Decolonizing knowledges in feminist world politics

International Feminist Journal of Politics ISSN: 1461-6742 (Print) 1468-4470 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20 Decolonizing knowledges in feminist world politics Anne Sisson Runyan To cite this article: Anne Sisson Runyan (2018) Decolonizing knowledges in feminist world politics, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20:1, 3-8, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2018.1414403 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1414403 Published online: 05 Feb 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 4182 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfjp20 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS, 2018 VOL. 20, NO. 1, 3–8 https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1414403 INTRODUCTION Decolonizing knowledges in feminist world politics Anne Sisson Runyan Department of Political Science, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA “Decolonizing Knowledges in Feminist World Politics” was the theme of the fifth International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP) conference held at the University of Cincinnati in May 2016 and is the theme of this special issue arising from it. The continuing annual conferences of this journal seek to identify and coalesce research on emergent and major currents in feminist International Relations (IR) and transnational feminist thought and action. The theme of the 2016 conference and this special issue refers to both sighting decolonizing knowledges already present in feminist world politics inquiry and seeking ways to further decolonize it. Although the “decolonial turn” (Maldonado-Torres 2008) in critical thinking has a long history, embedded in centuries of resistances to colonization and settler colonialism, it is only recently that IR, as a discipline, has been recognized as a fundamentally colonial project. Eurocentric (and later US-centric) colonialism and imperialism both founded and remain constitutive of IR (Barkawi and Laffey 2002; Jones 2006; Tickner 2014). Past and continuing stories of Westphalian “sovereignty and liberal democracy” as the history and foundations of the discipline cover up “the authoritarianism, theft, racism, and in significant cases, massacre and genocide” at the heart of the “colonial state and political economy” that IR represents and legitimizes (Jones 2006, 3–4). Moreover, the structure of contemporary IR knowledge production has been likened to a colonial household in which perspectives of colonized peoples and post-colonial critiques are either consigned to servitude in it or kept outside of it altogether (Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Also relatively recently, feminist studies have been challenged for still present colonial legacies and colonizing moves within it, particularly in the US but also elsewhere. Although gender, ethnic and queer studies have importantly exposed the hegemonies and costs of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative ideologies and structures, without a central interrogation of colonization and particularly settler colonialism, such studies can devolve into “liberal multicultural discourses” that champion “inclusion and equality” within the nation (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). These can play into “the expansion of the settler state” by increasing the “opportunity” of previously excluded majorities and minorities to take part in the settling processes that dispossess” Indigenous peoples (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). “Indigenous communities’ concerns are often not about achieving formal equality and civil rights within a nationstate, but instead achieving substantial independence from a Western nation-state – independence decided on their own terms” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). Moreover, a neglect of colonialism can mean inattention to the appropriation and destruction of CONTACT Anne Sisson Runyan [email protected] © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 4 A. S. RUNYAN land that entails multiple forms of ongoing genocidal and other violence. The usurpation of territory to accumulate wealth has rested on a “triad relationship among the industrious settler, the erased/invisiblized Native, and the ownable and murderable slave” and extending to the super-exploitable “illegal” immigrant (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 12). Thus, what Latin American and Caribbean scholars have referred to as the “coloniality of power” understood as a “colonial power matrix” introduced in the sixteenth century and globalized by the nineteenth century and affecting all dimensions of life (Quijano 2000), ranging from institutions, identities and relations to epistemologies, subjectivities and aesthetics, is far from a thing of the past. What Maria Lugones (2010) refers to as the “coloniality of gender” also remains highly operant and essential to what Breny Mendoza, the opening speaker for the 2016 IFJP conference, calls the “genocidal logic of the coloniality of power” (2016, 20). The imposition of European gender systems, particularly heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 14) and applicable only to “civilized” colonizers, renders the colonized as outside of and even threatening to that “gender order” and thus only “fit for breeding, brutal labor, exploitation, and/or massacre” (Mendoza 2016, 18). As a result, the colonized are subject to the most extreme sexual and gender violence attendant to the “dehumanizing practice” of the coloniality of gender (Mendoza 2016, 18). Decolonial thought and practice, most associated with Indigenous voices in the Americas and other settler colonial contexts, seeks to denaturalize this dehumanization