Postcolonial feminism

An approach to feminist thought that examines how colonial histories shape gender relations, power, and knowledge, and challenges accounts that treat women’s experiences as universal.

Postcolonialism: A body of thought examining colonialism’s legacies in power, culture, identity, and knowledge. It supplies the critique of colonial power that postcolonial feminism applies to gender.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: An Indian literary theorist whose work examines colonialism, representation, and subalternity. Her question of whether the subaltern can speak became a landmark challenge to representation.
Subaltern: A term for people excluded from dominant structures of political and social representation. The concept foregrounds whose voices are made inaudible within colonial and gender hierarchies.
Liberal feminism: A feminist approach focused on equal rights and opportunities within existing political and social institutions. Postcolonial feminism asks whether universal rights frameworks overlook colonial histories and unequal conditions.
Development discourse: Language and institutions that define social change through models of economic and political development. Postcolonial feminist critique examines how development policy casts some women as targets for rescue or modernization.
Feminist theory: Theories that analyze gender inequality and seek to explain or transform relations of power. Postcolonial feminism revises feminist analysis by making colonial histories central.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty: An Indian-American feminist scholar known for critiques of Western feminist scholarship. She showed how scholarship can flatten women in the Global South into one victimized group.
Representation: The practices through which people or groups are portrayed or speak on behalf of others. Postcolonial feminist analysis asks who represents women and what power that representation carries.
Essentialism: The view that a group shares a fixed underlying nature or set of defining traits. The approach resists treating women or cultures as homogeneous categories.
Humanitarian intervention: Action across borders justified by preventing or ending severe human suffering. The approach questions when claims to protect women become entangled with imperial power.

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