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Probing Postcolonial Feminist Concerns in researching Igbo women’s Social Change project: An emerging research methodology
Uchendu Uchechukwu E. PhD Research Student Gent University Gent, Belgium ABSTRACT: This paper addresses the possibility of utilizing postcolonial feminist concerns around representation, cultural alterity, and reflexivity in order to account for the intersections of gender, race, class, and ethnicity in researching for social change in postcolonial context. While drawing from an emerging Southern theoretical positions – scholars who have provided the theoretical lens to address issues of gender from the perspective of the postcolonial female subject and expose the multiple social and historical locations from which men and women speak – it aligns this perspective as preceded by gendered act of colonialism and its continued effects. Out of the methodological complications arising out of mainstream feminist ethnography emphasising “insider” perspective in fieldwork setting, the research work builds on the postcolonial feminist insider/outsider positionality /ies of a researcher working in postcolonial context. While acknowledging self‐reflexivity of traditional feminist scholars, postcolonial feminist positions (re)conceptualizes the ethnographer’s positionality in the field through the intersections of epistemological concerns, ethical practices (“for whom do ‘we’ produce knowledge?”) and political commitments (“what are the consequences of such claims of
knowledge?”) in relation to the researched participants. The commitment entails taking further recourse through auto‐ethnography and ethnonarrative both of which refer to a reflexive practice. It allows me to consider what I pay attention to and how I pay attention to it in terms of what becomes called data. These concerns and positions distinguish postcolonial fieldwork as a political project beyond a critical approach to qualitative inquiry.
Introduction
In an earlier issue of Journal of Ethnic and Radical Studies, Peter Chua et al., argue that “much
work which focuses on the Third World either operates with a conception of women as beings
without agency, or does not analyze the roles played by women in both public and private
domains” 1. These authors, like most postcolonial critics of Western knowledge production2,
of International Development discourses3 and critics of Western feminism4, have revealed the
“modes” and “means” of representing the non‐Western “Other” as “the noble savage”, “the
cultural Other” or “weird regime”. This representation reached a crescendo as gender issue
1. Chua, Peter; Bhavnani, Kum‐Kum & Foran, John. “Women, culture, development: A new paradigm for development studies?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23:5 (2000), 821. 2. See Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage, 1993); Said, E. Orientalism. (London: Penguin, 1995); Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (New York; Routledge, 1994). 3. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 4. Example Mohanty, T. Chandra. “Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses”. Feminist Review, 30 (1988), 61‐88.
in postcolonial context collided with the polemic history of the ethnocentrism of Western
academic discourses and their Universalist agenda. More and more, the non‐Western woman
is being represented as a paragon of softness, passivity, and docility, needing to be spoken
for because of her victimized patriarchal tradition5. In this postcolonial context, therefore, the
issue has become how to narrate the “Oriental Woman”6, the “Third World Woman”7, or the
“Subaltern Woman”8 without speaking for her, without condemning her to an archetype (the
docile wife or the vengeful goddess). This misrepresentation of non‐Western woman in
scholarship raises important questions regarding both the theory and practices of feminist
research. One of these concerns centers on how to research Third World women’s everyday
lives or edify postcolonial feminism that could consider cultural specificities, which would be
consistent with the “historically muted subjects of women in postcolonial context. These
issues have been raised by postcolonial feminist scholars writing from the global South and
developed, over the last few decades in literature that engages with critique of representation
and intersections (or shifting constructions) of gender, race, class relations and culture. These
perspectives further our understanding of how material existence, shaped by history,
influences women’s mobilization and social change goals for those who, in Homi Bhabha’s9
words have “suffered the sentence of history” – subjugation, domination, diaspora,
displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.
As qualitative research enters into what Denzin and Lincoln10 call the eight moment,
ethnographers have begun to confront these controversial issues, such as notions of truth,
representation, colonialism, and power in epistemological, theoretical and methodological
research. Specifically, from the 1980s, new epistemologies has emerged examining
knowledge as socially and contextually produced. What emerged, according to Foucault11,
5 Stephens, Julie. “Feminist fictions: A critique of the category ‘Non‐Western woman’ feminist writing on India”. In Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies VI, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110. 6. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. 7. Mohanty, T. Chandra. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In: Aura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post‐colonial Theory: A Reader, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). pp. 66‐111 9. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, 172. 10. Denzin K. Norman and Lincoln, S. Yvonna, “Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In: Denzin NK, Lincoln YS (Eds.). The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd edn. (Thousand Oaks, London, & New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 1‐32. 11. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972‐1977, (New York Pantheon Books, 1980).
was the reappearance of [subjugated] knowledge – a whole set of knowledges that have been
disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located
down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. The emerging
“subjugated knowledges” draw from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including, a
highly influential writings of phenomenology12 which directed scholars to examine the notion
of subjectivity and the inner‐subjective construction of meaning. Other various writings from
the field of the interpretive social sciences, such as critical theory of Frankfurt School,
engagement with “reflective practices”13 of 1980s and, later, postructuralist, postmodernist
and feminist discourses on knowledge development provided new insights into an alternative
perspective to positivist science.14
Research, in turn, becomes a means of social change and represents a call to use reflexivity in
decolonizing the production of knowledge15. It is on this basis that contemporary research
process has been described focusing on critical and ethical discourses of gender, race, class,
ethnicity, and social justice. Hill Collins16 contends that race, gender, and class construct and
reproduce differences in the research process. Hooks17 emphasizes the double impact of
whiteness and maleness in shaping the authoritative discourse of traditional ethnography.
Alongside these multidisciplinary perspectives, postcoloniality has emerged as a paradigm of
inquiry that provides “a situated engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past
and present effects”.18
12. See Husserl, E. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Translated with notes and an introduction by Quentin Lauer, (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Schutz, Alfred. The phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh & Frederick Lehnert, with an introduction by George Walsh. U.S., Northwestern University Press, 1967). 13. Quentin Skinner, “The flight from positivism”; Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self‐Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1992), among many authors of “reflexive project of the self” critically examine the contemporary sociological problems in the late modern societies 14. See Garry, Ann and Pearsall, Marilyn. Women, Knowledge and Reality. (Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1989); Carol Gilligan. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Harvard University Press; Nicholson J. Linda. (Ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism, (New York and London, Rutledge; Anderson M. Joan. “Lessons from a postcolonial‐feminist perspective: Suffering and a path to healing”. Nursing Inquiry, 11 (2004), 238‐246. 15. Diversi M. and Finley S. “Poverty pimps in the academy: a dialogue about objectivity, reflexivity, and power in decolonizing production of knowledge”. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodology, 10:1 (2010). 16. Collins P. Hill. “Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought”. Social Problems, 33:6 (1986): 14‐32. 17. Hooks, Bell. Talking Back, Thinking feminist, Thinking Black, (Boston: South End Press, 1989). 18. Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process, (Cornwall Polity press, 2000).
This paper is limited to a substantial literature on postcolonial feminism developed over the
last few decades that engages with representation, culture and reflexivity and its shifting
constructions of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. My aims are more modest and I focus on
exploring the possibility of utilizing “postcolonial feminist”19 concerns around representation, cultural
alterity, and reflexivity to account for the intersections of gender, race, class, and ethnicity in
researching for social change in the context of Igbo women’s organisations in Nigeria.
As the history of Western feminism (understood here as a universalizing elitism), neoliberal
globalization models (as new forms of colonialism in developing countries) erase the
specificities of Third World woman, how can a postcolonial feminist researcher theorize and
examine North/South relations amidst the complexities between feminisms and
globalization20. Given the extant feminist theories and calls for activism available from
theoretically diverse positions21, what kinds of possibilities are there for theorizing and
‘writing differently’? If we focus on the ‘modes’ and ‘means’ of representing women in
colonized contexts (i.e., a Third World woman who is a ‘a paragon of softness, passivity, and
docile who submits to an immutable patriarchy’) as issues raised by the collusion between
women in a postcolonial and feminist discourses; how do we narrate this ‘Third World
woman’ (e.g., Igbo), without speaking for her, without condemning her to the same colonial
narratives? How can the researcher negotiate his/her feminist research method in the field
in order to free indigenous feminism from monolithic and essentialist thought that are
Eurocentric? Or, how can this research field, in the context of grassroots women’s
organisation, edify Southern feminism that is negotiated around cultural specificities in
consistent with the previously ignored informants or ‘subaltern woman’, according to
Spivak22?
19. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture; Mohanty, T. Chandra. Feminism Without Borders; Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 20. Desai, Manisha. “The messy relationships between feminisms and globalization”, Gender and Society, 27 (2007), 797‐803. 21 For example, Ackerly, Brooke. and True, Jacqui. “Back to the future: feminist theory, activism, and doing feminist research in an age of globalization”, Women’s Studies International forum, 33 (2010), 464‐72; Anzaldύa, Gloria. Borderlands (La Frontera): The New Mestiza, (Aunt lute Books, 1987); Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Rutledge, 1993). Haraway, Dona. “Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14 (1988), 575‐99; Hook, Bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Min‐ha, T. Trinh. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, (Indiana University Press, 1989), and many more. 22. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
While acknowledging the rich insights into gender relations provided by mainstream feminist
theorizing, this work draws, not only from my recent empirical fieldwork experiences and
findings, but also from postcolonial feminist scholars who explicitly addressed ‘race’ and class
relations. These, including Bannerji23, hooks24, Collins25, Spivak26, Mohanty27, Smith28, and
many others, have opened up a new analytic space that would enable a researcher like me to
address these questions and complexities relating to representation, cultural alterity, and
reflexivity when deploying a postcolonial feminist approach to research. More importantly,
they have provided another view that illuminated social life at the margins, and from which
to interpret the dialectic between margin and “center”. In so doing, they brought the voices
of those “subjugated knowledges” from the margins into discourse with the center29 and
made visible that which was subjugated and hidden. Above all, this critical scholarship has
provided a new angle on the intercession of gender, “race”, and class relations and meshed
them well with the work of postcolonial scholars such as Said30, Bhabha31, and Hall32.
Altogether, this body of work has offered novel insights and understandings of the rudiments
of a praxis‐oriented science. In this way, they showed how historical positioning and racialized
constructions structure our global society as well as impacting on the material conditions of
daily life. In the course of this study, therefore, I discuss how these “concerns”, and the
challenges that come with them, provide new directions for scholars who are engaged with
postcolonial feminist praxis in relation to social change, research, and writing as an emerging
Southern theory and research methodology.
Postcolonialism: A theoretical framework
23. Bannerji, Himani. (Ed.), Rethinking the gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics, (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1993). 24. Hooks Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984). 25. Collins, P. Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, (Cambridge: Unwin Hyman, Inc., 1990). 26. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 27. Mohanty, T. Chandra. Feminism Without Borders. 28. Smith, T. Linda. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous Peoples, (London, New York, and Dunedin, New Zealand: Zed Books and University of Otago Press, 1999). 29. Hook, Bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist. 30. Said, E. Orientalism. 31. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 32. Hall, Stuart. “When was ‘the Postcolonial’? Thinking at the limit”. In: The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, Eds. I. Chambers and L. Curti, (London, New York, NY: Routledge, 1996).
For this study, I employ postcolonial feminist scholarship generated through the convergence of
postcolonialism and Southern feminist perspective as a theory and methodology for feminist change
orientation. Like other Southern feminist scholars, I conceive these two perspectives (postcolonial and
Southern theories) as complementary. On one hand, the postcolonial project focuses on issues of
misrepresentation and appropriation. It reflects the ways in which dichotomous categories can be re‐
inscribed – “us” and “them”, “colonizer” and “colonized” along the lines of “race” and racialization.
Drawing from a range of contemporary critical theories, postcolonial highlights the impacts of
colonisation throughout the centuries as well as the ongoing neo‐colonialism, and the humiliation and
suffering of those who, according to Homi Bhabha “have suffered the sentence of history”33 –
subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement. Postcoloniality, as a movement has a discursive
and materialist connection in decolonizing research34. It critiques and understands the
marginalization and histories of colonialism and, perhaps ironically, the persistence
geopolitical inequalities that define knowledge production between the global North and
South35. On the other hand, Southern feminist perspective indexicalizes the contemporary
geopolitical location, of ‘third world’. It uses a contextualized approach to research process
to account for the postcolonial context as preceded by earlier European colonial efforts to
introduce their own models of productivity as part of the colonial mission.
The use of “postcolonial” is sometimes metaphorical. If “postcolonial” suggests “after” the demise of
colonialism36, then postcolonialism indexicalizes actual geographically specific locations or spaces
referred to as “third world” and “developing” bequeathed to the “global South” in the post‐world war
decolonization or via dependency theory37. If, however, postcolonial transcends the geographical
imperative of non‐Western “periphery” and, perhaps, Western “Metropolitan center”, then, scholars
of both “divides” employ “postcoloniality” to critically analyze the colonial aftermath and challenge
the hegemony of Western science38. The word “postcolonial” does not mean the end of the colonizing
process per se. Quayson admits: “To understand this process (postcolonializing), it is necessary to
disentangle the term “post‐colonial”, from its implicit dimension of chronological supersession, that
33. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, 82; see also 66, 85ff, 111, 172. 34. Kagendo Mutua and Beth B. Swadener, Decolonizing Research in Cross‐Cultural Contexts: Critical Personal Narratives, (State University of New York Press, 2004), 11. 35. Epstein, Debbie. & Morrell, Robert. “Approaching Southern Theory: explorations of gender in South African education”, Gender and Education, 24:5 (2012), 471. 36. Appiah K. Anthony. “Is the post‐ in postmodernism the post‐ in postcolonialism?” Critical Inquiry, 17:2 (Winter, 1991); Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘postcolonial’, Social Text. 31:32 (1992), 99‐112. 37. Epstein & Morrell “Approaching Southern Theory”, 471; McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester University Press, 2000); Mutua and Swadener. Decolonizing Research, 9. 38. Bhabha. The Location of Culture.
aspect of its prefix, which suggests that the colonial stage has been surpassed and left behind. It is
important to highlight instead a notion of the term as a process of coming‐into‐being and of struggle
against [italics added] colonialism and it’s after effects. In this respect, the prefix would be fused with
the sense invoked by ‘anti’”39.
In this sense, postcolonialism offers a framework for challenging and contesting the fixity of
gender, race, and culture. It directs attention to intersectional factors as socially produced
through historical, socio‐economic and political processes of colonialism and imperialism. It
challenges the unitary notion of culture and contests images and representations of the
essentialized cultural “Other”. For the “colonized” or “raced” subjects such as Igbo/African
women, the notion of identity involves a loss of precolonial, relatively substantive forms of
subjectivities …40. By devaluing and under‐representing them in the colonial records, they
become essentialized, unified or totalized as cultural entities. But postcolonial feminist
scholarship is now exploring the fluidity of these identities and their new construction within
hybrid cultural spaces41. By so doing, McConaghy suggests, it:
creates a “Third Space” for theorizing the conditions of the colonial. It moves to and fro in this Third Space in order to ensure that postcolonialism serves neither the cultural requirements of global capitalism and colonialism, nor the new ‘methods’ of the privileged in the West. For this reason, postcolonial theory remains a key resource for disrupting scientific culturalism and engaging in decolonization within Indigenous education, especially when incorporating the feminist insights … [of] postcolonial feminist theorists42.
