AFRICAN GENDER STUDIES ;week 4,lecture 2 notes

Colonial Imposition of Gender

• Relationship between colonialism and gender

  • Intersects with ecology, economics, government relations, spirituality, and everyday practices.

  • Impacts how societies care for or destroy the environment.

Views of Maria Lugones

• Rereading of modern capitalist colonialism as a lens for understanding gender.

• Challenges the assumption that:

  • Heterosexuality is the natural and superior norm.

  • Highlights the interplay of gender, colonial history, and racial hierarchies.

Western Feminism

• Critique of universalizing women’s experiences:

  • Fails to recognize how colonialism shapes gendered oppression differently for women in the Global South.

Commonality of Gender

• Introduced by Lugones:

  • Exposes how European colonialism imposed a binary and patriarchal gender system.

  • Indigenous societies had more fluid and complex gender identities before colonization.

Decoloniality and the Ideal Human

• Description of the ideal human within colonial frameworks:

  • Depicted as the heterosexual Christian male.

  • Positioned as rational and superior, reinforcing racial and capitalist structures.

• Gender roles:

  • Women were portrayed as:

    • Sexual purities, passive, and homebound.

    • Supportive of white European bourgeois norms.

• Results in:

  • Gendered division that supports patriarchal order in Europe.

  • Justifies colonial dominance.

Subordination and Dehumanization

• Overview of how colonization affected women:

  • Women were seen as:

    • Inferior and uncivilized.

    • Lacking rationality and autonomy.

• Impacts of coloniality of gender:

  • Imposition of European gender norms on colonized societies.

  • Erasure of precolonial gender fluidity.

  • Reduction of non-European women to objects for racial and sexual exploitation.

Colonial Depictions of the Colonized

• Colonized individuals characterized as:

  • Sexually deviant, pestilent, and sinful.

• Legitimization of:

  • Violence, control, and exclusion against colonized populations.

Language of Colonial Logic

• Complex categorizations of identities:

  • Terms like hermaphrodites, sodomites, viragos, and colomites used to label non-European identities as unnatural.

• These labels reinforce colonial ideologies and practices.