Decolonial approaches to gender studies and secularism

Professor Nadia Kiwan, LLMVC

In this paper, Professor Kiwan will consider the theoretical contributions that a decolonial studies paradigm might bring to the study of gender. She argues that a decolonial conceptual framework can generate critical discussions of key political concepts such as equality, secularism and universalism and the ways in which such concepts have, at certain key historical moments been mobilised to inhibit women’s perspectives in the public sphere. Drawing on examples from ongoing research on emergent feminist social movements in contemporary France, she will argue that some of the blockages and obstacles that such movements can experience are linked to certain established assumptions about what ‘good’ feminism(s) should strive for. She suggests that such assumptions are embedded within a particular conceptualisation of gender equality, which tends to overlook the ways in which structural inequality can be at once, socio-economic, cultural and postcolonial.