Feminist Intersections with Postcolonial Research
This research is located at the intersections of postcolonial critiques of ‘Western’
representations of non‐Western contexts and the latter’s concern over gender, race, class,
ethnicity (among other) relations. I assume that postcolonialism and Southern feminist
perspective, taken together, shed light on the complex issues at the intersection of gender,
race, class relations, and culture. That is, postcolonial feminist positions serve simultaneously
39. Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism, 9. 40 Bannerji, Himani. Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti‐racism. (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995). 41. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. 42. McConaghy, Cathryn. Rethinking Indigenous Education: Culturalism, Colonialism and the Politics of Knowing. (Flaxton: Post Pressed, 2000), 269.
as critique and recovery tools in the examination of representations and material conditions
confronting postcolonial subjects, especially, in the historic context of North/South relations
ongoing through contemporary neoliberal globalization process. Furthermore, these
intersections further our understanding of how voices from the margins – “those who have
suffered the sentence of history”, “the colonized or raced subjects”43 produce insights that
are intended to interrupt dominant discourses about race, class, gender relations and
feminism.
The “situatedness” which this lens brings to awareness, according to Lewis and Mills44, is the
visibility of both “contextualized and historicized”45 ways in which “identities and political
positions of these indigenous women are embedded within the postcolonial context. In this
sense, postcolonial feminists, in their various analyses, bring to understanding the issue of
the representation of women in the postcolonial context, the cultural expression and its
relationship with diversity of postcolonial subjects’ experiences as well as material conditions
under which they live. In a physical fieldwork, these approaches enable researchers to
acknowledge how differences in position and privilege, which operate through gender,
ethnicity, and class among other relations, influence research as well as
researcher/researched relations.46 They determine how postcolonial feminist qualitative
interview contexts are shaped47. In this sense, the positionality one adopts in the fieldwork
setting is synonymous with his/her dual and often conflicting roles in that particular field.48
Such positions constantly shift and influence how and which narratives data are and can be
collected. In other words, these factors problematize researchers’ positionality and enable
them use their own sense of identity and image (reflexively) as insiders as well as outsiders
to construct themselves and the researched. In this way, all researchers, particularly in the
postcolonial context – including the natives of a culture – bring to the field acquired
43. Bannerji, Thinking Through. 44. Lewis, Reina and Mills, Sara (Eds.). Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, (Routledge, New York, NY, 1993), 45. Anderson M. Joan. “Toward a post‐colonial feminist methodology in nursing research: exploring the convergence of post‐colonial and black feminist scholarship”, Nurse Researcher, 9:1 (2002), 19. 46. McCorkel, Jill. A. and Meyers, Kristen. “What difference does difference make? Position and privilege in the field”, Qualitative Sociology, 26:2 (2003), pp.199‐231; Narayan, K. “How native is a ‘native’ anthropologist? American Anthropologist, 95:3 (1993). 47. See DeVault, L. Marjorie. “Talking and listening from a woman’s standpoint” Social problems 37, (1990) 96‐116; Oakley, Ann. “Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms”, in H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing feminist research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 31‐61. 48. England, V.L. Kim. “Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality and feminist research”, Professional Geographer, 46:1 (1994), pp. 80‐9.
knowledge and experiences that shape the researcher‐researched relationship, the specific
role each one assume, the knowledge obtained, how it is interpreted and used.
However, while positionality is necessary in feminist research project, it is not sufficient in
postcolonial feminist research. In addition to highlighting marginalized (subaltern)
experiences and subject positions as well as “giving voice” to previously silenced groups of
women by describing the diversity of their experiences49, postcolonial feminist research has
to critique representations of Third World subjects in Western theories and texts. More so, it
has to engage with the notion of the “native”50. This involves, according to Louis Racine51,
adopting “cultural safety” that enables one move beyond cultural theories to examine the
beliefs and stereotypes by which gender relations and research diminish, demean, or
disempower the cultural identity and well‐being of the individuals. From this perspective, the
aim of the researcher is not “correcting misrepresentation” nor producing authentic
representation of subjects. Rather, such critique aims to highlight how North/South relational
concepts are products of constructions of non‐Western Other through contrasting images
with the West. Hence, studying encounters between West and indigenous people requires
feminist researchers adopt a reflexive stance in producing theory as well as in conducting
fieldwork52. From this perspective, postcolonial feminist researchers are not involved in
“information retrieval” from the Third World to be displayed on Western journals. The task
of postcolonial feminist position is to highlight arbitrary assumptions over the
conceptualization of the research subject (i.e., the essentialization of “womanhood”) in
research relations as well as question its ethico‐reflexive basis53.
Still, these positions will not do justice to the aim of the research, namely, notions of “who
can speak and for whom since it requires the acknowledgement of the messy intersections of
49 See for example Fonow, Mary, Margaret & Cook, Judith A. (Eds.). Beyond Methodology: Gilligan, Carol. In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Gluck, B. Shema & Patai, Daphne. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, (New York: Rutledge, 1991); Shulamith, Reinharz. Feminist Methods in Social Research. 50. For example, see Kirin Narayan, “How native is a ‘native’ anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95:3 (1993); Ozkazanc‐Pan, Banu. “Postcolonial feminist research: challenges and complexities”. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 31:5/6 (2012), 574. 51. Racine Louise. “The impact of race, gender, and class in postcolonial feminist fieldwork: A retrospective critique of methodological dilemmas”. Aporia, 3:1 (2011), 18. 52. Visweswaran, Kamala. “Histories of feminist ethnography”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: (1997): 591‐621. 53. Agarwal, Bina. “Traversing lines of control: Feminist anthropology today”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 571:14 (2000), pp. 1‐11.
the agency of oppressed subjects and researcher reflexivity. It is argued that this
acknowledgement complicates further the “situated feminist epistemology”54, since the
oppressed or “subaltern” subjects, according to Spivak, have no agency to speak for
themselves due to their exclusion from global capitalist processes. In the face of this situation,
the researcher’s position relies on the subaltern (the oppressed) as a subject position rather
than unreflexive person or group of people (see Loomba). By occupying the subaltern
position, the researcher understands the possibility for a “collective subjectivity of agents” as
well as being able to uncover how subaltern subject positions are produced. In the end, the
researcher is in the position to examine possibilities for agency and change.
Critiquing Representation and methodology for change
One broad aim of postcolonial feminist research is to challenge existing approaches to
representing non‐Western people based on Western notions of selfhood. While critiquing
hegemonic forms of knowledge and producing “autonomous, geographically, historically, and
culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies”55, taking an appropriate positionality in
postcolonial feminist project is not enough. In order to highlight marginalized experiences
and subject positions and letting the participants speak for themselves, the research should
aim to produce locally grounded identity narratives based on shifting gender, ethnicity, and
class relations between the researcher’s self and the research participants. In this sense,
postcolonial feminist research approach adopts two‐fold processes arising out of
epistemological critique on one hand, and, on the other hand, the methodology through
which social change is possible. While the first aims to identify and examine taken‐for‐granted
(discursive) practices that produce a particular field (representations of Third World subjects
in Western texts), the second step discusses research methodology and methods that was
deployed during my empirical research process. I begin by locating postcolonial feminist
epistemological critique around International Development practices and radical Western
feminism that have, in the past three decades marginalized and constructed indigenous
African/Igbo woman as subservient “Other”. It then highlights modes of this representation
which is self‐emanating from Western psychology’s notion of “self”. The later part of the
54. Haraway, Dona. “Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14 (1988), pp.575‐99. 55. Mohanty T. Chandra. “Under Western eyes”, 51.
paper discusses postcolonial feminist methodology as it concerns the insider/outsider
positionality of the researcher, particularly, his/her reflexive stance.
Postcolonial feminist research and the location of epistemological critique
In line with postcolonial feminist research, the first step when focusing on representation of
Third World subjects is locating the epistemological critique around where and how such
“Third World” subjects have been represented. What has constituted the central initial
criticism focusing on representations of Third World women’s productivity was the Cold War
modernization approach which was integral to the promotion of US economic and
geostrategic interests in the global South. Prominent in this initial criticism was Esther
Boserup’s seminal study Women’s Role in Economic Development56 which questioned the way
development theory, policy and practice ignored and marginalized women’s role as
producers. She singled out the context of sub‐Saharan African farming system where women
played central part in cultivation and argued that colonial and postcolonial administrators
assumed women’s place was in the home. These preconceptions have been criticized as
“promoting the productivity of male labour” while excluding women because they (women)
are not considered in those policies relating to the introduction of cash crops and the
promotion of new technology in agriculture.
