Beyond civilisational feminism
If you have some to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. ―Lilla Watson, Australian Indigenous activist
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: Ongoing
🥣 Ingredients: “A decolonial feminism” book by Françoise Vergès (if you’re curious to find out more about it!)
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Community, Liberatory Learning, Radical Care
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Accountability, Acknowledgment, Allyship, Caring, Challenging, Championing, Inquiry, Liberation, Multiperspectivity, Reciprocity
Beyond civilisational feminism
📝 Description
Towards a decolonial feminism.
In her book “A decolonial feminism”, activist and public educator Françoise Vergès, opens with the question “Who cleans the world?” to engage with feminist theory and support anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialists struggles. The following recipe invites you to critically analyse and move beyond what Vergès calls “civilisational feminism”, meaning “white feminism” understood as an ideology with the “mission of imposing a unique perspective that contributes to the perpetuation of domination based on class, gender, and race.” Instead, she defends a “decolonial” approach to feminism “whose objective is the destruction of racism, capitalism, and imperialism”.
🌟 Steps
Step 1 – Undoing “civilisational feminism”
Vergès invites you to sit with this question: How has the issue of women’s rights become one of the trump cards played by the state and imperialism, one of neoliberalism’s last recourses, and the spearhead of the civilising mission of white, bourgeois feminism? If you look at the roots, civilisational feminism “is born with the colony” and, as Vergès argues, “if feminism remains based on the division between women and men… but does not analyse how slavery, colonialism, and imperialism affect this division… then this feminism is racist”. If you identify as a white woman and a feminist, consider the following: What is holding you back from learning about your history (of whiteness and colonialism)? And if you identify as a racialised woman, consider the following: Do you feel you have been accepted into the ranks of civilisational feminism on the condition that you adhere to a Western interpretation of women’s rights?
Step 2 – Towards “decolonial feminism”
Vergès explains that unlike civilisational feminism, decolonial feminism “is a feminism that offers a multidimensional analysis of oppression and refuses to divide race, sexuality, and class into mutually exclusive categories”. Why is this important? Because by adopting a multidimensional approach, it is possible to “avoid a hierarchy of struggles based on a scale of urgency whose framework often remains dictated by prejudice”. For example, to return to Vergès’s opening question “Who cleans the world?”, reflect on the following: Are gendered and racialised bodies the one mostly affected by the economy of exhaustion, of fatigue, and of wearing out? Then also reflect on the following: How can you understand the relationship between capitalism as a material and toxic waste producer, and its production of human beings seen as disposable? How is the outsourcing of waste invisibilised? How can you put your solidarity with care workers and cleaning workers into practice?