Analyzing normativity from a transnational perspective will contribute to re-imagining the nature and practice of feminist postcolonial theory and politics. The current world order is not only examined in geopolitical and strategic terms, but also by applying normative concepts such as justice, democracy and peace on a global scale, thereby examining the legitimacy of overarching normative systems of global scope and validity.
Normativity has different sets of features. Norms outline acceptable – both implicit (social and cultural) as well as explicit (codified) – principles of behavior. As strategies of normalization they regulate our practices and interactions with one another, even as norms are not reducible to its instantiations. As principles of valorization norms operate to reward compliance and punish deviance. The focus here is on “normative violence”, namely, violence of particular norms that determines who counts as politically-qualified subject. Beside the coercive aspect, namely, functioning through sanctions, the power of norms can also be understood as productive: it produces certain legitimate subjects, while delegitimizing others. Thus norms at once enable and hinder the emergence of political agency. Even as subjects are dependent upon and emerge from within normative orders, they are not fully determined by them. This is exactly where political contest resides.
As norms are not pre-given, ahistorical desideratum detached from human practice, there is always room for negotiating normativity. The capacity to develop a critical relation to norms presupposes an ability to transcend the horizon of the current and to imagine the possibility of other normative orders to come. It is exactly in between the discrepancy of what is and what could be which constitutes the initium for struggles for alternative articulations of norms and opens the space for creative agency. Feminist-postcolonial politics, often on the margins of power, holds the promise of transforming established norms and/or implementing alternative norms which might contribute to improving the lives and working conditions of vulnerable and marginalized groups. This entails a questioning – instead of the uncritical application– of normative frameworks and their alleged universal validity. Unlike cultural relativist approaches, a feminist-postcolonial perspective does not stop at simply rejecting specific norms and ideas which are perceived to be rooted in Western Androcentrism and to legitimize Eurocentric interests; rather it unfolds and aims to (re-)negotiate their foundational claims and biases, which are deeply linked to the history of colonialism.
Thus, the proposed project takes a double stance: It combines the contemplation of historical conditions with current configurations of gendered North-South power relations in which norms emerge by scrutinizing the global/local divide. It further seeks to examine the means by which norms regulate forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Gendered colonial and postcolonial orders are therefore perceived both as power relations and as normative orders. The assumption is that it is precisely when Eurocentric, heteronormative social and political normative orders are challenged that alternative visions of normativity are generated. Importantly, the question then not only becomes how do norms emerge, but also how can norms be employed and even appropriated to strive for inclusion, justice and equality to overcome historical violence. The focus of the four sub-projects is to explore the tensions between various kinds of norms as well as their negotiability and legitimacy under consideration of historically grown gendered power relations. We propose to examine how different political actors negotiate the unequal relations between the global North and the global South as well as within the global North and South, which are a historical product of colonialism.
Sub-projects:
The proposed project comprises of four closely interlinked sub-projects:
Project 1: Decolonization and Democratization (Nikita Dhawan)
As a form of collective exercise of political power, one of the cornerstones of deliberative democracy is the public sphere as a place where citizens can problematize conditions of inequality and question their exclusion from political arrangements through a principle of societal deliberation. Nancy Fraser (1992) proposes that the normative legitimacy and political efficacy of public opinion are essential to the concept of the public sphere in democratic theory, whereby she proposes “subaltern counterpublics” as an antidote to the homogenization of public spheres. In her recent work Seyla Benhabib (2006) has developed the concept of “democratic iterations”, which she explains as the possibility of re-appropriation and re-signification of citizenship so as to enable the extension of democratic voice.
By inserting new actors into the political stage, what democratization promises is to instigate a dialogue on the meaning of democracy and on the constitution of a new social grammar in the postcolony. Now it is well accepted that the socially vulnerable groups are not able to have their interests represented in political systems with the same ease as the more privileged actors. This is where the notion of subalternity, one of the central concepts of feminist postcolonial theory, comes into play. Gayatri Spivak (2008) expands her argument on subalternity to explain that when a citizen is unable to claim the public sphere, itself a creation of colonial history, a certain kind of subalternity is produced. With an eye on the subject-position of the subaltern, it is a challenge to reconstruct democratic theory and public sphere theory. How can Enlightenment be taken beyond the confines of Europe and be made to work for the ‘Other’? And what are the difficulties which we continue to face in trying to negotiate with concepts like public sphere with its Westphalian frame? The proposed sub-project seeks to examine the twofold task of decolonization and democratization with a focus on the question of subalternity: How can the sexed subaltern subject be transformed from an object of benevolence to an agent of democracy?
Project 2: Renegotiating Gender Relations – The UN’s Gender Norms in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel)
After violent internal conflicts, political and social orders – and as a part thereof gender relations – are renegotiated. As such the analysis of democratic transitions and the negotiation of gender norms within these have become increasingly relevant within feminist Political Science. Prominent feminist theorists critique liberal assumptions on the quality of democracies and democratisation processes, if questions of in- and exclusion are not problematized. In this sense, long-accepted tenets around political representation and participation are opened up to critical questioning once more.
