Gender was a crucial lens through which colonial societies
viewed their populations. Patriarchy worked in these societies in pragmatic and
discursive forms, normalising certain cultural practices, social customs and
ways of being as ‘true’ or ‘natural’. Women were twice colonised in their
simultaneous experience of patriarchy and colonialism, doubly demoted to the
obscure margins by patriarchal and imperial discourses and narratives that
celebrated male- oriented values, such as bonding between men and reticent
heroism, outdoor activities like battles, exploration and missionary
activities, and the strong silent men who went to ‘take up the white man’s
burden’ in barbaric, uncomfortable, steaming colonies.
The convergence of the contradictions and paradoxes of
class, gender and race affiliations, created the ‘racialization of domestic
space’ as well as ‘the domestication of colonial space’. Tropes such as gender,
race, patriarchy, maternity, femininity, and domesticity were re-inscribed and
reconstructed in the service of colonialism and modernity, and nations were
frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space.
Within this space, women were represented as the atavistic and authentic body
of national tradition; men, by contrast, represented the progressive agent of
national modernity, embodying nationalism’s progressive or revolutionary
principle of discontinuity.
In her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak
(1987) posed a challenging question for scholars of gender and colonialism. She
asked if the double eliding of native women by colonisation and patriarchy
precludes their voices from ever being heard. If human subjectivity is
inscribed like a palimpsest; written and re-written by ‘violently shuttling’
discourses of power and knowledge and from shifting positions and locations,
then it is impossible to retrieve subaltern agency from the colonial archives
since one cannot assume that the colonised person has autonomy and that the
archive presents a transparent record of her/his agency. The issue of gender
further complicates this task, as the colonial archive usually contains the
stories of men: ‘As object of colonialist historiography and as subject of
insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If,
in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot
speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’. However, Spivak
does not imply that the engaged intellectual who wishes to highlight the
oppression should therefore do nothing. Rather, she advocates the adoption of
the Gramscian maxim, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, or the
combination of a philosophical skepticism about recovering any subaltern agency
with a political commitment to making visible the position of the marginalized:
‘The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with
‘woman’ as pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female
intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown
with a flourish’ (Spivak 1987, 308).
Ania Loomba in her book ‘Colonial Postcolonial’ says that
under colonial regime, the image of nation or culture is often manifested as a
female, which evokes both female power and female helplessness. Aurobindo
writes ‘I know my country as Mother. I offer her my devotions, my worship. If a
monster sits as upon her breast and prepares to suck her blood, what does her
child do? Does he quietly sit down to his meal…or rush to rescue?’ Thus the
image of nation as mother both assembles and undercuts female power.
Feminist and post colonialist theories share much common
ground due to their examination of the voice, and the position of, the
subaltern in society. Their critiques of, and struggles against, domination by
the white male has led to their alignment and relevant discussions about their
similar problems, affects and strategies. since the 1980s, there has emerged a
divergent element to feminist postcolonial theory which has focused on the
'double colonization' that women colonized by both race and gender have
suffered, leading to questions of which
should be dealt with first, the discrimination they have suffered for not being
white or not being male. They share with colonized races and people an intimate
experience of the politics of oppression and repression, and like them they
have been forced to articulate their experiences in the language of oppressors.
