sujithxavier TWAILR: Reflections

Women’s Liberation in Postcolonial States: The role of ‘womanhood’ in women’s agency and liberation

Apeksha Gandhi examines construction of ‘woman’ and the nation-building period within postcolonial India. The author argues that the concept of womanhood, rooted in colonial and Western constructs, perpetuates binary notions of subjecthood and undermines efforts for genuine liberation.

TWAILR: Reflections #58/2024

“There is no monolithic ‘Indian woman’ and nor do I have the confidence to write on her behalf.”

Shrayana Bhattacharya1

My piece aims to shed light on how the concept of womanhood has been used within human rights discourses to marginalise non-western women. It traces its prominence within postcolonial states like India as a perceived tool of resistance against colonialism. My argument follows that, given womanhood’s predisposition to make and unmake subjects, the language of womanhood used in postcolonial states during the anti-colonial struggle and nation-building stage inevitably pursues similar aims of alienation.2 Thus, despite possessing a more nuanced understanding of multi-layered identities, postcolonial feminist movements continue to reinforce binary notions of subjecthood and struggle to detach from the concept of womanhood conceived during nation-building without attracting allegations of supporting Western imperialism. In advancing this argument, my piece illuminates the need to uproot the conversation of women’s liberation from its current ground, which can only offer binary notions of freedom or unfreedom, subjecthood or victimhood, colonial or anti-colonial. Instead, what is required for meaningful and critical engagement with women’s liberation is ‘the shift to a different place’ from which to situate hope for diverging futures of freedoms.3

The promise of liberation for women is fundamental to human rights discourse in both the Western and postcolonial world. Despite little agreement on what constitutes the ‘liberated self’,4 the notion that rights are in and of themselves emancipatory characterises human rights discourse and practice in both spaces. Legal frameworks consequently build upon and reproduce assumptions about subjectivity and liberation that are embedded within human rights discourses5 – assumptions it should be noted, that are historically and culturally placed within the west.6 A chief assumption peddled by modern human rights projects is the notion that accumulation of individual rights will transform subjects into autonomous agents who can then attain liberation.7 Paradigmatic constructions of freedom, and what constitutes the ‘liberated self’, necessitates creating conditions of ‘unfreedom’ to distinguish between subjects and victims.8 By making and unmaking subjects and victims based upon essentialist understandings of the Other, the human rights corpus pursues an assimilationist project, using liberation as an interventionist mechanism under the guise of uplifting the disenfranchised.9 Human rights, under this view, are ascribed as tools that help ‘victims’ overcome external barriers to agency and liberation, which are often attributed to the individual’s social, cultural and religious positioning.10

The ‘politically sensitive [language] of human rights’ allows for the disassociation of human rights discourse from historic colonial projects, despite both engaging in the stratification of human beings into subjects and non-subjects.11 TWAIL scholars have identified and rightly criticised the racial, regional and ethnic structures of power that underlie legal systems in the Western and postcolonial world.12 Separable categories, such as race and gender, are used as the basis of the distinction between persons.13 Scholarly engagement with the concept of womanhood as an exclusive category of distinction intra-gender, which transcends separable categories, has hitherto been sparse or entirely missing from the discourse on women’s liberation. The concept of womanhood – understood to be the collection of values and characteristics considered innate to the being of a woman – is conceptualised linearly in both Western and postcolonial human rights discourse, resulting in the restriction of women’s complete autonomy, and impacting her pursuit of absolute liberation. Feminist projects in the Western and postcolonial world use womanhood to make distinctions intra-gender and prescribe unidimensional futures of freedom – what freedom should look like – for ‘women who are understood to be marginalised, subordinated, or oppressed.’14 This serves to more concentratedly marginalise minority women, and women of the majority group who defy the ideal subjecthood.

The concept of womanhood, as envisaged by Western feminism, is based on a Western mainstream conceptualisation of what it means to be a woman. In demarcating a collection of values and characteristics considered innate to the being of a woman, the concept of womanhood serves to alienate women who exhibit differing values and characteristics as Deviants.

Womanhood and Alterity

The notion of stratifying humans into distinct categories is not new. The racialised and colonised hierarchies invoked by liberalism’s narrative of ‘progress’ necessitates the creation of binary conditions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘savagery’ and ‘civility’, ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. This allows liberal (human rights) interventions to be more clearly located and credited with the transition of an individual into civility and freedom from her prior ‘savage’ and ‘unfree’ state. TWAIL scholarship has identified and critiqued hierarchical structures and distinctly liberal models of progress in international law and postcolonial states.15 Insights emanating from this scholarship reveal the threat to minorities in postcolonial states, against whom (rights) interventions are carried out to assimilate minorities into the acceptable subject or eliminate them altogether to preserve the unity of national identity. Whilst timely and important, the grouping of minorities together ignores the experience of women who occupy spaces in liminality. Critical feminist engagements with TWAIL are thus required to supplement this analysis with a necessary focus on gender. Indeed, the unique experiences of women in postcolonial states must not be ignored.