intrinsic to colonial and settler colonial logics and all the violences arising from them while aligning with “processes and forces of regeneration, revitalization, remembering, and visioning” drawn from Indigenous ways of being, thinking and connecting (Simpson 2011, 148). Native feminist Mishuana Goeman of the transnational and matrilineal Haudenosuanee (Iroquois) Confederacy counsels “centering Indigenous conceptions of land as connected, rather than disaggregated parcels of land at various European-conceived scales” such as “reservations, nation-states, hemispheres,” and seeing water “as connected with the currents rather than water as that which divides continents” (Aikau et al. 2015, 94). This not only disrupts hegemonic geopolitical categories and logics of accumulation, but also revises the transnational feminist politics of “difference” by considering the non-human in relation to the human (Aikau et al. 2015, 94). Such a move recognizes the dependence on and shared obligations of care for and reciprocity with the non-human by human communities. Thus, the 2016 IFJP conference was dedicated to exploring to what degrees and in what ways feminist world politics knowledge production reproduces and/or challenges colonial and settler colonial logics. Within that remit, contributors to the conference were asked to consider multiple definitions of and approaches to decolonial feminism; an array of methods and practices for decolonizing not only scholarship and institutions but also bodies (human and non-human), emotions and minds; relationships between decolonization and anti-racist, anti-heteronormative anti-gender normative and anticapitalist projects; and promising directions for decolonizing feminist security and international political economy inquiry and transnational feminist thought. The conference, keynoted by Zillah Eisenstein, who, given the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election at the time, urged non-cooperation with the gendered and racialized colonial order that it was bound to (and did) reproduce and intensify, was also accompanied by a preconference workshop led by Sunera Thobani and Simona Sharoni. This focused on pedagogies and scholarship resistant to such colonial projects as occupation, Islamophobia and INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 5 settler colonial state terrorism and relevant to ongoing local and global struggles for social justice, including within our own educational institutions. Centering colonialism in feminist and feminist world politics studies and activism disables genderwashing, or the process by which colonial projects are carried on in the name of women’s rights, in order to practice more ethical politics and solidarity. In this special issue, the articles that appear were either presented at the 2016 conference or submitted in response to the call for journal submissions relevant to its theme. The Conversations section in particular as well as several of the book reviews are also consonant with the focus on decolonizing feminist world politics knowledges. What emerges across these contributions are the perils and costs of neglecting the coloniality of power and the particular manifestations of settler colonialism in feminist scholarship and/or activism. These include ignorance and dismissals of indigenous knowledges and practices, inattention to human relationships with nature, complicities with colonial logics and failing to recognize how deeply, extensively and painfully colonial logics permeate all aspects of life, undermining full expressions of selves, transformative relations with human and non-human others, and ethical solidarities. The ultimate cost is reproducing and extending the coloniality of power and gender. Contributions also exhibit different ways in which decolonization can be exercised from identifying and resisting the most overt and the more covert violences of ongoing colonization to seeking modes of remembering, recovery and rejuvenation often informed by Indigenous approaches to struggle and healing. The issue opens with Nompumelelo Motlafi’s “The Coloniality of the Gaze on Sexual Violence: A Stalled Attempt at South Africa-Rwanda Dialogue,” a trenchant meditation on the problematics posed by the realities that most scholarship on sexual violence in Rwanda has focused on the Rwandan genocidal rapes and has been conducted by Western or Western-oriented feminist researchers from outside Rwanda at the expense of local scholarship on the issue. Among the effects of this is a focus on what the Rwandan case can contribute to international law rather than what alternative, more indigenous jurisprudence might be more appropriate from the perspectives of Rwandan rape survivors. But what is particularly at issue for Motlafi, a Black South African, is how her gaze is also implicated in coloniality in choosing to focus on sexual violence from pre- to post-colonial times in Rwanda rather than in South Africa, where genocidal rape may have been avoided, but rape nevertheless is infamously rampant. Her positionality as a member of a regional African power with the most notorious white settler history also renders her suspect not only to the Rwandan government but also to potential research participants. Thus as important as it is to consider what might constitute decolonized relationships between South Africans and Rwandans to further the study of sexual violence, it also necessary to look “closer to home” to make connections between sexual violence and colonization. My contribution to this issue, “Disposable Waste, Lands, and Bodies Under Canada’s Gendered Nuclear Colonialism,” takes up the case of ongoing attempts to bury all of Canada’s nuclear power waste on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) as an example of the worldwide phenomenon of