On the Question of Postcolonial lens in Historical and Feminist Sociology: What does it reveal and what does it conceal?


Shabnoor Nabi, University of Toronto

The dominant gender and development frameworks, including classic modernization, developmental idealism, and human capital model, claim a positive relationship between women’s educational attainment and their overall socio-economic power elevation via greater female labor force participation. The gradual extension of this neoliberal discourse into the sphere of western feminism and its agenda for the global South has rendered women’s pursuit of education and employment as a marker of progress and modernity. For instance, the ‘girl-ing’ of development and ascending Western investment in education and entrepreneurial campaigns in the low-income countries of the global South valorizes neoliberal scripts of individualism, consumerism, choice, wellbeing, and entrepreneurial identity, such that women following these scripts are considered modern and successful, whereas the rest are considered as victims of structural and cultural oppression (Eisenstein 2010; Harris 2004; Mohanty 2003; Khoja-Moolji 2018). Accordingly, progressiveness and modernity in terms of education and paid labor in the neoliberal feminism’s agenda for the global South seems to have been redefined in a way that presumes reorganization of gendered norms and domains as its default effect. However, the fact that this mostly resonates with observed trends in high-income countries of the global North suggests underlying workings of very different socio-political rationalities in postcolonial nations. Indeed, postcolonial feminist theorists recurrently highlight how it is the racialized Muslim woman/girl subject of the ‘troubled’ and ‘crisis-stricken’ developing countries of the global South that frequently gets presented within the neoliberal feminist discourse as the epitome of ‘wasted’ resource in need of rescue. Following the production of this binary girl-subject, stripped from its socio-political subjectivities, key postcolonial theorists argue for the need of sociology to adopt a postcolonial lens with interconnected histories framework in order to shift its focus from essentializing and hybridizing categorizations to interactional understanding of social relations, historical processes, and practices across multiple spaces. While I do find value in connected histories framework, I argue that its proposed application as part of the call for a ‘postcolonial’ sociology continues to put us at the risk of analytical elisions and bifurcations. Following this theoretical lacuna, I extend Julian Go’s (2013) interconnected histories approach to analyze gender relations in the context of a postcolonial Islamic nation-state of Pakistan. I particularly show how distinct conceptions of postcolonial Pakistani nation and nationalism pave(d) way for a whole new set of power relations and hierarchies surrounding religion, nation-state, and gender order. In doing so, I highlight the reasons why historical and feminist sociology’s self-reflection as a counter strategy to the call for adopting a postcolonial lens may not suffice in undoing the implicit primacy of the West and elision of colonial understandings and relations. I ultimately suggest the need of a renewed postcolonial lens that not only incorporates interconnected histories (presuming co-constituting anticolonial consciousness), but also the associated semiotics of the internal national politics in redefining the conceptions of postcolonial gender order, modernity, and development. This is what I present as key to a high-yielding postcolonial (feminist) sociology that can unravel and relocate the elided relations and experiences within the historical processes of concept formations.

This paper will be presented at the following session: