POLS2603 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Patrilineality, Neocolonialism, Gender Binary
Lecture 11 - Gender, Culture, Difference and Colonialism
•Key Questions:
◦Where and how is the rel between gender and cult difference negotiated in glob
pols?
◦through what discursive frameworks is this rel considered?
◦by what formations of power is this rel structured?
◦how might we approach/respond to debates about gender/cult difference?
•What is colonialism?
◦Domination of one place by people/systems of another place
◦system of power + domination that is specially mediated
◦Metropol = those imposing power - Britain in Aus
◦Colony = ppl from metropol that take up residence in new place
◦Justifications:
▪Legal - law of discovery
▪Moral - claims of European superiority
•Religion
•Civilisation
•Race
•Types of colonialism:
◦extractive
▪Colonisers establish pol control while using resources and labour of indigenous ppl
•E.g. India, Vietnam, DRC
◦Settler
▪Colonisers establish pol control with the intention of replacing ind ppl on their land
•e.g. aus, NZ, US, Canada
•Colonialism in the Present:
◦US + China as new imperial powers?
◦Development project
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◦HR?
◦Peace-building?
•How is colonialism gendered?
◦Gendered Justifications:
▪works with other forms of justifications
▪Feminisation of colonised people
•Colonisers seen as strong, rational
•indigenous ppl seen as the opposite
•the feminine as a source of disorder
•gender binary mapped onto binary of colonisers/colonised
•public man v private women
◦reason v passion, knowledge v desire etc
▪Idealisation of femininity in the metropol
•subordinated, but particular norm of femininity was idealised
•coded white
•maternal, innocent etc
•functioned to confine women to private sphere
•contributed to ideology of protection
•Weakness + virtue of women must be protected from messiness of public life
•used to justify exclusion
•argument that bc indigenous societies did not protect their women in the same
way, they were uncivilised and barbaric towards women
◦enabled call for intervention
◦Gendered Methods of Social Control
▪Use of SGBV
▪Frontier violence took on gendered form
▪bodies of native ppl as dirty + polluting purity of settler soc
•Functioned to justify violence
•Colonial imagination: only a pure body could be violated
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Document Summary
Race: types of colonialism, extractive, colonisers establish pol control while using resources and labour of indigenous ppl. Colonisation changed gendered systems of land tenure through disrupting land rel"s white male anthropologists depict ind societies as patrilineal too ready to interpret women as inferior. Reflects western biases women"s rights were embedded in trad soc"s but this is not readily visible to white scholars: also altered gendered rels in settler soc. Our fight is against the state, system, social injustices, racism", not patriarchy: events surrounding huggins"s response, when published, was accompanied by response from bell, framing of huggins voice, responses, larbalestier: to bell. Universalising + colonising argument positions rad fem as source of all knowledge about women constructs violence as universal + universalising. Bell uses co-author"s voice to legitimise her own speech colonial rescue narrative: moreton-robinson: bell uses position as white woman to silence dissenting views.
