GEND 2019 - Gender and Race in a Colonial World II

This course takes an intersectional and decolonial approach to gender, race, and other intersectional categories, exploring how European colonial ideas and practices created many of our current assumptions about race and gender, and how this thinking continues to influence power structures today. Using Lugones’ concepts of the ‘coloniality of gender’ and ‘heterosexualism’ (among others), we will trace the origins of gender, race and racism in colonial discourses, and look at how they have contributed to contemporary heteronormative gender roles for both colonising and colonised societies. Hearing from Black, Indigenous, ‘Third World Feminist’, ecofeminist and Islamic feminist scholars, we will take a critical look at how colonial thinking creates overlapping binaries between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, ‘rational’ and ‘natural’, ‘liberated’ and ‘oppressed’, and how these dualisms work to justify or obscure ongoing inequality and exploitation. We will look into a range of contemporary global issues and contexts where these dynamics still commonly play out, including in nationalism, economic development, feminist campaigns, Indigenous issues, environmental debates, and global ‘gay rights’ campaigns. In recognising colonial ways of thinking, we will also attend to alternatives, looking for more ethical ways to practice cross-cultural solidarity, and encountering anti-colonial visions for a more just and relational world.