Contending masculinities: the gendered (re) negotiation of colonial hierarchy in the United Nations debates on decolonization

Abstract

The emergence of legal decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, is often understood through the lens of race and the disruption of racial hierarchy. If we take seriously the transnational feminist contention that the colonial racial order was also gendered, however, how might this perspective shift our understanding of decolonization? In this article, I explore the debates on decolonization that take place in the UN General Assembly from 1946-1960 that lead to the 1960 Declaration from a transnational feminist perspective to answer this question. Specifically, I use comparative historical and discourse methods of analysis to explore how colonialists and anti-colonialists negotiate the onset of legal decolonization, focusing especially on how colonialist hierarchies of race, culture, and gender are addressed in these debates.

Feminist Scholar-Activism Goes Global: Experiences of “Sociologists for Women in Society” at the UN

“…One former UN delegate who now is involved in World Social Forum emphasizes the need to collaborate with more radical grassroots organizations questioning gender and to put "our money where our mouth is" (I19) as a "superrich" organization. Other SWS members have dedicated their research to the liberal and colonial bias of the UN (Falcon, 2016a, Patil, 2009, as well as the reproduction of a missionary white feminism that gets reproduced through the ways in which the UN conceives gender (Desai, 2007b).…”

Flirting with Capital

“…Western hegemony long relies on a hierarchy and a system of practices that regard non-Western men as insufficiently masculine, hypermasculine, or sometimes as both (Patil 2009). My research challenges this scholarship by identifying two major gaps in the global and postcolonial masculinities literature.…”

“…Second, though scholars have examined various instances of masculinist resistance to colonial and neocolonial influences, few empirical works frame multiple resistances as part of one transnational story (Patil 2009). These conceptual and empirical blind spots conceal the dynamic relational performances of masculinity that arise between and among Western men and newly moneyed elites in rising emergent economies.…”

"New" Social Movements: Alternative Modernities, (Trans)local Nationalisms, and Solidarity Economies

“…The grand narratives upon which the victors' History rests, obscuring the lived experiences of the conquered, are rooted in the imposition of one single truth. The pursuit of one universal truth places "the people without history" (Wolf 1982) within a politics of kinship (Patil 2009) that infantilizes them, rendering them incapable of abstractly and critically understanding their own cultural practices. Sound systematic scientific study is said to require unbiased distance between researcher and researched 19 Take Back the Land-Miami was a housing rights organization founded in 2006 in Miami as "the" black response to the gentrification of people of African descent from their communities, the result of the U.S. housing crisis.…”

“…The diaspora introduces another important element in the theorizing of nation, sovereignty, and citizenship. The diaspora disturbs and re-arranges the naturalized borders of the 46 Boat people are primarily lower and working class urban and rural Haitians who board rafts and attempt to reach the shores of the U.S. Alexander 1994, Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Barraclough 2003, Chatterjee 1993, Grewal and Kaplan 1994, Marchand and Runyan 2000, Mayer 2000, McClintock 1991, Patil 2009). Thus, these elites delimit which bodies exist within and which exist outside of the homogeneous imaginary that is the postcolonial nation-state.…”