Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic by Serene J. Khader


Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic
Title : Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0190664193
ISBN-10 : 9780190664190
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 198
Publication : Published December 4, 2018

Decolonizing Universalism argues that feminism can respect cultural and religious differences and acknowledge the legacy of imperialism without surrendering its core ethical commitments. Transcending relativism/ universalism debates that reduce feminism to a Western notion, Serene J. Khader proposes a feminist vision that is sensitive to postcolonial and antiracist concerns. Khader criticizes the false universalism of what she calls 'Enlightenment liberalism, ' a worldview according to which the West is the one true exemplar of gender justice and moral progress is best achieved through economic independence and the abandonment of tradition. She argues that anti-imperialist feminists must rediscover the normative core of feminism and rethink the role of moral ideals in transnational feminist praxis. What emerges is a nonideal universalism that rejects missionary feminisms that treat Western intervention and the spread of Enlightenment liberalism as the path to global gender
injustice.

The book draws on evidence from transnational women's movements and development practice in addition to arguments from political philosophy and postcolonial and decolonial theory, offering a rich moral vision for twenty-first century feminism.

Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic Reviews

  • Gretel

    Partially read for the course Decolonizing Gender. Read Intro, Chapter 1 and Chapter 5.

    This is a very dense, very complex little book that tackles decolonial, postcolonial and transnational feminism. Khader has certainly delivered an interesting perspective and useful tools for transnational feminist ethics and activism but the text is very hard to get into. It took me about 30 to 40 pages to finally get into her convoluted and abstract writing style. Until then I was only getting parts of what she was trying to say. Even then, I think that some of her arguments or statements need more "proof" because she sometimes tends to drop finalised opinions with little examples of how she comes to that conclusion.

    This is definitely something for people who have read a couple of feminist works and have some basic idea of academic theory because this is otherwise too complicated, both contentwise and how Khader writes. Definitely nothing for beginners.

  • Madeleine Gale

    an interesting, dense look at feminist philosophy. Only thing keeping it from 5 stars for me is Khader’s writing, more often than not, is extremely difficult to decipher.