Critical feminist scholars argue that a number of interrelated Western-based dualisms are condensed in the universal notion of ‘woman’ (Plumwood 1991; Chandra Mohanty 1994). Chandra Mohanty (1994) contributed to this debate introducing the idea of ‘Third World Women’ as a homogenous and subjugated group constructed
under the social category of ‘average Third World woman’. Mohanty observes that, in development literature, Third World Women have been historically represented in contrast to Western standards for measuring progress (see also Chapter 7).
This stereotype is rooted in the homogenous and hierarchical categorisations of Western-based universalism and grounded in the separation between culture and nature, body and mind, human and non-human, men and women (Lugones 2010). With regard to the external great divide (Blaser 2014), the ‘Third World’ represents what is irrational, uneducated and tradition-bound (section 4.3); in the masculine- feminine binomial, ‘woman’ is the negation of all rational and masculine qualities. The feminine sphere as represented by the Western tradition is in opposition to masculine and rational domains, and hence emotional, unpredictable, unreliable and to be confined to private realms, yet in continuity with the merely physical, natural and animal (Plumwood 1991).
During European colonialism, indigenous people in African or American colonies were thought to be as wild and libidinal as animals (non-human); women (in both the Global North and South) were differentiated against a supposed male perfection marked by rational, heterosexual, Christian, public, rule-oriented and subjective/ intentional features. This typification further classified Third World Women according to their deficiencies with respect to Western women (educated, free and in control of their bodies), implicitly projecting the former as domestic, family-oriented and passive victims of local and global patriarchal cultures.
The work of Ann Laura Stoler (1995) is particularly useful for understanding how gender, colonial and postcolonial relations co-constitute each other. She points to how colonial discursive strategies on sexual practices of the colonised flourished on the basis of the classification of colonial objects into distinct human beings, (e.g. the ‘libidinal savage’). Colonised societies were defined as morally declining and put in
stark contrast with the ideal male-headed family milieu of European bourgeois families. The discourses on sexual self-control assumed and produced racial distinctions and contributed to the making of European identity, as well as serving the colonising purposes of the European imperial project (Stoler 1995). In Chapter 7, I will show how the experience of colonialism in Malawi, by introducing Christian conceptualisations of family structure and household management, deeply transformed local matrilineal societies (mbumba), further imbricating gender relations into racial, colonial and patriarchal structures and increasing women’s vulnerability to climate shocks – via the division between public and private spheres.
Mohanty (2003 and 2013) has recently called for an increased historical and cultural specificity in women’s studies to take account of the intersections between systemic power structures and multi-folded inequalities (race, gender, class), avoiding forms of generalisation and reductionism.7 Lately, intersectional analysis has especially highlighted the interactions between gender, race, class, sexuality and other categories of individual and collective inequalities, and the structures of power and domination. Intersectional analyses make the fundamental point that individual identities are differently affected by multiple interacting systems of oppression and privilege, depending on the individual’s societal position (Lugones 2010; Garry 2011). Intersectional scholars emphasise how single-axis frameworks (institutional, scientific, legal, analytical, etc.), which operate under the pretence of neutrality and neglect the power dynamics shaping identity formation, can rarely transform the conditions of marginality (Cho et al. 2013; Mohanty 2013; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014). Sandra Harding (2009), for example, noted that male-biased Western epistemologies tend to ignore the most significant changes in women’s lives and neglect their role in social change. As a consequence, Western scientific projects have been historically characterised by the absence of women in the design and management phases, affecting the nature of scientific inquiries and generating socially regressive effects on women.
7 The systemic socio-historical and institutional analysis underpinned by the concept of Third World Women has also been criticised for being totalising and responsible for the creation of a unified and homogenous subject (Mohanty 2013).
More specifically, intersectionality can disclose the colonial legacies and deep biases based on race, class, and gender that permeate the methods, formulations of issues, and substantive positions of Eurocentric philosophy (Garry 2011). Recently, quests for a systematic intersectional analysis of gender and climate change have emerged that would allow including insights from various disciplines on the relations among humans and nature, as well as clarifying how contextual and multi-sited dynamics of power interact to produce ‘objective’ narratives and identities linked to climate change (Cho et al. 2013; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Liska 2015).
In Chapter 7, I will discuss some of the gender stereotypes (e.g. the ‘feminisation of poverty’ trope) deployed in climate change policy discourses, which risk categorising women as inherently vulnerable to climate change and substantially reducing their inclusion in development initiatives. In Malawi, these simplifications shaped the design of women-centred climate change projects, which, however, tend to neglect how women’s vulnerability and responses are historically and socially constructed not only by gender, but also by age, societal position and family networks.
In that sense, FSTS filled up some of the theoretical and methodological gaps left by PCSTS (e.g. binary North-South typification and gender-blind colonial analysis). PCSTS typically frames colonised identities and struggles as opposed to ‘Western’ historical and cultural ideals (Harding 2009; Sharp et al. 2010; Lazarus 2011). Mudimbe (1988), for example, pointed out the tendency of postcolonial African analysts to retain the epistemological categories characterising Western thinking, such as the coloniser- colonised binary relation, whereby the colonised can only exist and develop his/her identity in dependence/contrast to the coloniser (Sharp et al. 2010). The tendency in postcolonial studies is hence to criticise the Western conceptual framework while using its dualistic thinking structure (Loomba 2005; Harding 2009; Lazarus 2011). Some postcolonial accounts have failed to recognise the overall spectrum of social impacts, transformations (not only racial and cultural, but also class- and gender-
related) and agency generated by the historical, political and economic experiences of Western capitalism, such as colonialism.