Gender identity on postcolonial literature,

1. Post Colonial Literature
Genderand
Identity
Presented by Wiwin Malinda

2. Gender and
Identity on
Postcolonial
Studies
Gender is the range of the characteristics pertaining of
femininity and masculinity and differentiating between
them. Depending on the context, this is may include
sex-base social structure (i.e. gender roles) and
gender identity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender)
Postcolonial and gender theories emerge from
political struggles and intellectual traditions
which connect in important ways for education.
Postcolonial and gender theories sit in the
nexus of activism, politics, and academia.

3. Gender, Postcolonialism, and Education
Postcolonial and gender theories in education are driven by a desire to engage
in social change. -> Critical explorations of the colonial and gendered
operations of power interrogate how culture and identity are imbricated.
They explore the pedagogic possibilities for resisting and dismantling the co-
constitutive logics of colonial oppression.
Theories of postcolonial and gender theory are often not recognized as such
within the academy.
The global economy of knowledge is at odds with the political history of gender
relations. Much feminist scholarship has emerged as critical responses to the
deficiencies and blinkers of "Western" feminist politics.

4. Margins: "The Silent, Silenced Center"
Postcolonial gender theories critique the operations of power that create
normative claims about the value of masculine Eurocentric knowledge and
practices.
The projects of postcolonial gender theorists seek to challenge the
hierarchical binaries of center/margin, Self/Other, North/South, and
male/female.
Mohanty argues that postcolonial gender theorists' work can be seen as a
commitment taking the position of the margins in order to critique and
challenge the structural bases of "epistemic violence" (Mirza 2009, p. 236).
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of
Women's and Gender Studies, (en.wikipedia.org)
Spivak reflects, "the subaltern as female is even more
deeply in shadow". Spivak, suggest that the "margins"
constituted through the gendered postcolonial political
economy are "the silent, silenced center".

5. The intellectual and political work of postcolonial gender theorists can be seen as a commitment taking the
position of the margins in order to critique and challenge the structural bases of “epistemic violence”
Gurminder Bhambra (2014) argues that a radical deconstruction of the margins remains illusory if knowledge
of the Self and Other is continually constructed as separate.
This is to eschew an exoticized, commodified reading of "difference". Sara Suleri (1992) warns of the dangers of
testimonial assertions of postcolonial womanhood.
-> Suleri Offers a provocation to consider the role and purpose of postcolonial and gender intellectuals in the
continuing violence of colonization.
-> The Educational Challenge for the field of postcolonial and gender theory is how much relational
understanding of marginality can be achieved.

6. The "Postcolonial Women" Subject
In postcolonial theory, the subject positions of "woman" and "man" are understood
as embedded within the colonial project.
In education, Heidi Mirza examines how when navigating educational spaces black
women's identities and bodies become sites of political, postcolonial struggle
(2009, p. 235).
In On Being Included (2012), Sara Ahmed examines how purported institutional
commitments to diversity and inclusion can exacerbate the embodied and
discursive effects of "difference". She claims those who are "different" are often
relegated the task of performing and creating institutional practices of
"diversity".
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer
and scholar whose area of study includes
the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian
feminism, queer theory, critical race theory
and postcolonialism. (en.wikipedia.org)

7. Ahmed's critique of the diversity practices of higher education institutions
follows a long line of interventions into education by scholars working with
postcolonial and gender theories.
Education is at the center of these theoretical considerations: as an
instrument of dominant power and a possible tool to subvert colonial and
gender assumptions.
For postcolonial gender theorists, the task of challenging colonial and gender
power is often seen as pedagogic. Bell hook's Teaching to Transgress offers
an approach to "engaged pedagogy" that goes beyond critical and feminist
pedagogies in its concern with self-actualization for teachers and students.
The Educational Challenges of/in Postcolonial Studies

8. THE USE OF
CULTURAL
STUDIES - Angela
McRobbie

9. Mad about Boys
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies
That Matter (1993) are regularly cited as having
had as big an impact on feminist thought as de
Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Her writing inaugurates
and confirms a significant, indeed seismic shift, for
feminism.
Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and
gender theorist whose work has influenced political
philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave
feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.
(en.wikipedia.org)

10. Mad about Boys
Feminism can be conceived of, in a post-structuralist move, as without either
beginning or end, as dependent on no great truth narrative to drive it
forward. The expansionist possibilities that women can conceivably invent and
revise different kinds of feminism suggests a means by which feminism
continues to have an existence.
Butler's post-structuralism propels her towards a range of discursive
phenomena, the literary text, psychoanalytic texts, film, philosophical writing
and, of course, feminist theory. This has been seen by critics to indicate a
turning away from what are understood to be larger political concerns.

11. Mad about Boys
Butler's work is absolutely necessary to feminist media and cultural studies,
that we cannot do without it. Her work allows us to understand how, within
popular culture, the 'heterosexual matrix' retains its dominance. The
complexity of contemporary sexual popular culture literally call out for an
analysis informed by Butler's writing.
Butler's analysis of popular culture shows how it continues to define and
redefine the boundaries of gender. The title of this section refers directly to a
magazine for pre-pubescent girls launched in 2001. No moral guardian or
feminist contested the assumption of childhood heterosexuality.

