Decolonisation course
Beschrijving
This lecture discusses the decolonization of gender. We will discuss how, besides historians and biologists, decolonization scholars have demonstrated that the binary gender system is a cultural construct, not a natural fact. In The Invention of Women, sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí explains how, for example, age rather than sex defined social order in the Yoruba culture before British rule. We will not only consider the historical contingency of the binary gender system but also the specific oppressive character it acquired in the colonial context. As Maria Lugones has argued, colonizers imposed the binary gender system as part of an oppressive strategy, effectively merging the goals of colonialism, exploitative capitalism, patriarchy, and racism (as was explained in the introductory class). In collaboration with Val Plumwood and other feminist scholars, we will explore ways to overcome oppressive gender dualism within a postcolonial conceptual framework.
Programma
This lecture is part of the course on ‘Decolonisation’ and will offer students the tools to gain insight into the complex realities and debates on the processes of decolonization. It also hopes to train the young generation to gain confidence and experience themselves as agents of change by teaching how past violence can be remedied and how these complex histories that shape our present realities can be repaired. The course identifies co-constitutive relationships between colonization, racism, sexism, and knowledge production. This shows how the relationships between “the West” and its colonial and post-colonial subjects and territories are produced and reproduced. The critical decolonization framework also identifies, interrogates, and contests the past and present entangled relationship between colonization, racism, elitism, and sexism to create more equal and just societies and more inclusive structures of knowledge production. The course offers students a critical decolonization framework to engage past and present societies and our dominant structures of knowledge production.
Every lecture starts with a case study from contemporary society (for instance, the statues of Leopold II, the war on Gaza, the criticism of black female athletes whose bodies are considered too masculine,…) and equip students with critical conceptual, theoretical, historical, and creative tools to analyse the complex societal phenomenon.