Gender inequality has shown itself as being part and parcel of wider discriminatory practices, which have evidently been shaped by the region’s colonial history. For post-genocide Rwanda, a country which witnessed the destruction of its social as well as its political fabric in the genocide, addressing these issues is of critical concern. From a gender perspective, women’s conflict experiences have widely been recognized as being integral to general conflict narratives since the wars in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Rwandan women’s genocide encounters have informed their post-genocide political pursuits. The genocide is a pivotal point of departure for an analysis as it marks the first major open contest for national power since independence. With its wide set of international norms, the United Nations seem to hold a key element in addressing the gender-specific aftermath and in taking down some of the restraints these women face. Thus this project pursues a deeper understanding of the link between national and international gender norms in a post-colonial, post-genocide context and contributes to a body of feminist approaches on norm domestication.
Project 3: Deconstructing and Decolonizing Cosmopolitanism. Responsibility for the ‘Other’ in Transnational Postcoloniality (Jeanette Ehrmann)
The conquest of America by the Spaniards in 1492 not only marks the beginning of modern European colonialism. According to Enrique Dussel (2007), it is exactly the colonial encounter of Europe with its ‚Other‘ that constitutes the formation of modern political thought. Drawing on a tradition of cosmopolitanism within the history of Western political thought dating back to antiquity, normative blueprints of a global order are extended to the New World. This raises questions like: To what extent does the ‚Other‘ qualify as human and therefore as a subject within a global political and normative order? In what way is the relation between Self and ‚Other‘ constructed as an ethical one in terms of justice or responsibility? To which rights are the European newcomers entitled vis à vis the life, manpower, claims of ownership and the normative ideas of the ‚Other‘?
By way of a deconstructive politics of reading subsequent to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a critical psychoanalysis of philosophy following Francis Cheneval, the project aims to unfold the inner logic and ambivalences of theories of cosmopolitanism with regard to alterity. On the basis of selected stations in the history of Western political thought from the School of Salamanca onward, the project will trace different normative justifications of the colonization of the ‚Other‘ in terms of submission, assimilation and foreclosure. In so doing, the importance of gender and race for the construction of the ‚Other‘ which legitimized European domination has to be taken into consideration. The main focus of the project is twofold. Instead of rejecting the concept of cosmopolitanism as a whole, the central questions is: How is responsibility for the ‚Other’ possible in a world of entangled histories and transnational interdependencies – beyond domination and destruction? Another concern of the project is to advance the decolonization of political thought by the double critique of an undoing and redoing (Walter Mignolo 2003), i.e. the reconstruction of the colonial difference within political theory so as to open up new forms of political thinking which give room to alternative visions of norms towards the ‘Other’ that deconstruct hierarchy without at the same time destructing difference.
Project 4: Global Normative Frameworks and Transnational Literacy. Reading, Translating and Negotiating Normativity from Postcolonial-Feminist Perspectives (Elisabeth Fink)
The demand for greater access to the public sphere is a well-known and long-standing cornerstone of liberal feminism. The goal of gender equality is sought to be achieved through equal participation of women and men in the political, cultural and economic realms. In this context, great emphasis is placed to the increased access of women to paid labor as key to emancipation through financial independence. Although the entry of women into paid labor markets can undoubtedly be seen as a milestone on the way to more autonomy of innumerable women, the participation in the paid labor force cannot be seen as a panacea to women’s well-being and freedom (Charusheela 2003). Against the background of exploitative working conditions in the global south as well as in the global north, the specific situatedness of the liberal feminist agenda is revealed. Furthermore, if, as Drucilla Barker (2005) and others point out, old-fashioned colonialism has been replaced by globalization – and its feminization of labor in unsecure and poorly paid jobs with monotonous tasks in the export-oriented industries in the global south – the notion of paid work needs to be renegotiated. Is there, as Barker argues, a complicity of liberal feminism with the advancement of the global feminization of labor? However, the question about the value of paid work for women worker’s in the global south is highly contested between feminist of various stripes as well as between specific local and global feminist understandings of the living and working conditions of women working in the global assembly line (Siddiqi 2009). This is followed by a controversy about international labor standards and its possible consequences on the employment of women in the global south (Kabeer 2004). In addition, postcolonial feminists have accused Western scholars and activists of producing a stereotyped image of women worker’s in the ‘sweatshop economy’, which rather underpins their moral relief than adequately taken into account the workers interests. This raises the following questions: How should the feminization of labor and the ‘New’ International Division of Labor be addressed by feminist scholars and activists without producing a ‘third world difference’ (Mohanty 1984) or a ‘culture of global moralism’ (Siddiqi 2009) that victimizes third world workers? How can worker’s rights be protected? How should feminists interfere in the debate about international labor standards as a global framework?
The project seeks to address these questions by integrating views of women workers who are usually not heard in international debates on how to protect labor rights. In so doing, the contradictions between local feminist understandings of the feminization of labor and global (feminist) approaches to protect labor standards will be explored with the aim to develop a ‘transnational feminist literacy’ (Spivak 1999) with regard to working conditions under globalization and global normative frameworks.
