What is Decolonialized Feminism?

Feminisms for the women of the global majority

Chandra Talpane Mohanty

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Witches and Bride Burnings

I’d felt a lifetime of guilt for the old Hindu practice of sati, bride-burning. A practice already illegal before my grandparent’s birth. It would more accurately be widow-burning, as she was burned on the pyre of her recently-dead husband. Rooted in misogyny, the idea descended from ideas of property, inheritance, and taking care of a woman who no longer held economic value to her deceased husband’s family.

I felt that lifetime of guilt start to lift when I read about the scholarship Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism, and learned that the practice was rare. It used by the British in part to justify the colonization of South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and it was British women — more than their male counterparts — who saw themselves as the heroines that would rescue these “Hindoo” women from “suttee”¹.

The guilt lifted further when I read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, and learned of how this feminine savior complex took away the voice and agency of the women of India themselves. The Indian woman’s agency was taken and her voice was silenced by both the native patriarchy and the colonizers. Because prior to the conquest of South Asia, women and men had already begun to organize against casteism, poverty, and rape.

Then the guilt lifted fully when I read Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, about the “Northern Europeans” killing approximately nine million women over the centuries— burning women at the stake, no less cruel than burning them over a funeral pyre. Then I thought back to the sati, and the shame that was passed down to be through the ideas of colonization that are part of my inheritance. In contrast, the numbers of widows burned in India as recorded by the British were under 6,000 in the Bengal Presidency, and 600 in the Bombay Presidency, over a ten year period².

The British called Indians misogynistic savages while forgetting their own savagery and misogyny. I’m uninterested in arguments of which was more or less. It’s impossible to measure and quantify, and the argument gets us no where in terms of progress. South Asian society was patriarchal and misogynistic. As was Western culture. As was most of the civilized world. Patriarchy still lingers and oppresses.

And history is written by the victors, and the colonists are the victors. Decolonizing my own damned mind took time. It’s an ongoing process.

Decolonist Feminism Defined

I’ve never understood the polemic asking readers/viewers to separate the art from the artist. The art an artist choses to craft reflects themselves. To that end, I write about intersectional feminism because the intersections affect me, as a lesbian of color who grew up working class and worked two jobs to put herself through college. That would explain why Judith Butler, non-binary feminist philosopher, focused on gender. Why Monique Wittig, lesbian, wrote about gender and lesbianism. Or Andrea Dworkin, survivor of abuse, wrote about her thoughts on what contributed to abuse. Or bell hooks, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde about Black and intersectional feminism. The work of these writer/philosophers is so passionate and well-written, I suspect, because they reflect on them and lived them throughout their lives.

Of less fame but equal passion are feminist thinkers, like Chandra Talpade Mohanty, born in Mumbai, India, and María Lugones, born in Argentina, who write/wrote about decolonizing feminism. Mohanty wrote Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses (a 30 page paper) in 1988, followed by the book Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity in 2003. María Lugones is usually credited with coining the term decolonial feminism with her 2010 paper Toward a Decolonial Feminism.

The most simple definition of decolonial feminism is: intersectional feminism + anti-colonialist philosophy = decolonial feminism.

How it works in feminist movements: that decolonization must happen along with overcoming sexist oppression. When nations were still colonies, feminist movements were adjacent to anti-colonialist movements.

With decolonial feminist, all the other intersections of Western feminism (race, class, disability, sexuality, transgenderedness, etc) are still present. Decolonial feminism focuses on women outside the West, who lives in countries that were colonized or subject to imperial powers who tried to force them to unequal trade deals. It was of the “third world”, or what we today would might call the global south, or global majority as I’ll call it. That last term works to emphasis that the intersection of race, feminism, and anti-colonization concern the majority of the world’s women. Decolonial feminism combines the politics of gender, critical race theory, and analysis of imperial power structures and thought. Culture, geopolitics, and history play larger roles in the philosophy.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty called decolonial feminism “third world feminism”. She wrote that there two strains of thought in it: critique of the hegemonic Western feminisms, and the formulation of autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies. The former is a critique aims to deconstruct and dismantle them. The latter, the concerns and strategies of global majority feminism, are movement-building and constructing.

