15 Postcolonial Feminism and Intersectionality

15
15 Postcolonial Feminism and Intersectionality
“Sisterhood Is Global,” “The Personal Is Political” or “Wages for Housework,” all

these are slogans of the second wave of the women’s movement in the West. But
despite its good intentions and the diversity of the various strands of feminism de-
veloped at that time – with their decidedly different political aims, models for gen-
der identities and envisaged ways to change society as well as the existing power
relations – the women’s movement was not as ‘global’ as it tried or claimed to be.
Already at the very beginning, women of color as well as LGBTQ people rightly
criticized that they were not visible and did not feel properly represented in a wom-
en’s movement that seemed to occupy mainly the essentializing speaking position
of White heterosexual middle-class women.
There is a wide range of theoretical work that opposes an essential, homogenous
unity of all women, as well as a binary system of gender and heteronormative
frameworks. Examples include Indigenous feminisms, which insist on different
epistemologies of gender and sexual orientation, and queer theory, which attempts
to step out of normative binarism altogether (see, for example, Grande 2015 on In-
digenous critiques of “whitestream feminism” and Xiang 2018 on a decolonial ex-
ploration of alternative, non-European trajectories of queer thought).
In this chapter, we will focus on two lines of resistance against the Eurocentric
bias of the White women’s movement discernible since the 1980s: intersectionality
and postcolonial feminism. Like other social movements that challenged racism,
colonialism, militarism and capitalism, these resistant feminisms share a focus on
the articulation of difference, despite different agendas and different vocabularies.
On the one hand, Black women in the West, like Heidi Safia Mirza, rightly criticized
that “[t]he invisibility of black women speaks of the separate narrative construc-
tions of race, gender and class: in a racial discourse where the subject is male; in a
gendered discourse, where the subject is white; and a class discourse, where race
has no place” (1997, 4). But, on the other hand, Black women are no homogenous
group either. They are, among other things, also separated by their global location
with regard to race, class, gender and other divisions, which are played out quite
differently in places which had once been subject to Western colonialism, as women
from the Global South pointed out.
These two strands of feminist intervention provided the basis for the theoretical
development of intersectionality and postcolonial feminism, which we will take a
closer look at in this chapter. While postcolonial feminism is mainly interested in
the way women are represented in discourse and is located in Western academies
as well as postcolonial locations, intersectionality is interested in identity categories
and was first developed in Western locations (and here mainly in the US and the
UK) before spreading to other places.
In this chapter, we will first look at the common roots of intersectionality and
postcolonial feminism with a focus on the way gendered identities are perceived in
both approaches before proceeding with an exploration of how they analyze oppres-
sion. The chapter closes with two readings, Anowa by Ghanaian author Ama Ata
Aidoo and Chiaroscuro by Black Scottish writer Jackie Kay, demonstrating the use-
fulness of combining notions of intersectionality and postcolonial feminism in inter-
preting literary texts.
J. B. Metzler © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature, 2019

A. Bartels / L. Eckstein / N. Waller / D. Wiemann, Postcolonial Literatures in English, 155
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05598-9_15
15
Postcolonial Feminism and Intersectionality
Intersectional Feminism: Multiple Axes of Oppression

The term intersectionality, which is firmly rooted in Black feminist political activ-
ism, is used in a wide variety of contexts and disciplines for diverse political projects
and has become the new buzzword in feminist criticism. But despite its apparent
novelty, there is a genealogy of intersectional-like (to use Ange-Marie Hancock’s
term) criticism originating in Western Black feminism which can at least be traced
back to Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman,” but also to more recent
thinkers. The Black feminist lesbian Combahee River Collective (1977), for example,
focused not only on the interlocking oppressive systems of race, class and gender
but also on sexuality and used identity politics as a tool of resistance. While Angela
Davis analyzed the interconnections between Women, Race and Class (1981), bell
hooks pointed out the double marginalization produced by sexism and racism in
Ain’t I a Woman (1981). The influential anthology This Bridge Called My Back ed-
ited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1981) collected writings by women
of color from different ethnicities and, last but not least, Patricia Hill Collins devel-
oped her concept of the ‘matrix of domination’ in Black Feminist Thought (1990).
What all these approaches share is their commitment not to reduce marginalization
and oppression to only one factor, which in the case of feminism would be gender.
The term intersectionality itself is credited to Kimberlé Crenshaw who first intro-
duced it in her famous 1989 legal essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race
and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory
and Antiracist Politics.” Crenshaw uses an illuminating metaphor to explain why
the analysis of a single-axis framework of dominance is not sufficient:
Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may
flow in another. If an accident happens at an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling
from a number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is
harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or
race discrimination. (Crenshaw 1989, 149)
She argues further that Black men determine the strategies of anti-racism, while
White women dominate feminism, which results in Black women being made invis-
ible – and not only in anti-discrimination laws. Therefore, it is important that inter-
sectionality takes different forms of oppression and their interplay into account
without prioritizing any one form of oppression over the other, which signals a
move away from additive models (like the idea of triple jeopardy/triple oppression
used in earlier forms of feminist analysis). While early intersectional critics mainly
focused on the so-called ‘master categories’ of gender, race and class, the analytical
categories that have been foregrounded in intersectional analyses in recent years are
widely different and varied, depending on the subject of analysis. Thus, an intersec-
tional analysis can confront several axes of social inequality and oppression (like
gender, race, class, caste, ethnicity, sexuality, or age, to name only a few variables),
while always working on two levels: the one of the individual or group, which is
defined in a cultural context by race, class, gender etc., and the systemic level of
social institutions and interconnected power constellations. The analytical focus of
intersectional analyses recognizes, furthermore, that multiple identities are experi-
enced simultaneously, which implies that they are not fixed but open to change
according to different settings and over time. In short, it investigates lived identities
and experiences as interlocked with systems of oppression.
156

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15

15 Postcolonial Feminism and Intersectionality

“Sisterhood Is Global,” “The Personal Is Political” or “Wages for Housework,” all

J. B. Metzler © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature, 2019

Intersectional Feminism: Multiple Axes of Oppression

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