Taking Nigeria as an example, representations, in contemporary development‐initiative, have
found a commonplace under the rubric of “International development studies” (IDS)57. In
addition, the neoliberal practices and discourses of gender and development are seen as
deeply racialized in their production of hyper‐industrious, altruistic, entrepreneurial female
subjects and, now represented alongside ‘third world women’ as the passive recipient of
development, devoid of agency58.
56. Boserup, Esther. Women’s Role in Economic Development. (London: Earthscan, 1970/2007). 57. See Christine Sylvester, “Development studies and postcolonial studies: Disparate tales of the ‘Third World’”, Third World Quarterly, 20:4 (1999), 703‐721; Emeka E. Okafor & Yusuf Abdulazeez, “Gender‐sensitive projects for sustainable development in Nigeria”. Journal of Sociology, 15:3 (2007), 235‐248; Eva M. Rathgeber, “WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in research and practice. The Journal of Development Areas, 24:4 (1990), 489‐502; Kalpana Wilson, “Towards a radical re‐appropriation: gender, development and neoliberal feminism”. Development and Change, 46:4 (2015), 803‐832; Chua, Peter. Bhavnani, Kum‐Kum & Foran, John. “Women, culture, development”. 58. Chua, Bhavnani & Foran, “Women, culture, development, 821; Wilson, “Towards a radical re‐appropriation”, 807.
Another location of critique has been the literature on Western feminism with its rhetoric of
universality erected by the discourses stemming from Western humanism that, consequently,
excludes differences among non‐Western people59. By confining their theories to their own
particular history and culture, white feminists have denied the history and culture of women
of color and have objectively excluded them from equal participation in the women’s
movement. Speaking from African context, postcolonial feminist perspective focuses their
critique60 on how “’African woman’ is caricaturized as a limited series of stereotypes in many
cases of social thought, with repetitive and oversimplified images underlying social science,
much as they persist in literature”61.
Southern perspective of postcolonial feminist studies critique the invisibility of women in
most writings on global and international development, arguing that the labour, cultures and
histories of women in the global South are rarely taken into account, or, when they do,
women are most often seen as lacking agency; as merely victims in a system of cruel and
unjust inequalities. Thus, much work which focuses on the Third World either operates with
a conception of women as beings without agency, or does not analyse the roles played by
women in both the public and private domains.62 The focus of this criticism is on how ‘third
world women’ are constructed within gender and development discourses as “a homogenous
‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socio‐economic systems”63,
waiting to be liberated by Western feminist, in a reiteration of missionary women’s narratives
of rescue and salvation64. The pertinent question in this case is: how do we conceptualize such
59. Mohanty, T. Chandra. Feminism Without Borders. 60. For example, Ilan Kapoor, “Hyper‐self‐reflexive development: Spivak on representing the Third World ‘Other’”, in I. Kapoor, The postcolonial politics of development, (London: Routledge, 2008), 41‐59; Chandra T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourse”. Boundary, 2:12 (1986), 333‐58; Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?”, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg Eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271‐313. 61. Beoku‐Betts, Josephine & Njambi, Wairimū Ngarūiya. “Western Perceptions of African Women in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries”, (Ed.). Andrea Cromwell, Readings in Gender in Africa, (The International African Institute in association with Indiana UP and James Currey, 2005), 124. 62. This view can be attested by development community’s self‐questioning of its agenda through what has been evident to its major planner, UN First Decade of Development [1960‐1970) that a “a trickle‐down” approach to development had not been effective. (See for example, Braidotti et. al, Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development Toward a Theoretical Synthesis, [London: Zed Press, 1994; Gardner, Katy and Lewis, David Anthropology, Development and the Post‐Modern Challenge, (London: Pluto press, 1996). 63. Mohanty T. Chandra. “Under Western eyes”, 338. 64. Abu‐Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others”, American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002), 783‐90.
International Development Organizations, when, as promoters of social change, their scholars
and theories represent the people they want to study?
A postcolonial research agenda highlights the lack of debate over the theoretical frameworks
guiding feminist research and their epistemological assumptions particularly in
representations of non‐Western development practices, cultures, and peoples65. Acting like
“plaintiffs” in an internationally‐based feminist conference, postcolonial feminists often
speak in a “communal voice” with an emphasis that Western feminist theorizing is “empty”
precisely because of its inability to connect with or refer to the realities and environments
which the plaintiffs identify66. These social and epistemological exclusions are more
noticeable in information gathering and knowledge construction, the question of
accountability, legitimacy, or who has the right to speak for whom67. Postcolonial feminists
ask whether social change with which feminist concern is directed depend more on the
theoretical “pursuit of status” and the worship of celebrity (such as postmodernists,
poststructuralists) or “building on the indigenous”68. Moreover, local gender, ethnicity, and
class relations (in the sense of Kirin Narayan’s “Native Anthropologist”, or Linda Smith’s
“indigenous researchers”69, working in postcolonial contexts) may produce novel concepts
and practices related to understanding identity and development activities. These concepts
and practices may be rendered invisible and marginalized by the very IDS and MNCs that aim
to “integrate” and value them and by feminist approaches that assume gender, ethnicity, and
class relations in Third World settings to exist in the same form as those in the West.
In the specific case of feminist movements in Nigeria, including Igbo women’s grassroots
organizations, hegemonic concepts of development studies (DS) and liberal feminist theories
still guide much of their cross‐cultural and transnational research and activism, even when
65. Mohanty T. Chandra. “Under Western eyes”. 66. Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29:21 (2003), 358. 67. Lugones, Maria and Spelman, V. Elizabeth. “Have we got a theory for you? Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for ‘the woman’s voice’”. Hypatia I, published as a Special Issue of Women’s Studies International Forum 6: (1986), 26. 68. Ake, Claude. “Building on the indigenous”. In Recovery in Africa: A Challenge for Development Cooperation in the 1990s, ed., Pierre Frühling, *Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1988), 19; Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing and Pruning Africa’s Way.” p. 376. 69. See Kirin Narayan, “How native is a ‘native’ anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95:3 [1993]), 671; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (London, New York, and Dunedin, New Zealand: Zed Books and University of Otago Press, 1999).
directed by indigenous scholars and activists70. For example, research and programmes
undertaken to study development and change in Nigeria have relied on concepts
appropriated from Western psychology and liberal feminist’s rational individual exercising
“free will” and maximizing self‐interest within Gender and Development (GAD)71. My aim here
is not to involve in an extensive critique of these indigenous literatures, rather my focus is to
demonstrate how and why these literatures are relevant vis‐à‐vis postcolonial feminist
critique and the relation of this critique to the issue of social change.
Critique of international development literature
Dating back to the 1990s, a lot of inspiration has been drawn from postcolonial feminist
literature,72 pointing out amongst other things, the dangers of simply replicating metropolitan
frames and imposing western feminist ideas and analyses. For example, the concept of
international development shaped by modernization theory posits that global inequality
exists “due to technological and cultural differences between nations” rather than historic
and present structural inequalities. Ironically, the theory puts forth the idea that every
country can achieve the level of development seen today in the global North through a free
market economy tailored to the culture of that country. But, funny enough and in consistent
with its marginalizing policies, this theory is not without the conditionalities that aligned Third
World countries to those of the West once and for all.73 As Chowdhury74 would contend, the
70.While Kassey Garba (“An endogenous empowerment strategy: a case study of Nigerian women”, Development in Practice, 9:1&2 [1999]) demonstrates how exogenous strategies take on disempowered groups by empowering them through external individuals or groups, Emma Lucas, Gloria Chuku, and Philomena Okeke analyzed the “bureaucratic corruption” engendered by “the First Lady Syndrome” due to the Nigerian feminist appropriation of radical approach in pressing for gender‐responsive programmes, such as “Women in Nigeria” [WIN] and “Better Life for Rural Women” [BLRW] (see Lucas, Emma. “Social development strategies of a non‐governmental grassroots women’s organisation in Nigeria”, International Journal of Sociological Welfare, 10 [2001], 188; Chuku, Gloria. “Igbo women and political participation in Nigeria, 1980s‐2005”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 42:1 (2009), 99; Okeke, Philomina. “The First Lady Syndrome: The (En) Gendering of Bureaucratic Corruption in Nigeria “, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa Bulletin, 3&4 [1998], 16‐19. 71. Emeka E. Okafor & Yusuf Abdulazeez, “Gender‐sensitive projects”, 240‐243; Omorodion, I. Francisca. “Rural women’s experiences of micro‐credit schemes in Nigeria: a case study of Esan women”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 42:6 (2007), 482. 72. Chandra T. Chandra, Russo, Ann and Torres Lourdes (Eds.). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991; Alexander, M. Jacqui and Mohanty T. Chandra (Eds.). Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, (New: Rutledge, 1997). 73. See Sylvester, Christine. “Development studies and postcolonial studies: disparate tales of the ‘Third World’”, Third World Quarterly, 20:4 (1999). 74. Chowdhury, H. Elora, “Locating global feminisms elsewhere: Braiding US women of color and transnational feminisms”, Cultural Dynamics, 21:1 (2009): 51‐78.