The former — deconstructing the view that Western feminist too often still has of the global majority woman as “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc” and herself as “modern, educated, in control of her body, with the freedom to make her own choices.”³

The reality is much more complex. Many women of the global majority are well-educated, not poor, of high caste/class, etc. Many women of the West are “traditional-bound, domestic, family-oriented”; after all, aren’t the trad wives and pronatalists working to return Western women to that? Weren’t the waves of feminist movements to free Western women of the patriarchy and end inequality and oppression? Despite that, there was and still is Western feminist thought that believes it impossible for women of the global majority to ever achieve the freedoms that Western women enjoy. Ignoring that in the 1970s, prior to the interference of the West in Iran and Afghanistan, women of those two countries enjoyed freedoms and access to education and work that were much closer to what Western women enjoy today.

These attitudes are inherence of colonization and imperialism. The issue between these two strains is that Western liberal feminism has hegemony — cultural, scholarly, and geopolitical dominance. That hegemony allows the Western to turn the global majority woman into the Other. Women of the West view themselves (ourselves)⁴ as the subject — the main character, so to speak — and global majority women as the object. As object, women of the global majority were rendered powerless, viewed, judged, and handled paternalistically.

Two Colonizations

Colonization and Othering of women also has two broad strains: Western and Eastern.

The first, the colonization of the Americas — that is, the indigenous people and of chattel-based slavery of African people — was justified through the philosophy of converting those people to Christianity. Saving their souls, Westernizing them for their own good. Christianity became a tool of control, and one of “unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systemic terror⁵.” Purses and pouches were made of the vaginal skin of indigenous women⁶ — but in American schools, we’re only taught that the Native Americans scalped white colonizers. The colonizers also fed people alive to the dogs, and whippings and rape were frequent and common. Mulatto, half-white enslaved people, fetched a higher price on the American slave market, thus making rape financially profitable.

Today, that attitude continues, with racist canards about how “uncivilized” Black Americans and Indigenous people are. Too many American conservatives argue that Western culture is inherently superior, with little to no understanding of other cultures and the base of their knowledge to contextualize their argument.

Failure to critique US empire allows feminist projects to be used and mobilized as handmaidens in the imperial project.⁷

The second is the colonization of the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and the attempted colonization of East Asia. The regions of the world Edward Said defined as oriental versus the occidental West in his influential Orientalism. He also explored how the West justified the colonization of the Islamic world by pointing out its oppression of women. The West colonized / forced trade on the East not when that part of the world was strong and progressive, but when they were declining, using that decline and the patriarchy of the East as evidence of “backwardness” and Western superiority:

There has been so massively and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women’s rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple and agreed upon concepts that one either does or does not find…⁸

Said uses the example of the Gustav Flaubert (French writer) spending time with and writing about an Egyptian courtesan. Never did Flaubert describe the courtesan’s emotions, present, or history. Similarly, in the aforementioned Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak described the savior complex of the colonizing West that never asked the global majority woman how she felt, or if she needed or wanted to be saved. For example, today Westerners will argue against Muslim women that argue they want to be veiled. Some Muslim women say their veiling offers them freedom from the male gaze, and greater comfort in pursuing a life and career outside the home. For me, looking androgynous provides some of the same safety — but lesbian androgyny is more acceptable, cool, hip, Western-coded to liberal feminism when compared to wearing a traditional, “ethnic” veil.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty wrote that during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, some Iranian revolutionaries voluntarily veiled themselves at times to show of solidarity with their working-class sisters. The Western here and historically demanded that Muslin women be unveiled because the veil is a sign of her oppression — never freely chosen. What they’re arguing in speaking over the Muslim women is that the veiled women cannot be trusted to speak for herself, nor make her own choices. A Western analogy might be women choosing to dedicate themselves to child birth and child rearing, more domestic labor, and wear traditional cottage core/prairie dresses. Neither are inherently wrong: my feminist argument would be that women are given the choice and not forced nor manipulated into either.

In Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses⁹, Chandra Talpade Mohanty wrote of “the veil” as the West’s symbol of the oppression of Eastern/oriental women. For the Western, the greater the number of veiled women, the greater the oppression that existed in that place and time. Nevermind that there’s no consistency in what the veil is, as it’s different in India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran…and the idea of a veil could be further extended past Mohanty’s focus to China, with feet-binding as a form of veiling. While China wasn’t colonized, it was exploited through foreign trading powers, and Japan was pressured to open to trade in other ways.

Constructing Decolonist Feminisms

Women of the global majority have been oppressed, but they’ve also struggled against their oppression. They’ve organized movements against that oppression. Since history is written by the victors, these have too often been forgotten or ignored. In Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Kumari Jayawardena described feminist movements of Egypt, Iran, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The early feminist movements often rose alongside or shortly after movements against colonial/imperialistic powers, and women and men participated in both movements in most of those countries.

