Talk by Serene Khader, Dept. of Philosophy, CUNY: “Towards a Decolonial Feminist Ideal of Resistant Power”

A genuinely decolonial feminism needs to reject the idea that, to use Uma Narayan’s words, “only Westerners are capable of naming and challenging patriarchal atrocities against third-world women.” In practice, this requires being able to recognize and support instances of “other” women’s resistance to sexist oppression. Unfortunately, a lack of conceptual clarity about what resistance is, and a number of colonial epistemic biases interfere with this. Some of these epistemic biases come from the analytical schemas offered by ideal theory and what I call “culturalism.” In this paper, I develop a normative conception of resistant power and a framework for employing it that seeks to counteract the effects of these epistemic biases.

Khader is the author of Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (2011).

Co-sponsored by Initiatives in Global Justice.