provision and utilization of this theory in the Third World and, consequently their dependence
on this development aid, especially by non‐government organisations (NGOs) hinders the
pursuit of broad critiques of structural inequality.
Similar cautions are contained in work that engages with development literature focusing on
realizing gender justice in the name of alien human rights to the history and culture of those
Third World contexts. Human rights discourse is understood in this case as based in concepts of
individual rights rather than community and cultural rights, used selectively by the West as
justification to intervene in other countries when it benefits Western interests.75 Whether in the
form of development or human rights discourse, postcolonial feminist emphasis on global
structural inequalities merits attention. For Southern perspective of postcolonial feminism, a
lack of attention to the global inequalities that shape the lives of those that International
Development Planners and human rights activists seek to help can compromise their
honorable intentions76. For instance, campaigns with the slogan “Bring Back Our Girls” against
the unlawful abduction of more than 270 Chibok girls by Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria for
two long year and counting, must take into account the realities of religious, ethnic, and
cultural bastardization and conflicts as well as sectional marginalization, poverty, and the
reasons the Chibok girls were abducted.
In this sense, mainstream human rights and development discourse are coming under attack
as paternalistic extensions of civilizing mission of colonialism, reinforcing the narrative of
Western saviour to passive Third World victims.77 In keeping with postcolonial feminist
critique, the concern is expressed that ‘development’ driven by northern, industrial economic
interests or global agencies, will always marginalize women unless local states and actors are
able to take control of the processes and develop indigenous framings, approaches and
solutions78.
75.see Aziz, Nikhil. “The human rights debate in era of globalization”, in P. Van Ness (Ed.). Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia, (London: Routledge, 1999), 32‐55. 76. Naila Kabeer, “Globalisation, labor standards, and women’s rights: Dilemmas of collective (in) action in an independent world”, Feminist Economics, 10:1 (2004), 3‐35. 77. See the critiques of Elora Halim Chowdhury, “Locating global feminisms elsewhere: Braiding US Women of Color and Transnational feminisms”, Cultural Dynamics 21:1 (2009), 51‐78; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development; Makau Mutua Human Rights: A Political Cultural Critique. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 78. Saunders, Kriemild. (ed.) Feminist Post‐development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Postcolonialism and Representations, London: Zed Books, 2002).
Contextually speaking, while acknowledging the usefulness of my positionality as a “native”
researcher working in postcolonial feminist areas, it does not guarantee that those Western
tools, theories or concepts will not be deployed to study Igbo society and represent Igbo
women in the context of their grassroots organisations. After all, research originating as an
“imperial tool” has been used to construct the colonized in ways that their identities, realities,
and ways of knowing were marginalized79. But research in postcolonial feminist context
provides a site of agency for decentering colonial knowledge80. It is like “working the
hyphens”81 which arises from the cautioning voice inside, warning the researcher to take heed
in a reflexive, ethical, and respectful manner. By so doing, it has the potential for ultimately
strengthening the participants by giving them voice as previously silenced perspectives and
questioning the basis of their taken‐for‐granted assumptions. It also involves utilizing
researcher’s acquired or learned Western education, knowledge, languages, and theories to
produce and legitimize research from inside perspectives. In other words, researcher’s
hybridized selves (roles as both insider and outsider) do not intend to produce “authentic”
accounts of participants’ (i.e., Igbo women’s) identity and social change pursuit by virtue of
being native or indigenous researcher. Rather, the critique here focuses on the
epistemological assumptions guiding theories and feminists’ change‐oriented organisations
purported to be “international” or “exogenous” approaches to studying the same social
change orientation in the Third World. To this end, the adoption of postcolonial feminist
positions critique and redirects notions of the “native” to help the “native anthropologist”
understand the relation between knowledge and power, researchers and researched as well
as enabling the transformation of research activities.
The ideas I present above demonstrate the complexities inherent to postcolonial feminist
engagement with representation. These complexities include how to define the research
field, locate the critique, and how to choose which epistemological assumptions to examine.
Despite these complexities, there is more to produce in a postcolonial feminist research
project, which aims at critique and social change impact. One way to effect social change is
to conduct fieldwork in order to “see” representation through grounded postcolonial feminist
79. See Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing methodologies. 80. Lorde, Audre. Sister “Outsider”: Essays and Speeches, (Freedom, CA: Cross Press, 1984). 81. Fine, Michelle. “Working with hyphens: Reinventing self and other in qualitative research. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 72.
concerns and strategies82. Next, I problematize on the feminist methodology as a gateway to
making meaning what postcolonial feminist research recognizes and considers in
ethnographic fieldwork. This will enable me and other postcolonial feminist researchers to
reflect on our positionality, especially, as it concerns self‐reflexivity. Retrospectively, when
engaging on the process of this research in the physical field, it makes sense to me that
reflexivity and cultural alterity would fully guide my data collection. Cultural alterity comes
next in the line of consideration. As a native, male‐feminist researcher, who recently went to
my “native home” Igboland in Nigeria, to conduct interviews (focus group) in the context of
Igbo women’s grassroots autonomous organisation, my positionality as a researcher speaks
volume.
Feminist versus Postcolonial Feminist Methodology
From the early ideas of second wave feminism to the contemporary position, feminist
research practice has chosen methods guided by its epistemological positions and research
aims.83 This position provided a methodology or theorizing (about research practice) which
methods (i.e., particular tools for research) will best accomplish research project in terms of
theoretical commitments, feminist praxis and activist goals.84 Their attraction for interview
and ethnographic research is partly because these methods offer possibilities for direct
interactions with participants. That would mean, the researcher herself (as it was conceived)
is never “outside” the research process or separated from the research participants as
“objective” observer.85 However, from a postcolonial perspective, studying representation
(i.e., identity formation) discursively requires an explicit focus on language and texts as these
variables are integrally linked to colonialism, power, and gender. That is, postcolonial feminist
positions are concerned on how “the researcher”, the actual writing of the research and
audience for whom it is written, are implicated in the very research process.86 In effect,
postcolonial feminist methodological considerations are twofold: recognition of constructivist
82. See Mohanty T. Chandra. “Under Western eyes”. 83, Haraway, Dona. “Situated knowledges 84. Nast, .J. Heidi. “Women in the field: critical feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives”, Professional Geographer, 46:1 (1994), 54‐66. 85. Harding, Sandra. “Rethinking standpoint epistemology: what is ‘strong objectivity’?”, in Alcoff, L. and Potter, E. (Eds.) Feminist Epistemologies, (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN,1993), 1‐14. 86. Patai, Daphne. “US academics and Third World women: is ethical research possible?” in Gluck S.B. and Patai, D. (Eds.), Women’s Words: Feminist Practice of Oral History, (Routledge, New York, NY:, 1991), 137‐53.
critical epistemology guiding the research and addressing questions “who has right in
speaking for others” and of particular places87. Researching in a postcolonial context as in my
project, these consideration, in addition to concerns over representation, requires me to pay
attention to language and texts in order to uncover how identity formation happens while at
the same time being reflexive. To accomplish this task, I rely on the combination of
ethnography and auto‐ethnography to engage in in‐depth fieldwork (e.g., participant
observations, interviews, and collection of artifacts). Using participants’ experiences and
“working back” as Dorothy Smith88 suggests, the postcolonial feminist researcher illuminates
subjectivities that would otherwise be silenced through the use of positivist and postpositivist
paradigms. The methodology is informed through the conceptual lens of histories of
colonialism that have structured notions of “race”, gender and class relations and can no
longer be sifted out from these historical forces. This lens, beginning with people’s
experiences and working back to explicate those context of marginalization might imply the
privileging of qualitative methodologies in a postcolonial context.
