Multiculturalism and Feminism

¶ … 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 why so many colonial males are so resistant to being characterized as feminine and are so determined to justify patriarchal institutions through the excuse of cultural difference).

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 if they were entities that exist neatly distinct and separate in the world, independent of our projects of distinguishing among them, obscuring the reality that boundaries between them.