nuclear colonialism and through which the relationship between gender and nuclear colonialism is explored. This is a case “closer to home” for me as a lifelong white settler summer resident on this territory on the shores of Lake Huron which also hosts the world’s largest operational nuclear power plant. Through this case, I make a direct connection between the appropriation of the SON’s land by the undermining of First Nations women’s status 6 A. S. RUNYAN and authority prior to and after Canadian Confederation and the present nuclearization of the area. I also trace how the patriarchal, neoliberal and techno-scientific hubris of the “Atomic Brotherhood” is embedded in Canadian nuclear power and waste policymaking, acting to dismiss local white settler resistances to nuclear waste burial and until recently denying First Nations any say in what hazardous material is produced or placed on their land. Although the right of First Nations, albeit a still precarious one, to determine whether or not toxic activities can occur on their territories has finally been recognized as a result of recent Canadian “duty to consult” law, it was not until local white settler resistance, largely led by women and garnering regional and transnational support, emerged that the SON was officially given decision-making power by the Crown corporation responsible for nuclear waste disposal. However, I problematize this white settler resistance, in which I continue to be a participant observer, for failing itself to recognize the central fact that proposed burial sites are on SON territory and thus to engage in any analysis of nuclear colonialism or their own implication in gendered settler colonialism that made it possible. In “Formulating Japan’s UNSCR 1325 National Action Plan and Forgetting the ‘Comfort Women,’” Hisako Motoyama presents a clear case of genderwashing in which the Japanese government is engaging in remilitarization and revisionist history to erase its imperial past, including forcing Asian “comfort women” into sexual servitude for its military, under the cover becoming a supporter of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 by adopting a National Action Plan for women, peace and security. As Motoyama reveals, Japan is casting itself as a protector of women in conflict zones in the Global South, particularly against sexual violence, as a pretext for joining the “international security order, in which powerful liberal democracies that are immune to historical colonial responsibilities exercise power and moral authority over the rest.” UNSCR 1325, by failing to counter that militarized colonial order, is enabling Japan and other such states to advance their participation in that order and to leave gender violence past and present unchallenged within their own borders while claiming to care about it beyond them. Anwar Mhajne and Crystal Whetstone challenge colonial conceptions of women in the Islamic world and of motherhood as apolitical. In “The Use of Political Motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring Uprising and Aftermath,” they trace how Egyptian women, both secular and Islamist, deployed political motherhood, primarily as a “bottom-up” strategy that took advantage of “top-down” and “hypervisible” state constructions of women as mothers of the nation, to mobilize mass protests against Mubarek during the Arab Spring. This strategy was also used by secular women in resistance to the Morsi regime and then by Islamist women to protest the military coup that toppled Morsi. Thus, while political motherhood, on the one hand, constitutes “bargaining with the patriarchy” in using the symbolism of maternal care and respectability, on the other hand, it is a powerful force for “legitimizing anti-state demonstrations,” shielding some against the worst state violence, and playing “a role in democratization processes,” particularly in Islamic contexts. The colonization of Black women’s bodies and minds, particularly in the form of the denigration of their natural hair which they are expected to “shackle” as an extension of slavery under racist colonial aesthetic regimes, is taken up by Carolette Norwood. In “Decolonizing My Hair, Unshackling by Curls: An Authoethnography on What Makes my Natural Hair Journey a Black and African Diasporic Feminist Statement,” she tells a story that interweaves her personal story of resistance to “white heteronormative INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 7 hairism” with literary, film and blog narratives by Black North American, African, Caribbean and Afro-Latina (collectively referred to as Africana) women and Black feminist and queer thought she has encountered on her journey to release herself from this “imprisonment.” Along the way, she also offers examples of the political economy, surveillance apparatus and sexual politics of “institutionalized hairism” as well as its cultural and health effects. Describing colonization as “very much a manipulation, a rape and a destruction – an occupation of the mind, the body, the spirit and the consciousness,” Norwood concludes that decolonization for her entails nothing less “than falling in love with a self I did not know, a self that was prohibited, a self that was shunned for no apparent reason, a self that was (and is) beautiful as is.” The Indigenous practice of story-telling with words and images continues in the Conversations section. Re-membering through Indigenous decolonial knowledges and practices in the Americas constitutes the theme that cuts across these moving contributions. Sandra Alvarez introduces us to the “cartography of struggle” of the U’wa people in Colombia, who have been joined by other Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, including herself, from across the Americas to protect their land from industrial