Furthermore, it offered postcolonial feminist research a conceptual tool that is used to
excavate or do the “looking”89 including: the analytic explication of the intersection of gender,
“race”, and class relations as historicized and contextualized90; the interpretation of data
within this framework; and, the reconstruction of theory from this angle. That is what
characterizes postcolonial feminist methodology.
While acknowledging the potential of ethnographic method to offer possibilities for direct
interaction with participants, ethnography is not without its feminist critics. In light of the
close relationships that form through ethnographic approaches (e.g. ethnography and
phenomenology on the basis of the assumptions of the researcher), there is greater potential
for exploiting research subjects through collaborative approaches that feminist researchers
strive to achieve. Stacey writes that ethnographic approaches commodify narrators and their
lived texts. She writes, “No matter how welcome, even enjoyable, the fieldworker’s presence
87. See Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: 0place and voice in anthropological authority”, Cultural Anthropology, 3:1 (1988), 16‐20. 88. See Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing methodologies. 89. Ibid. 90. Bannerji, H. “The dark side of the nation”. Essay on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender, (Toronto, Canadian Scholars Pres, Inc., 2000); Collins, PH. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Cambridge: Unwin‐Hyman, Inc., 1990); Hooks Bell. Feminist Theory, (1984).
may appear to the ‘natives’”, ethnographic fieldwork “represents an intrusion and
intervention into a system of relationships”. She argues that “the researcher is far freer than
the researched to leave. The inequality and potential treacherousness of this relationship is
inescapable”91. Even more recent reflexive and critical ethnographic approaches like
mainstream feminism92 still position the “omnipotent” researcher as the voice of
ethnographic authority without regard to the ways privilege is reproduced through
research93.
Nevertheless, postcoloniality challenges and complicates ethnographic approaches in that it
recognizes the complicity of Western anthropologists in enabling colonial rule94 and the
hegemonic and universalizing notion of culture95 which ethnography embodies. As such,
postcolonial feminist approaches to ethnography highlight that systems of inequality can
remain unchanged when First World scholars research Third World women96 and
demonstrate that reciprocity and collaboration under conditions of power asymmetries are
not necessarily possible. Their emphasis on the intersection of gender, race, and class as
context‐related factors suggests they can hardly be universalized into predictive and
prescriptive theories without the risk of committing theoretical imposition97.
Interrogating feminist Ethnography: A Methodological Concern
Despite the above enumerated criticism of traditional ethnography by mainstream feminist
movement and scholars, feminist methodology complicates further ethnographic method by
its emphasis on “insider” perspective. Emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, Western or
mainstream feminism drew its methodology out of its hostility to “objective knowledge”.98
91. See Stacey, Judith. “Can there be a feminist ethnography?” In Women’s Words: The Practice of Feminist Oral History. Eds. Shema Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1991), 113. 92. See Clifford, James. “Travelling cultures”. In Grossberg, l., Nelson, C., and Treichler, P. (Eds.), Cultural Studies. (Routledge, New York: NY, 1992), 96=116. 93 . Borland, K. “Decolonizing approaches to feminist research: the case of feminist ethnography”, In Hasse‐Biber, S.N. (Ed.), Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis, (Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2007), 639‐49. 94. Prasad, A. (Ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organisational Analysis, (Palgrave Macmillan, New York: NY, 2003). 95. See Sokefeld, M. Debating self, identity, and culture in anthropology”, Current Anthropology, 40:4 (1999), 417‐31. 96. Patai, Daphne. “US academics and Third World women: is ethical research possible?” in Gluck, S.B. and Patai, D. (Eds.), Women’s Words: Feminist Practice of Oral History, (Routledge, New York, NY 1991), 137‐53. 97. Lather, P. Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern, (New York: Routledge, 1991). 98. See Lincoln, S. Yvonna and Guba, G. Egon. Naturalist Inquiry, (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985).
Stimulated by questions raised by the initial feminist movement, women activists, not only
called into question the phenomenon of “objective” research, it challenged the very ethical
structure of it, especially, the practice of “studying down” or conducting research only on
groups of lesser status than the ethnographer. Building particularly on women’s experience,
feminist scholars began to discover fallacies of “objectivity” and the many other devices
constructed exclusively for males. The presumption was that whether or not a woman had
chosen to study women, and whether or not she considered herself a feminist, most women
activist then came to associate their identity with research relationship. It is this attempt to
produce a ‘hygienic research’99 in feminist ethnography that led a number of feminist
academics and theorists to dub a research, where gender “difference” is perceived to exist
between researcher and researched, as “questionable”100. Writing from this methodological
point of view, Oakley101 claimed that “a feminist interviewing women is by definition inside
the culture and participating in that which she is observing”102. Among other individual
biography in shaping feminist qualitative research, Oakley emphasized gender, ethnicity or
some other aspects of women’s identity as prerequisites to developing social rapport when
both the researcher and researched are engaged in fieldwork. This idea of shared
characteristics also resonate in the work of Finch103, who maintains that the reason why
women are more enthusiastic about talking to a female researcher lies in their expectation
that the researcher shares their social experience of subordination. Indeed, Gray et al.104
write that “it is much less likely that they [men] can produce research based on women’s
experience, simply because it’s not their experience”.
The question arises: How does a postcolonial feminist researcher work within this unequal
relationship if he/she is to understand research field as, no longer dependent upon rapport
over shared gender, but on the recognition of the complex social structures within which men
99. Stanley, Liz and Wise, Sue. “Back into the personal” or: Our attempt to construct “feminist research”, in Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein (eds.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983a), 194‐95. 100. Brabeck, Kalina. “Testimonio: A strategy for collective resistance, cultural survival and building solidarity”. Feminism and Psychology, 13:2 (2003), 252‐8. 101. Ann Oakley, “Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms”, in H. Roberts (ed.) Doing Feminist Research. (London: Routledge, 1992), 57. 102. See Marjorie L. DeVault, “Talking and listening from a woman’s standpoint” Social problems 37, (1990) 96‐116. 103. Finch, Janet. “It’s great to have someone to talk to: The ethics and politics of interviewing women”. In Social Researching: Politics, problems, Practice, Ed. C. Bell and H. Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). 104. Gray, S. Paul, Williamson, B. John, Karp, A. David, and Dalphin, R. John. The Research Imagination: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, (New York: Cambridge University Press), 230.
and women live? In view of “a situated engagement with the experience of colonialism and
its past and present effects”105 and the contemporary complex and multifaceted power
dynamics that influence the social interaction of the interview situation, does feminist
assumption of “insider knowledge” still hold sway in a postcolonial context?
In the light of above questions, the vulnerability of my research women participants as rural
ethnic learners with little or no voice106, as well as their literacy level, was considered in the
choice of qualitative research design, nature and technique of data gathering. The choice of
my research field is not only epistemological and ontological task but also a political one
relevant for reflexivity from a postcolonial feminist perspective against the backdrop of
“science that has been used against the marginalised”107. In considering these, I assumed a
subject position parallel to and in interaction with that of the other participants while
adopting a reflexive stance. This entails taking further recourse through auto‐ethnography108
and ethnonarrative109 both of which refer to a reflexive practice. In this case, I considered
myself as part of the context both materially and textually. Now, while indicating the limits of
traditional ethnography and mainstream feminism, postcolonial feminist concerns
(re)conceptualized my positionality through the intersections of epistemological concerns,
ethical practices and political commitments in relation to my research context – Third World
or indigenous women.
