in realising the promise of
Andean philosophy in addressing gendered violence in Ecuador.
In a quite different vein, Madina Tlostanova, Redi Koobak and Suruchi
Thapar-Björkert explore the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist femin-
isms in their article ‘Border thinking and disidentification: Postcolonial and post-
socialist feminist dialogues’. Inspired by Lugones’s work on pluralist feminism,
they explore various case studies, including political debates in Russia, feminist
debates around the infamous Delhi rape case of 2012, the work of Estonian artist
Anna-Stina Treumund and the activism of the Yerevan Queering Collective in the
post-Soviet republic of Armenia. Engaging with a range of decolonial theorists, the
authors use these examples to demonstrate the relevance of two concepts – border
thinking and disidentification – in pursuing the intersections of gender, sexuality,
race, ethnicity and location. Tlostanova, Koobak and Thapar-Björkert discuss
their position as scholars trained in Sweden, but coming from and wanting to
speak with scholars and activists in their countries of origin, namely Russia,
India and Estonia. Their article highlights both the shared experience of being
an outsider in the Swedish context, and the specificities of their engagements in
post-socialist and post-colonial spaces and debates.
As is evident in this special issue, many scholars from the global South are
interested in the relationship between the formal economy of knowledge and
social movements, and in the practicalities of feminist intellectual work in post-
colonial conditions. Robert Morrell’s article, ‘Making Southern theory? Gender
researchers in South Africa’, explores this in the South African case. Based on life
history interviews with six leading gender studies scholars, this article discusses the
ways in which individuals’ life experiences of politics, discrimination and education
funnel into academic trajectories and the selection of topics and lenses for inter-
sectional work on race, gender, class and sexuality. In their think piece, ‘Activist
research and the production of non-hegemonic knowledges: Challenges for

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intersectional feminism’, Amana Mattos and Giovana Xavier describe their own
work in Brazilian academia and feminist activism, discussing how they engage with
decolonial theories and perspectives with students and in their research projects.
This is only a small collection of the work towards understanding gender that
comes from the postcolonial world. We are conscious that no one issue can be
‘representative’ of this huge domain. What we hoped for, and what we present here,
is a rich collection that provides any reader with starting points for thinking about
new possibilities in feminist theory.
The editors of Feminist Theory are very keen that this initial step will lead to
more dialogue between Northern and Southern feminist scholars. To this end, the
journal has committed to pay, on a regular basis, for the translation of articles into
English, either outstanding previously published pieces or new work. We invite
readers to email the journal editors with suggestions for suitable contributions.
In editing this special issue, we had three hopes. One was to provide a venue for
feminist work that the global North ought to know about. The second was to help
connect intellectual workers in different parts of the global South – which, ironic-
ally, often happens via conferences and journals in the North. The third was to
support the re-thinking, and ultimately re-making, of feminism’s relationship to the
global economy of knowledge.
In this, we align ourselves with students and academics involved in the ‘Why is
My Curriculum White?’ British National Students’ Union campaign, who are cur-
rently challenging academics to widen both their reading lists and the issues they
address in order to decolonise their curricula (www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why-is-my-
curriculum-white/). Similar issues are under intense debate in South Africa, and in
Latin America. We hope that for those working in gender and women’s studies,
and in the social sciences and humanities more broadly, this special issue will
provide a valuable set of materials for teaching, research and scholarship that
will help in this reform.
It is a platitude that knowledge is power. It is a reality that organised knowledge
is structured in highly undemocratic ways; and contemporary neoliberal regimes
are making this worse. Feminism as a democratic movement, as a struggle for
justice in gender relations, has a stake in contesting and re-making the global
economy of knowledge. We hope that this special issue will encourage readers to
work for this change.

References
Connell, Raewyn (2015) ‘Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale’. Feminist
Theory, 16(1): 49–66.
Hountondji, Paulin J. (1997) ‘Introduction: Recentring Africa’. In: Paulin J. Hountondji
(ed.) Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails. Dakar: CODESRIA, pp. 1–39.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1991) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses’. In: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres
(eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, pp. 51–80.

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Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,

Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Woehrer, Veronika (2016) ‘Gender Studies as a Multi-Centred Field? Centres and
Peripheries in Academic Gender Research’. Feminist Theory.

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