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¶ … Feminism and colonialism
Gayatri Spivak's essay "Can the subaltern speak?" is a complex and sometimes elliptical essay which can be summed up in a very simple answer: "no." Spivak poignantly illustrates the reality of many Indian women's lives throughout history by providing an overview of how the treatment of native women was regarded during the period of Indian colonial rule. The British, in their effort to present themselves as civilizing the uncouth and barbarian Indians, decried what they saw as negative, male-dominant aspects of Indian culture. Many Indian men defended this ideology as a source of national cultural pride and as a source of resistance to colonialism. Of course, the voices of the women were lost in this discourse: to speak out against patriarchy meant to ally themselves with the British who did not have their interests or their country's interests at heart. To condone Indian patriarchy meant to sublimate their own interests as women. "Both as an object of colonialist historiography and as a subject of insurgency, the ideological structure keeps the male dominant" (Spivak 28). There was no ideological place to articulate their needs.
Edward Said, however, would add that not only actual women are deemed feminine and therefore worthy of oppression but that the entire 'Orient' itself has been constructed as feminine in colonial discourse and therefore worthy of being oppressed (however Spivak might counter that this might be one reason...
In his classical work Orientalism, Said writes: "the Orient that appears in Orientalism then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later Western empire" (Said 60). The construction of the Orient has very little to do with the real countries being oppressed; rather it is an ideological way for the West to reduce the Orient in a manner that can be easily categorized by Westerners as something strange, exotic, despotic, and sensual in an unchanging fashion -- and in need of being cleansed and rectified (Said 61). The Orient was always presented as something inferior to European culture and white men were thought to have the duty to study it as well as civilize it. Whites were always placed in the role of the observer and other cultures in the role of the observed. Even positive accounts of Arabs were highly romanticized and tended to show them primitive in a manner that whites were not.
Uma Narayan in her essay "Package Picture' of Cultures" like Spivak highlights the difficulty of feminists of color to find a way to articulate their needs in a manner that does not endorse white stereotypes of formerly colonialized peoples. "The essentialist Package Picture of Cultures represents cultures as…
Contrasting Views on Multiculturalism and Women\\\'s Rights, and a Hypothetical Dialogue between Lila Abu-Lughod and Susan Moller OkinIntroductionThis essay examines the critical dialogue between Lila Abu-Lughod�s �Do Muslim Women Need Saving?� and Susan Moller Okin�s �Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?� to explore the relationship between multiculturalism and women\\\'s rights. The focus is on hypothesizing how Abu-Lughod might respond to and critique Okin\\\'s views on multiculturalism\\\'s impact on women, drawing exclusively
Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice" by Jilian Hernandez, the essay explores the concept of 'raunch aesthetics' in the video for the song, "Don't Let Go." Hernandez also explore the notions of community cultural capital, color blind/new racism, and postfeminism through the performance of the women in the video. Hernandez's interpretation of queer and feminist teachings via these four concepts and through
Canadian Feminism Expression, Action, Rebellion, Reflection, & Attention: The Power and the Problem of Canadian Feminist Media How does use of the media inform and propel the feminist movement in Canada? How is media used as part of the feminist agenda? What is the history of the media in reference to feminist communication in Canada? How can Canadian feminists utilize media to its full advantage to support and promote the feminist agenda? How does the feminist movement
This continuing trading out of one tyranny for another is also built into a recurring theme in the text. Multiculturalism Early on in the novel, a scene of mob violence -- that is, of a white mob practicing violence upon black students, including with the use of a baseball bat -- is described, and Puttbutt's reaction to the scene is prompted and recorded by the ubiquitous television media. Puttbutt describes the
Schwartz (2006), many arguments are presented, most of which generally criticize the Western treatment of First Nations people or address women's rights issues. As an example, "Aboriginal Australia: Current Criminological Themes" by Rick Sarre (2006) focuses on the affect of British colonialism in Australia on the Aborigines, connecting it to a vast overrepresentation of Aborigines in the Australian penal system. "The Left Realist Perspective on Race, Class, and Gender"
Cultural Values in Humanistic Psychology Every discipline embraces particular values that reflect on the science or discipline itself, but that also reflect on the cultural context in which the discipline or science is primarily conducted. The full court press of positivism brought an objective, values-free paradigm to the forefront of research (Glazner & Hill, 2013). The field of psychology is engaged in a debate about the possibility of bringing positive psychology