appropriation and destruction. The photograph she shares includes the images of three transnational Indigenous women activists assassinated in Colombia for their solidarity work framed by the beauty of earth and sky, symbols of how ancestral spirits and relationships to the land enable re-membering community and Mother Earth. Pascha Bueno-Hansen transports us to an Encuentro of Latin American and Caribbean lesbian feminists in which she participated and which involved a visit to a memorial site, pictured in the piece, for those tortured and murdered by the Chilean dictatorship, including the lesbian partner of their guide. Bearing witness to these past and continuing traumas, and particularly the still unacknowledged torture and murder of sexual minorities in the national imaginary, can have the effect of healing “fragmented” bodies and subjectivities through the process of “decolonial re/membering” that offers alternative approaches to transitional justice. Just as Alvarez notes that IR invisibilizes “relationality and accountability” among humans and between humans and the land, Justin de Leon finds that hegemonic IR is dismissive of scholar-activist practices that seek to serve “communities from which one learns.” He, as a colonized Filipino now residing in the US settler state who studies, teaches about and contributes to Indigenous politics through ethnography and film production, has learned much from years spent with and filming the lives of the Lakota Sioux people as they counter the legacies of settler colonialism through remembering their own cosmologies and recovering their own traditions. It is through film that he can best give back to such Native American communities not only to share their stories of struggle and remembering with wider audiences to “challenge settler colonial, patriarchal and racist structures,” but also to document for the communities themselves their own histories and practices to assist in their remembering process. Several books reviewed in this issue also show the value of ethnographic work in revealing the greater dependencies of poor, indigenous women in urban South Africa on the state, the history of indigenous gender relations in Timor-Leste prior to and since the Indonesian occupation and the rise of the transnational domestic workers movement and how it succeeded in gaining an International Labour Organization convention for domestic workers rights. Other books reviewed focus on the gendered nature and impact of the US neocolonial counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan from invasion to withdrawal, the intensification of gender violence since the US imperial 8 A. S. RUNYAN response to 9/11, African women’s decolonial and feminist activism and the array of gender instruments, including quotas, mainstreaming, women’s policy agencies and gender responsive-budgeting, that must be fully and contemporaneously in place to actually engender democracy. As all these contributions suggest, the decolonial turn in feminist world politics is highly varied and necessarily open-ended. The sheer range of the manifestations of colonization in different parts of the world and the extent to which not only polities, economies and cultures, but also lands, waters, bodies, identities, emotions and minds are colonized ensure that decolonizing projects will continue to be works in progress. Whether feminist scholar-activists engaging in this work refer to their perspectives as decolonial, post-colonial, anti-colonial or anti-imperial, each having somewhat different genealogies and resonances, they are, in varying ways, centering the coloniality of power and gender in their analyses and calling for others to engage in this practice to learn from and posit more transformative epistemologies, ontologies, methodologies, pedagogies and solidarities for social and ecological justice. IFJP, which will be guided by a new editorial team and housed in its new homebase at Cardiff University as of January 2018, welcomes more scholarship and creative work that centers and expands decolonial feminist world politics knowledges. It also invites you to participate in future annual conferences. At this writing, the next conference on “Feminism + Knowledge + Politics” is being held at the University of San Francisco in April 2018, which is following the April 2017 conference on “Walking the Talk: Feminist Reflections on International Practices” held at South Asian University in New Delhi. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. References Agathangelou, Anna M., and L. H. M. Ling. 2004. “The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism.” International Studies Review 6 (4): 21–50. Aikau, Hokulani, Maile Arvin, Mishuana Goeman, and Scott Morgensen. 2015. “Indigenous Feminisms Roundtable.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36 (3): 84–106. Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. 2013. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections Between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25 (1): 8–34. Barkawi, Tarak, and Mark Laffey. 2002. “Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31 (1): 109–127. Jones, Branwen Gruffydd, ed. 2006. Decolonizing International Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lugones, Maria. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mendoza, Breny. 2016. “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality.” In Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 25 pages. Oxford Handbooks Online. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.6. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15 (2): 215–232. Simpson, Leanne. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and New Emergence. Winnipeg: ARP Books. Tickner, J. Ann. 2014. A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.