International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Postcolonial feminism in international relations (PFIR) studies world politics as a site of power relations molded by colonization. Europe's merchant ships initially set sail for spices and trade (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), later turned into conquests and conversions (eighteenth to twentieth centuries). This legacy of colonization entwines with older, precolonial as well as postcolonial systems and relations of rule to produce multilayered and multiply-related matrices of power, constituting what we call today “world politics.” PFIR combines postcolonial and feminist insights to ask: How does the stratum of elite power (e.g., the boardroom–bedroom–war room complex) interlock with subterranean layers of colonization (e.g., the “servants’ quarters,” the “sweat shop,” the “red light district,” the “opium den,” the “Casbah”) to produce our contemporary world politics? How do these intersections of race, gender, sex, and class inform matrices of power in world politics? Furthermore, how do we account for elite and subaltern agency and resistance to the hegemonic sphere of world politics? For PFIR, three major components are involved in analyzing world politics: culture, politics, and material structures. By culture, PFIR refers to conventional markers of difference (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class/caste, nationality/location, language/dialect) ... log in or subscribe to read full text