This method recognizes the intersections of my voice, place, and privilege (autobiography) as
a researcher when considering encounters with participants (i.e. observations, interviews)
and in the writing of the research (i.e. informing, reporting). They allow me to consider what
I pay attention to and how I pay attention to it in terms of what becomes called data110.
105. Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism. 106. Bodgan, R. C. and Biklen, S. K. Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to theories and Methods. (2nd edition) (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003). 107 Gamson, J. “Sexualities, queer theory and qualitative research”. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. Denzin and Yvonne, S. Lincoln (London: Sage, 2000), 347‐65. 108. Ellis, Caroline. Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Reed‐Danahay, D. (Ed.), Autoethnography: Rewriting the self and the Social, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Buzard, J. “On auto‐ethnographic authority”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16:1 (2003), 61. 109. Hansen, H. “The ethnonarrative approach”. Human Relations, 59 (2006), 1049‐75. 110. Denzin, K. Norman and Giardina, M.D. Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Evidence, (Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2008).
Problematizing Researcher’s position and Reflexivity
My recent concluded PhD empirical research in Igboland, Nigeria, constitute the cornerstone
of my inquiry into how Igbo women mobilize for social change because the success of what
becomes data collection depends on the positionality of the researcher working in a
postcolonial context. As a male researcher doing feminist research111, the challenges I
encountered was the manner in which I was positioned in dual, often conflicting roles as both
an insider and an outsider to the lives and “discursively constituted experiences”112 of the
research participants. This double consciousness113, on one hand, could be equated to images
of a native ethnographer114 or indigenous researcher115 researching in a context I was an
insider to. On the other hand, it involved researching as a male‐feminist in a context I was
outsider to. For example, my position as a “native”, fluent in the “cultural” knowledge of Igbo
society required me to look at and problematize the lives, experiences, or culture in which I
was researching through the eyes of the participants themselves. But I could do this without
drawing on my own images and multiple identities, such as being male, acquired or learned
Western education, knowledge, languages, and theories to produce and legitimate research
knowledge from inside perspectives. Bearing these in mind, the general question that
confronted me were: “Can researchers only conduct research on an experience or social
location from which they already have intimacy and experience?” To address this question, I
reflected on the following sub‐questions: What do I represent in the eyes of the participants?
Am I part of them? Am I an outsider? Do I have one foot in Igbo community and another
outside as a student and researcher belonging to a community of knowledge producers and
researchers beyond this indigenous Igbo social context? Within this context, am I going to be
seen as an outsider doing insider research? I came to this issue of insider/outsider regarding
my positionality as a researcher in efforts to decolonize the research process.
Observing Cultural Alterity in Postcolonial Research field
111. Adelson, J. “Androgyny advocates pose a threat to scientific objectivity”. Behaviour Today, 11:11 (1980), 1‐3. 112. Scott, J. W. “Experience”. In J. Butler and J. W. Scott (Eds.). Feminists theorize the Political, (New York: Routledge, 1992). 113. DuBois, W.E.B. The souls of black folk, (New York: Random House, 1994). 114. Kirin Narayan, “How native is a ‘native’ anthropologist?” 115. Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing methodologies.
Cultural alterity and reflexivity are heuristic means that researchers must use to deconstruct the crystalized Cartesian insider/outsider identity and the researcher/participant dualisms that are experienced in the field.116
Part of my research field focuses on highlighting postcolonial feminist critique of Western
development practices and discourses of Western feminism that rhetorically has used
universality to exclude cultural expressions among Third World women. In this sense, I find as
convenient the terms “humanity” and “materiality” connotatively derived from the French
word globalization (la mondialisation) in the issue I wish to raise here, namely, the everyday
world of Third World, indigenous, African, or Igbo women. La mondialisation derived from le
monde with double meaning of the physical world (materiality) and people (humanity)117
captures both the materiality and humanity of globalization. Though, at best minimized and
at worst ignored in the discourses and practices taking place in Africa, “humanity” commands
center stage in postcolonial feminist research, particularly in Africa. For African feminist writers, the
West has used and still using colonialism, development theories, and even the recent globalization to
supplant indigenous cultures, particularly Africa with its humanism embedded with gendered power
dynamics. Unfortunately, the agents of these processes of unequal power relations have used “weird
regimes” to portray as “unacceptable” cultures in many parts of the so‐called third world in order to
justify the demoting of the practitioners of these cultures below human level. Assuming the moral
responsibility to intervene in rescuing women victims from the “weird regimes”, Western feminism
became complicit with colonial project and, using its privileged social location, unilaterally brought
about the conception of good and social justice from which, unfortunately, the humanity of those to
be rescued is relegated to the background. Thus, the goal of contemporary “developmental” activities
among postcolonial feminist theory and mobilization in the global South is geared toward an honest
effort to humanize development processes and not assume that economic growth guarantees
development.118
These practices echo the basic lesson underlying Appadurai’s119 anthropological research on the
cultural dimension of globalization. It acknowledges that “the transnational flow of universalizing signs
116. Racine Louise. “The impact of race, gender, and class in postcolonial feminist fieldwork, 23. 117. See Dominelli, Lena. “Globalization, contemporary challenges and social work practice”. International Social Work, 53 (2010), 599‐614. 118. Nnaemeka, ‘nego‐feminism’, 375. 119. See Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. University of Minnesota Press, 2005; and Appadurai. ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’. In: Moore, Henrietta L. & Sanders, Todd (eds.) Anthropology in Theory. (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 622‐633.
demands their domestication; that they be made meaningful and salient to homespun realities”120. He
therefore focuses on the production of locality and neighborhood in a globalizing world, viewing the
locality as an “inherently fragile social achievement […], ephemeral unless hard and regular work is
undertaken to produce and maintain its materiality”121. Stuart Hall122 claims that culture cannot be
limited to exploring people’s subjective experiences but must encompass an examination of the
historic, social and material conditions with which subjectivities are constructed. Based on these
views, I claim that the experiences, voice of Igbo women as well as their search to humanize society
in the context of their grassroots autonomous organisations must be studied. While doing this, the
research draws on the ontological, epistemological and methodological strengths of postcolonialism
within which social change activities unfold in their everyday lives. Informed by women’s agency
embedded in “cultural” (issues of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and livelihood), my argument
is that gender issues can neither be essentialized nor universalized but embedded in diversity, in
cultural expression as well as in social and political expression. Postcolonial feminist research is laying
emphasis on the retrieval and recognition of difference as well as the preservation of this
heterogeneity123 as cultural alterity.
Schutte124 contends that cultural alterity “demands that the other be heard in her difference and that
the self give itself the time, the space, and the opportunity to appreciate the stranger without and
within”. Minh‐ha’s125 reference of cultural alterity as the blurring of insider/outsider identity occurring
in the field thrills me and I strive to develop what she calls hybrid identity in the sense that I am neither
quite an outsider nor quite an insider. In this way, Minh‐ha linked cultural alterity to introspection in
the field as she explained that “she who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself,
of history without involving her story, also knows she cannot make a gesture without activating the to
120. Comaroff, John L. “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Difference in an Age of Revolution”. In: Wilmsen, Edwin N. & McAllister, Patrick (Eds.). The Politics of Difference. Ethnic Premises in a World of Power. (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 174. 121. Appadurai. . Modernity at Large, (2005): 179‐80. 122. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural studies: two paradigms”. In Dirks NB, Eley G. Ortner SB, (Eds.). Culture/Power/History: A Reader in the contemporary Social Theory 123. Heterogeneity is a key concept of postcolonial feminists referred by Spivak (1994: 25, 38, 185, and 195) as subaltern agency or a form of “negotiation”. It means that postcolonial feminist agency are not directed toward reclaiming precolonial or pre‐orientalist women’s discourse, nor in search of an “authentic” identity of lost origin (Spivak, 1988: 291). It means using diversity promoted by cultural hybridity to “decolonize gender” or research (Mohanty, 1991, 2003) through marginalizing colonial reading and writing of gender in a non‐colonial context 124. Ofelia Schutte, “Cultural alterity: Cross‐cultural communication in feminist theory in North‐South contexts”. In: Narayan U., Harding S., Eds., Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist Worlds (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 55. 125. Trinh T. Minh‐ha, “Not you/Like you: Postcolonial women and the interlocking questions of identity and difference”. In: Anzaldύa G. Ed., Making Face, Making Soul = Hacinendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: An Aunt Lute Foundation Book, 1990), 371‐5.