The racial and regional hierarchy underpinning international (human rights) law extends to Western feminist human rights discourse, which distinguishes between the (free) Western woman and her (unfree) non-Western counterpart. The progressive narrative of liberal human rights discourse means that the ‘creation of an image of the modern western woman depended from the beginning on the creation of a contrasting image of the victimized non-western woman.’16 The concept of womanhood is used here by Western feminist projects to define ideal, unidimensional futures of freedom for the victimised non-western woman to aspire towards. Conditions of womanhood are ethnocentric, based on social, cultural, and political contexts that privilege dominant group ideals. The specific contexts that underpin the constitution of womanhood are, therefore, crucial to our understanding of how womanhood operates to make and unmake subjects.17 The concept of womanhood, as envisaged by Western feminism, is based on a Western mainstream conceptualisation of what it means to be a woman. In demarcating a collection of values and characteristics considered innate to the being of a woman, the concept of womanhood serves to alienate women who exhibit differing values and characteristics as Deviants. These do not simply include desirable characteristics of the powerful elites, such as being unveiled, heterosexual or belonging to a particular racial or ethnic group. The concept of womanhood operates more insidiously to differentiate between women through socially constructed ideas of what makes a person a woman. To illustrate my argument and its impact on rights-claims, consider, for example, a related concept of distinction to womanhood, motherhood: would the concept of motherhood consider adoptive mothers to be as ‘real’ as biological mothers? Would working mothers be regarded as ‘good’ as stay-at-home mothers? Would women who cannot or do not want children still be considered women?

Questioning the construction and impact of such ideals is important as they permeate the state’s social, legal, and political fabric and influence feminist mobilisations and subjectivity. Human rights interventions are enacted against Deviants to assimilate them into the folds of acceptable womanhood and, consequently, into acceptable subjecthood. Alternatively, the exercise of othering women through socially constructed categories dehumanises them and deprives them of their personhood entirely. Despite the lack of scholarship explicitly problematising conceptual categories of distinction, the practice of classifying persons as women and non-women using concepts like motherhood and womanhood is not a new phenomenon. Hortense Spiller’s influential essay explains that enslaved women’s motherhood was not considered in equal measure with white women’s motherhood, which was perceived as ‘real’.18 Classifications of this nature that go beyond merely racial or gender categories have repercussions for the types of rights claims one can avail and the way response strategies are framed.19 Explained in this way, the concept of womanhood can be understood as a mechanism with which to exercise more concentrated marginalisation of minority and majority group women who do not conform to the accepted standards of subjectivity. Their agency and pursuit of diverging expressions of freedom is thus barred in and through human rights discourse and practice as we currently understand them.

Human rights interventions are enacted against Deviants to assimilate them into the folds of acceptable womanhood and, consequently, into acceptable subjecthood.

Womanhood in Postcolonial States: A Case Study of India

Notions of womanhood (and manhood) form necessary parts of nationalism and the construction of national identity in postcolonial states.20 The concept of womanhood is harnessed here as an act of resistance against colonial powers. In the context of India, for example, the concept of womanhood is especially relevant to redefine and distinguish the ‘Indian woman’ from her Western counterpart. To shed colonial definitions, postcolonial states like India engage in revivalist identity-formation politics to reinvent a national identity that appears nostalgic of the past, holding firmly to native traditions and customs.21 Identities emerging from this exercise are perceived as immutable to the state structure and permeate the lives of subjects through political, social, cultural, and legal avenues. These avenues reinforce the concept of womanhood through their commentary, influencing the pursuit of unidimensional expressions of freedom and discouraging the imagination of alternative futures.

