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resisting heteronormativity/resisting recolonisation: affective bonds between indigenous women in southern Africa and the difference(s) of postcolonial feminist history

  • Theorizing the ‘First Wave’ Globally
  • Published:
Feminist Review

Abstract

This article recognises that any attempt to theorise the first wave globally must specify the use of the term ‘global’, so as not to elide the specificity of local differences, and must critically account for how feminist struggles among postcolonial, indigenous women are intertwined with a resistance to a history of colonialism and racial domination. While more than a demand for equal access to the symbolic order on the basis of gender alone, Western feminists must study carefully the cultural and gender implications of work by indigenous women in postcolonial contexts which do not easily fit into familiar theoretical paradigms that mimic the development of Western feminism, given the heterosexist biases of Western feminism historically. To what extent does the very form of historicisation of feminist struggles in the West repeat the colonising gesture when attempting to historicise the struggles of women in postcolonial contexts where the three waves of feminism as an organising framework, however loosely constructed, are transplanted to locations where they did not emerge historically? Through an examination of feminist work coming out of southern Africa, the article argues how attention to affective and erotic bonds between women in Lesotho provides a critical response to the heterosexist biases of African cultural nationalism, as well as to the colonising tendencies of feminist and queer enquiry in the West that do not account for the primacy of the performativity of sexual expression rather than its discursive naming as a precise sexual identity. The article concludes by asking for a reconceptualisation of the temporality of feminism not limited to its periodisation in the West, but informed by the specificities of feminist struggles locally and globally, including erotic autonomy as a viable praxis of decolonisation and a heightened self-reflexivity about the imperialist gestures guiding the production of (feminist) history and scholarship.

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Notes

  1. Chatterjee does not specifically mention same-sex desire as encroaching on the inner domain of sovereignty and the identifiable trace of cultural authenticity and distinctiveness that postcolonial cultural nationalisms often seek to preserve. His theory of postcolonial nationalism is important because it is distinguished from European forms of nationalism which were centred around liberal-nationalist thinking related to wealth, industriousness, liberty, and progress and came about and developed under post-Enlightenment thinking in the eighteenth century (Chatterjee, 2001: 2–3), obviously under a different set of historical, material, and ideological conditions than in the postcolonial world. His theory of postcolonial nationalism is double-edged in that it takes into account the history of colonial domination and the ongoing resistance to its effects alongside the need for Western influence in the material domain of the nation as a means of economic development. According to Chatterjee, postcolonial nationalism is a search for the regeneration of national culture so as to reach the standards set by alien (Western) cultures for development on the one hand, while preserving the distinctiveness of the ‘inner’ domain of national culture on the other (Chatterjee, 2001: 2). But the remaining question that needs to be asked is whether or not the so-called inner or ‘spiritual’ domain of postcolonial national culture is necessarily heterosexual.

  2. See William J. Spurlin (2006) Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa, especially Chapter 4.

  3. I borrow the term ‘heteropatriarchy’ from M. Jacqui Alexander's usage to describe the link of heterosexualisation with patriarchal power in the constructions of many postcolonial nationalist imaginaries. Alexander borrows the term from Lynda Hart's (1994) Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton University Press) and uses it in a postcolonial framework to analyse state-sponsored violence in the Bahamas that attempts to foreclose and suppress desire between women in the name of developing the Bahamian tourist economy. See Alexander (1997: 65).

  4. I realise that the place of bisexuality in transnational studies of sexuality is shifting and that it has not been sufficiently interrogated in Western queer studies, or, when it is, as Clare Hemmings reminds us, it is understood as undermining lesbian and gay claims to legitimacy by bringing lingering traces of opposite-sex desire into the investigative frame, or, bisexuality is assumed to produce once again oppositional identity categories (hetero/homo) which queer theorists purport to challenge. In either case, bisexuality remains invisible within queer enquiry so that lesbians and gay men remain its de facto subjects (Hemmings, 2007: 14). Bisexual queer theory and politics have certainly helped challenge received thinking about bisexuality as tied to earlier stages of development, the imperialist remnants of which remain to the extent that bisexuality is relegated discursively to the past, that is, as a precondition for sexual modernity in the West. I mention this because I think further theorisation needs to address Gay's assertion that affective and erotic bonds between Basotho women reflect a growing recognition of bisexuality in anthropological research given that it is not entirely clear from her study how the women differentiate, if at all, between their relations with other women and those with their husbands. Some women, such as ‘Mpho ‘M’atsepo Nthunya, whom I cite later, seem to speak implicitly to the dutiful (sexual) relations they have with their husbands as wives and mothers, and to the stronger emotional (and sometimes erotic) ties to their female motsoalle. I do not have the space to develop this line of thought in this piece, but I am not sure if bisexuality, as an identic category, would be a useful or sufficient way of reading these particular close intimate bonds.

  5. Judith Gay does report that Basotho women exercise a great deal of initiative in their relationships with other women as opposed to the formal rules of marriage, given that their bodies are not bound exclusively to male desire and that the women are not bound in their relationships with other women to the formal rules of marriage and to the male-dominated family and economic systems (Gay, 1986: 111). As in other patrilineal societies, yet differing only in a higher literacy rate among women that exceeds men in Lesotho and women in the rest of Africa, Basotho women are still subject to male control, principally through the continuing practice of bohali (lobola or bridewealth), usually paid in cattle or cash to the parents of the bride as a seal of marriage (Malahleha, 1984: 5).

  6. Rich's continuum created controversy among feminists and lesbians when it was first published in 1980 in the immediate aftermath of second-wave feminism in the United States. Many feminists seriously questioned the notion that all women could be placed somewhere on the lesbian continuum by virtue of their emotional or political connections to other women even if they didn't specifically identify as lesbians or have sex with women – this response was largely a strategy to deflect and distance the specific agendas of lesbian politics at a time when an anti-feminist, homophobic cultural context marked feminist positions as lesbian. Similarly, radical lesbians critiqued the continuum for blurring the distinctions between lesbians and heterosexual women in supportive relations with other women and for undermining the specificity of the ways in which women related to one another erotically. While traces of these controversies surrounding Rich's continuum still remain at present, the continuum is nonetheless useful here, not as a solution to better understanding same-sex desires between women in postcolonial contexts, but, perhaps, as Teresa de Lauretis suggests, as a political and intellectual strategy for (re)imagining the existence of the varied relations between women, including lesbian existence, despite ‘all that conspires to obliterate, deny, or make it unimaginable’ on the social ledger (De Lauretis, 1994: 191).

  7. For further discussion of ‘mati work’, as practiced by Creole women, see Gloria Wekker (1997).

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Spurlin, W. resisting heteronormativity/resisting recolonisation: affective bonds between indigenous women in southern Africa and the difference(s) of postcolonial feminist history. Fem Rev 95, 10–26 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.56

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