Provincialism and Semi-Intersectionality: Pitfalls of Feminism in Postcolonial Times

摘要

This essay revisits the intersectional and postcolonial critique of global sisterhood. It focuses on one effect of this critique: a tendency of critical Western feminism to restrain from engaging with cultural and religious contexts that are different from its own, in order to not continue the imperial gesture of othering sexism. Taking the author's experiences among feminists in Pakistan as a starting point, the essay debates some of the implications of this restraint for both feminist activism and scholarship, claiming that it often leads to provincialism on the one hand, and to a form of semi-intersectionality on the other hand. In the end, it sketches out ways in which both tendencies may be overcome.