Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a knowing otherwise (original) (raw)

Abstract

For more than two decades, the vast production of post-structuralist/post-positivist feminist critique and postcolonial feminism thinking within the field of International Relations and more recently on Global Politics have pushed forward critical investigations on their modern and colonial foundations (e.g. Sylvester 1993, Pappart and Marchand 1995, Shilliam 2010, Gruffyd Jones 2006, etc.) In doing so, different epistemological positions have been deployed in their attempt to destabilize narratives that produce and reproduce dominant ideas about ‘the international’ and ‘global politics’. Today, these contributions constitute a fruitful background for the current wave of academic interest focused on critically understanding the epistemic foundations of IR and GP as disciplines responsible of thinking how power operates in the international and global spheres. Decolonial thinking has recently been partaking in this critical endeavor (Icaza 2015 and 2010, Icaza and Vazquez 2013, Taylor 2012). Belonging to a different geo-genealogy to that of post-colonial studies, decolonial thinking departs from acknowledging that there is ‘no modernity without coloniality’ (Lugonés 2010a and 2010b, Mignolo 2003 and 2013, Quijano 2000, Vazquez 2014, 2011, 2009, Walsh 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2007). For the purposes of this text, the relevance of this affirmation is that coloniality as the underside of modernity constitutes an epistemic location from which reality is thought. This locus of enunciation, following Mignolo, means that hegemonic histories of modernity as a product of the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution are not accepted but challenged to undo their Eurocentric power projection inherent to them. Precisely, in seeking to avoid becoming just another hegemonic project, decolonial thinking is also understood as an option – in contrast to a paradigm or grand theory - among a plurality of options.

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