Issue #28 January 2020

A Decolonial Feminism

Barbara Kasten — Torso (1974)

Timofei Gerber: Thank you for joining me. My first question concerns the dynamics between visibility and invisibility, which plays a crucial role in the minority discourse. Through external marks of discrimination, like skin color or gender, visibility became an instrument of exclusion, while systematic invisibilities aim to hide real human suffering. The effort to overturn this, to become visible as a human being was an important political instrument. But it seems that the neoliberal variation of feminism that you criticize in Un féminisme décolonial [FD] can easily appropriate and instrumentalize terms like ‘awareness’ or ‘inclusion’, so that the external marks serve as an integration into the cultural industry. Does that change the nature of the feminist struggle? Is awareness still an instrument for politization?

Barbara Kasten - Untitled (1974)
Barbara Kasten - Photogenic Painting, 74-1 (1974)

An English translation of A Decolonial Feminism has since been published by Pluto Books, and The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism by Duke University Press.

#28

January 2020

Introduction

A Decolonial Feminism

Timofei Gerber in conversation with Françoise Vergès

Existentialist Hero vs. Ordinary Language Man: Iris Murdoch Confronting Sartre and Wittgenstein

by Eve Y. Lin

Bringing People Closer: Cicero, Hierocles, and Cosmopolitanism

by Will Johncock

Manufacturing Authenticity: How We Yearn for the Real and Fall for the Fake

by Martijn Visser