12. Theory of performativity in relation to popular culture by Judith Butler. Examines how feminism has come
to represent women on the basis of an assumption of shared oppression.
Butler posits feminism as a subjectivising discourse, one which in repeating its claims is able to bring into
being the women it seems merely to describe. Contraception, abortion and easily available childcare are
demands which assume a certain type of female subject (heterosexual, a mother).
Butler argues that the claim by non-mothers that feminism does not represent them has an effect of
breaking the foundations of feminism. But instead of seeing this as somehow the end of feminism, Butler
argues it marks a point for renewing feminism so that it moves in another direction.
Butler challenges the centrality of motherhood in feminism's political agenda. Just as she wants to stretch
the definitions of what it is to be a woman, so must feminism be opened up in this way. Butler is
undoing the imbalance which disadvantaged lesbian feminist politics in favour of heterosexual issues.
Rewriting Feminism

13. Rewriting Feminism
What happens when conditions of heterosexuality for young women undergo
some degree of. transformation in that there is a loosening up in regard to
the degree that it is still compulsory? That is, where (in western. culture)
being lesbian no longer carries the same weight of social disapproval?
The relations between heterosexual culture and gay and lesbian culture are
subject to redefinition and redrafting. The heterosexual matrix now exacts its
dominance by more subtle means. There is a reversal of hierarchies in
feminism after Butler, with momentum emerging from a younger generation
of lesbian feminists.
Butler's two books mark a moment of transformation, and for the left and for
1970s feminism, a sharp sense of loss and failure. Butler's work provides a
means of instituting a feminist politics which works in and through processes
of breaking up, dissolving and endlessly disputing.

14. Butler's re-reading of Freud and Lacan produces radical new claims about bisexuality and
gender. She argues that the correct gender identity was not arrived at, but its instability
and precariousness revealed itself in how it continually showed signs of failing (Mitchell,
1984; Rose, 1987).
Butler argues that consolidated gender ideals carry within them 'the figure of the lost
object of same-sex love whose preserved presence as such casts a melancholic shadow on
its bearer'. Homosexuality is a taboo which precedes incest, its primary repression ensures
it retains a critical presence wherever heterosexuality is compelled.
Revising Psychoanalysis 1

15. Revising Psychoanalysis 1
Butler argues that those who cannot be accounted for along the rigid lines of
gender are rendered unintelligible, or abject. The term queer can as Butler shows,
be made to re-articulate the conditions of abjection and challenge, as she herself
does, the processes of power which produce the heterosexual matrix.
Butler argues that Freud's understanding of bisexuality has already assumed the
taboo against homosexuality. The Oedipus complex ensures that under threat of
castration the boy gives up his mother as an object of desire, while the girl
resolves her penis envy and desire for the father.
Butler: 'The unthinkable is fully within culture but excluded from dominant
culture'. The more full and proper masculinity or femininity is aspired to, the
more apparent is the noted loss of improper desire. The lost object then comes to
be installed in or on the body.

16. Butler challenges Lacan's positing of the phallus as irrefutable. He uses it
to re-signify other possible meanings. Failure to proceed through the
Symbolic results in psychosis, he writes. The Symbolic inaugurates culture
and kinship.
The phallus is a symbol which guards the rules of kinship and
heterosexuality, making sure these rules are adhered to. But it is also a
'transferable phantasm' and Butler seeks to lift this symbol-phallus away
from its pre-eminent male domain.
Revising Psychoanalysis 2

17. The image of the 'ladette' is of a girl for whom gender equality with men
is assumed. In such an environment there is little need for a renewed
feminist politics. These 'phallic girls' can be understood as 'having taken
hold of a symbol of male power'.
Revising Psychoanalysis 2
The word "ladette" was coined to describe young women who
take part in laddish behaviour. Ladettes are defined by the
Concise Oxford Dictionary as: "Young women who behave in
a boisterously assertive or crude manner and engage in
heavy drinking sessions." The term is no longer widely used.
- Wikipedia

18. Theory of Perfomativity
The great misperception is that the
performativity of gender suggests a
kind of voluntarism and unconstrained
agency. Butler makes strenuous
efforts to clarify that she is saying
almost the opposite of this. The need
for clarifications reveals the fine line
between analysis of gender
regulation and possibilities for change
within and issuing from those
practices.
Butler argues that 'gender is not a noun (but
it) proves to be performative, that is,
constituting the identity it is purported to
be'. In this sense gender is always a doing,
though not by the subject who might be said
to pre exist the deed. There is a celebratory
dynamic in many strands of cultural studies
which celebrates the need for complex
understanding of power by suggesting it can
be easily opposed, countered or thrown off by
so-called active agents. This approach also
often seems to see resistance everywhere,
with the effect that needs for sustained
oppositional politics recede.
Butler insists on the absence of an 'I'
who might 'do' or 'can do' gender in a
subversive way. She does argue
however that the 'iterability of
performativity' is a 'theory of agency'
but without, of course, an agent. In
Bodies That Matter Butler confronts
her feminist critics who insist on the
substance of the body. The
performativity introduced in Gender
Trouble, takes on a much more
coercive function. Only by recognising
oneself as a girl can a culturally
intelligible speaking subject emerge.
But power is not a single mechanism,
rather it is 'reiterated acting'.

19. Butler argues that performativity is a series of practices which mark bodies according to a
grid of intelligibility. Performativity in this context comprises the continuous ongoing
processes of boundary marking and rigid demarcation. Gayness is all around straightness,
forcing the Law to produce as spectres of horror the 'feminised fag'.

20. Resources:
Gerrard J., Sriprakash A. (2015) Gender, Postcolonialism, and Education. In: Peters
M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_190-1
McRobbie, Angela. The uses of cultural studies: A textbook. Sage, 2005.