Outsourcing Patriarchy To and Within India: Intersectional and Decolonial Gender Politics Across Scales

Abstract

This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context

“…Fairless Nicholson (2020) and Cheung Judge (2020) highlight the work of community‐making in decolonisation, albeit through encounters across geopolitical boundaries, and a focus on practices of fun, friendship, and play, among young people. In Gilbertson's (2020) paper, potentials to decolonise “youth” emerge through a multi‐scalar and intersectional critique of both racist and caste geographies.…”

“…Amanda Gilbertson's (2020) research with young middle‐class gender justice workers in Delhi demonstrates the need for a multi‐scalar approach to grasp how young people understand feminism and its relation to anticolonial and decolonial practice. If we only view decolonial politics through India/Euro‐America relations, we miss how “individuals have to navigate different geographies of power, sometimes from a position of the colonised and sometimes from a position of privilege” (Gilbertson 2020:3). Euro‐American feminisms are somewhat irrelevant, and questions of “difference” are understood to be internal to the Indian context.…”

“…The young Indigenous activists in Gergan and Curley's (2021) paper find themselves in conflict with elders as they stake out their own vision for a decolonial future. In Gilbertson's (2020) paper, gender justice workers in Delhi articulate a robust critique of the colonial underpinnings of Western feminism, while also reproducing their own privilege in encounters with lower‐caste women. Freshour and Iniestra Varelas (2022) explore in‐betweenness as an embodied “structure of feeling”, as underdocumented youth in the US South grapple with experiences of precarity and legal limbo that are felt unevenly within their own families, as well as across wider society.…”

“…In Gilbertson's (2020) case, displacement comes across in the fraught efforts of urban, upper‐caste, middle‐class youth to decolonise Indian feminisms. Familiar with its North American origins, they advocate for “intersectionality” in gender justice work, but may at times uncritically reproduce “colonial dynamics of outsourcing patriarchy to Othered bodies and sites”.…”

“…We begin from an understanding that our world has been shaped by the figure of the liberal human originating in the colonial era and caught up in a hierarchy that renders some people either outside humanity (Jackson 2020; McKittrick 2015; Weheliye 2014; Wynter 2003) or as figurative children, not yet made human (Nxumalo and Ross 2019; Stoler 2002; Tambe 2019). Thus, authors note how education targets specific categories of youth as “at‐risk”, “deviant”, or in need of improvement—whether that is working class and ethnic minorities in Britain enrolled into international volunteer programmes (Cheung Judge 2020) or young people understood to be in need of feminist education in New Delhi (Gilbertson 2020). But we also begin from the premise that we must follow the life and excesses that escape this rendering (McKittrick 2013).…”