In India, there were women who began organizing before/around the time of British colonization. There were South Asian feminist thinkers who were contemporaries of Mary Wollstonecraft. Raja Rammohan Roy (1772 - 1833) was a man who was a pioneer in beginning the early feminist movement in India. The Reform movement grew through the 1800’s, with an emphasis on access to education. By the 1880s, there were women graduating from universities in India.

In Iran, there were heroines in the older Zoroastrian religion, which became inspirational heroines in the Islam. There was a 1800s heretical movement (Baha’ism) that argued for social justice, higher status for women, limits on polygamy, prohibitions against violence against women and measures for their education. Girls began attending school in the 1890s.

In China, the first Western-style schools for the education of girls were started after the Opium Wars, in the 1840s. As they grew up, these girls became parts of proto feminist movements in Chinese cities. The most famous (so wrote Jayawardena) was Jiu Jin, who passed away when she was only 22…she wrote and lived an patriotic but scandalous life — she dressed in Western male attire, rode horseback, drank wine, and joined political movements. Women were part of the May 4 Movement and the Revolution.

In Egypt, Huda Sha'arawi was an early feminist who founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923. The Union demanded the right to vote, the advancement of women and children's education, stopping government legalized prostitution, and advocated for better health care for women and children. Sha’arawi cast her veils off into the sea in 1924.

For each of those countries, I can think of a historical ruler that was more powerful than most men of her time. Hatshepsut, the Egyptian pharaoh in died in 1458 BCE. Nur Jahan, the real “power behind the throne” in Mughal India. Wu Zetian, Chinese emperor from 660 - 705, who scholars consider one of China’s greatest. Musa of Parthia, who started as an Italian slave-girl and became ruler of ancient Persia from 2 BCE - 4 AD, as well as a few that were ethnically Iranian. These are the stories we — people of the global majority and/or descended from — need in addition to those about sati, veils, and foot-binding.

During this century, there have been global efforts and inevitable backlashes to feminism globally. There was the rapidly shut down “woman, life, freedom” in Iran in 2022, following the murder of Mahsa Amini — killed for not being veiled properly. There’s the NiUnaMenos that started in 2015 in Argentina and spread throughout Latin America — I have Verónica Gago’s (a leader in that movement) Feminist International on my shelves. There seem to be somewhat regular protests in India following rapes that make the news — the stand out one for me are the late 2012 protests that followed the rape and murder of Nirbhaya — which I’ve referenced frequently here. There’s China’s “pink feminism” — hiding feminism connections behind cute emojis and text when gathering and connecting online. The U.S.’s #metoo movement set off waves of similar movements online that transcended the internet into real life legal cases around the world.

A estimate is that about 82 - 84% of the world’s population is the global majority. The feminisms of those part of the world are varied, huge, and complex — far too much to cover in a single essay, or even a single book. The greater reliance on family, social networks, and community offers a valuable lesson to Western feminists also in movement-building. I offer this essay as a way to begin to think about those feminisms.

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Thank you for reading unknown canon. I advocate for intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis; and directly with survivors of assault.

I would appreciate it if you could please support by liking and sharing this or other posts. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber — which helps grow my advocacy ♥️

1. Don’t know why translations from Hindi and similar languages into English are so so bad.

2. South Asia was a region, not the three countries it is at this time. Each of these “presidencies” is of a different cultural group that broadly falls under the umbrella of South Asian, they’re both in modern-day India.

Note, also, that the numbers for sati are over a decade, versus for Europe are centuries. Still, that the numbers are so disparate strongly suggests that to call South Asians “savages” and use this as one of the excuses that morally justified colonization while ignoring that you’ve murdered likely far more women makes the justification logically and morally unsound.

As the statistics imply, many widows were kept alive, but they were socially shunned and subject to abuse. Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005) is a fictionalized telling of the social shunning of widows (it takes place in 1938, so during the British Raj/colonization), and she wrote a documentary The Forgotten Women about the subject after.

3. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Feminist Review 30 (1):61-88. 1988.

4. Being a child of immigrants, with grandparents born in a still-colonized country complicates my personal identity between the East/West.

5. Lugones, María. Toward a Decolonist Feminism. Hypatia , Volume 25 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Feminist Legacies/Feminist Futures: The 25th Anniversary Issue , Summer 2010 , pp. 742 - 759. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x

6. Ibid.

7. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of citizenship, complicity and dissent. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(1), 7–20. 2006. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690600571209

8. Said, Edward. Orientalism. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). preface.

9. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Feminist Review 30 (1):61-88. 1988.