and fro movement of life”126. Cultural alterity means that the researcher goes through unsettling
experiences in the field by opening new ways of seeing participants’ lived experiences and to
reconceptualize Otherness from a decentered position. In the following words, Schutte explains the
conception of “Other” through the operation of cultural alterity in the field:
The other is that person or experience which makes it possible for the self to recognize its own limited horizons in the light of asymmetrically given relations marked by sexual, social, cultural and other differences. The other, the foreigner, the stranger, is that person occupying the space of the subaltern in the culturally asymmetrical power relations, but also those elements or dimensions of the self that unsettle or decenter the ego’s dominant, self‐enclosed territorialized identity127.
Most notably, postcolonial feminist emphasis on “building on the culture and difference”128 points to
the struggles of indigenous women in Africa including Igbo women to use their African (colonial and
postcolonial) contexts of existence and experience to account for the interlocking oppressions in
multiple sites. Theoretically, womanist writers and activists in formerly colonized nations, particularly,
in Africa are presently casting aside the old lines of dependency on the metropolitan center and
reverting to “indigenizing theory” and the use of performative practices. Their texts, as knowledge
production, make use of cultural and intellectual traditions of most African societies which do not fit
into familiar (Western) literary or textual paradigm. Terms that have been employed in African
womanist criticism to explain this conception include “complementarity” (used repeatedly by Igbo
womanist writer, Catherine Acholonu in her formulation of “motherism”) and “nego‐feminism” by
Obioma Nnaemeka which implies the negotiation of feminism and the exclusion of what she calls “no‐
ego feminism”. Arguing on the importance of culture and difference, Nnaemeka, quite like other
African womanist writers, calls on the “the necessity and prudence of building on the indigenous” in
the construction of African feminist theory129. Similar reference to cultural specific is employed on the
126. Ibid. 375. 127. Schutte, O. “Cultural alterity: cross‐cultural communication in feminist theory in North/South contexts”. In Narayan U. Harding S. (Eds.) Decentering the Center, Philosophy for a Multi‐cultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist Worlds, (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 48. 128. See Susan Arndt, The Dynamics of African Feminisms, (Trenton, NJ & Asmara Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2002); Obioma Nnaemeka, “Mapping African feminisms”. Ed. Andrea Cromwell. Reading in Gender in Africa. (The International African Institute in Association with Indiana UP and James Currey, 2005), 31‐40, (Adapted from: “Introduction: Reading the Rainbow”, Sisterhood, Feminism and Power from Africa to the Diaspora. Ed. O. Nnaemeka (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988); Zulu Sofola, “Feminism and African womanhood”, Sisterhood, Feminism and Power from Africa to the Diaspora. Ed. O. Nnaemeka (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 51‐64. 129. Nnaemeka, ‘nego‐feminism’, 361.
formulations of Kolawole as well as the postulations of Oyeronke Oyewumi130 to theorize African
gender constructs of womanhood and motherhood as the central concern of African females.
Conclusion
Invoking “those who have suffered the sentence of history”131 and those still undergoing
horrors that mark and continue to mark colonisation and neocolonial practices both in their
indigenous home and diaspora, postcolonial feminist concerns could serve as possible
interventions with representation, cultural alterity and reflexivity in research. Though
embedded with challenges and complexities in relation to researchers in research field, my
demonstration using examples from my fieldwork suggest a praxis‐oriented and politically
conditioned methodology. These interventions and implications for feminist praxis has been
voiced by some postcolonial feminist scholars who observed that “’third wave’ of
democratization sweeping through the global South has generated a large body of literature
exploring women’s roles in these processes and illuminating some general patterns”.132 In this
sense, comparative research on state feminism reveals the importance of broad‐based
women’s movements in civil society that can display support for goals of gender equality.133
From this perspective I conceptualize postcolonial feminist praxis, for this specific project, as
redirecting International Development Studies and feminist universalizing theories toward
community development groups prevalent in the global South as forces of social change.
By way of redirecting theory, the communal or relational epistemologies of postcolonial
feminist positions recontextualizes comparative (i.e., the intention of structural adjustment
policies, SAP) and relativist approaches to development and feminist theories. As a result,
subjects of IDS and liberal feminist theories are conceptualized on the bases of “community
development groups”. They “are casting aside old lines of dependency on the metropolitan
centre, particularly through indigenizing theory and through the use of oral and performative
practices, in addition to written texts, as sites of knowledge production to the extent that
130. See Kolawole, M.E.M. “Self representation and the dynamics of culture and power in African women’s writing”. Journal of Cultural Studies, 1:1 (1999), 1‐10; Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Intention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse, (Minneapolis: IJ of Minnesota, 1997). 131. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, 172. 132. Okeke‐Ihejirika, E. Philomina & Franceschet, Susan. “Democratization and state feminism: Gender politics in Africa and Latin America”, Development and Change, 33:3 (2002), 442. 133. See Friedman, E.J. “State‐based advocacy for gender equality in the developing world: Assessing the Venezuelan National Women’s Agency”, Women and Politics, 2:2 (2000), 47‐80; Stetson D. McBride& Mazur, A. G. (Eds.), Comparative State Feminism, (London: Sage Publications, 1995).
these forms of textuality make use of the cultural and intellectual traditions of African
societies and do not fit familiar (Western) literary or textual paradigms”134. These positions
highlight contradictions and complexities in how identities form in the engagement between
first and third world feminist practices rather than offer a historic cultural comparisons (i.e.
Third World/Igbo versus Western).
This said, one might ask, what has been added to the value of postcolonial feminist
scholarship and research? It might well be argued that postcolonial feminist scholarship, as
discussed above, does little to extend the boundaries of feminist scholarship. I argue,
however, that postcolonial feminist scholarship illuminates the historical and cultural location
of “racialized” and classed identities, in ways that move beyond mainstream feminist
theorizing; a universalist theory that has emanated from a middle‐class, white, perspective,
which has privileged gender over other analytic categories. As such, for the most part,
“mainstream” feminism of the 1980s and 1990s was non‐inclusive to Southern or African
feminist movements. It excluded these social locations, ignoring their diversity and
heterogeneity as well as other issues in their lives.
Moreover, as a discursive marker of historically and culturally grounded criticism of Western
representation of Third World women135, research guided by postcolonial feminist
frameworks address the material oppression and theoretical marginalization relating to
different women in different location worldwide.136 These frameworks require a reflexive
praxis that recognizes the connections between research and feminist scholarship in order to
challenge gendered capitalist processes and interrogate our understanding of how
subjectivities form in West/Third World relations. In sum, postcolonial feminist approaches
offer situated engagement with multiple gender, ethnicity, class, etc., relations as part of a
research agenda aimed at critique, hybrid mobilization, and social change pursuit.
134. Daymond, M. J. (Ed.), South African Feminisms: Writing Theory, and Criticism, 1990‐1994, (New York: Garland, 1996). 135. Mohanty T. Chandra. “’Under Western eyes’ revisited: feminist solidarity through anti‐capitalist struggles”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:2 (2003a), 499‐535. 136. See Calás, M. B. and Smircich, L. “Feminist perspectives on gender in organisational research: what is and is yet to be”, in Buchanan, D.A. an Bryman, A. (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organisational Research Methods, (Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2009), 246‐69.