Inevitably, like its parallel Western manifestation, the concept of womanhood in postcolonial states also more concentratedly alienates women through socially constructed ideals. The concept of womanhood that emerged in India, placed undue emphasis on the notions of ‘honour’, ‘purity’, ‘chastity’ and women as ‘custodians of the culture of ethnic, religious and tribal groups’ – concepts that ultimately controlled women’s sexuality and bodily agency.22 Predominantly based upon Hindu-patriarchal notions of femininity, the mainstream conception of womanhood delineated women of minority communities as Deviants and Others.23 Adding to this complexity was the dualistic development of Indian womanhood that emerged as both anti-colonial and colonial in character. Although distinguishing itself from her Western counterpart as a means of anti-colonial resistance, Indian womanhood (unironically) followed the Western narrative of progress and sought to create conditions of freedom and unfreedom, ‘savagery’ and ‘civility.’ Against this binary, Indian womanhood developed its more ‘modern’ womanhood, the new aspirational subjecthood women could strive towards from their state of ‘unfreedom.’ The Indian womanhood that emerged from this exercise sought to decry the degraded position of minority women to assert its own superiority and desirability.24  In this way, both Western and postcolonial human rights discourse pursue assimilatory politics and legal interventions that restrict the exercise of women’s full autonomy, who are forced to pursue one-dimensional paths to liberation.25 The project of liberation that is being exercised against minority and Deviant women then simultaneously – and unironically – restricts her freedom to imagine alternative futures and alternative freedoms.

Since definitions emerging from this exercise – rather than the exercise of redefinition itself – are seen as embodying resistance to the colonial order, challenges by Indian feminist movements are misconstrued as imperialist in nature. Thus, despite understanding the multi-layered identities of postcolonial subjects, postcolonial feminist movements can seldom move beyond definitions of identity created during anti-colonial struggles and nation-building stages. This is a result of the terrain upon which current debates on women’s liberation take place, which is inadequately placed to facilitate the discourse on diverging futures of freedoms.26 The language, concepts, and spaces in which theorising about women’s liberation takes place currently are ineffective in communicating the particularities of women’s experiences and needs. The binary notions of freedom and unfreedom, subjecthood and victimhood, colonial and anti-colonial, do not allow postcolonial feminists to challenge and redefine the meaning of ‘woman’. What is more, spaces that imagine progress and freedom in a distinctly linear manner do not serve as adequate grounds upon which to theorise, hope, and dream of diverging futures of freedom.

In the Aftermath of Critique

I have shown in this piece the problematic role of womanhood in women’s liberation in both the Western and postcolonial world and illuminated the need for TWAIL Feminists to dislocate the conversation from its current, concaving grounds. The operation of womanhood as an exclusive category of distinction between women serves to reproduce colonial notions of subjectivity and enact interventionist strategies against Deviants and Others. Understanding the complex and multi-layered subjectivities of the postcolonial woman, TWAIL Feminist efforts are required to reorient the discourse on women’s liberation toward more hopeful, inclusive, and imaginative prospects. My wider research project on the role of womanhood in women’s agency and liberation draws upon diverse disciplinary insights in a collaborative effort to contribute to TWAIL Feminist scholarship on alternative futures of freedoms. Interdisciplinary knowledge exchange is important to construct a nuanced understanding of the problem in question so that we may accurately assess the impact of womanhood in other avenues of women’s lives and formulate appropriate strategies to move beyond it. As the title of Ratna Kapur’s influential article goes, in the aftermath of critique, we are not in epistemic freefall.27

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  1. Shrayana Bhattacharya, ‘The Private Rebellions of Indian Women’ Mint (14 August 2022) https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/the-private-rebellions-of-indian-women-11660500167983.html  (accessed 15 August 2022).
  2. María C Lugones and Elizabeth V Spelman, ‘Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for “the Woman’s Voice”’ (1983) 6 Women’s Studies International Forum 573.
  3. Vasuki Nesiah, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “Third World” Feminisms’ (2003) 4 Journal of International Women’s Studies 10, at 37.
  4. Ania Loomba and Ritty A Lukose (eds), South Asian Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2012) 2.
  5. Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018); V Spike Peterson, ‘Whose Rights? A Critique of the “Givens” in Human Rights Discourse’ (1990) 15 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, at 303.
  6. Ratna Kapur, ‘Revisioning the role of law in women’s human rights struggles’ in Saladin Meckled-García and Başak Cali (eds), The Legalization of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law (Routledge, 2006).
  7. Kapur, supra note 4, at 1–2.
  8. Lugones and Spelman, supra note 1.
  9. Kapur, Gender, supra note 4.
  10. Lugones and Spelman, supra note 1.
  11. Brian Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (1st edn, Routledge, 2001) 172.
  12. Antony Anghie, ‘Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Retrospective’ (2023) 34 European Journal of International Law 7.
  13. Oyeronke Oyewumi, Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
  14. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2011) 30.
  15. Mohammad Shahabuddin, Minorities and the Making of Postcolonial States in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
  16. Clare Midgley, ‘Female Emancipation in An Imperial Frame: English Women and The Campaign Against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30’ (2000) 9 Women’s History Review 95, at 113.
  17. This is highlighted in postcolonial, decolonial and transnational feminist writing. See for example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1988) Feminist Review 61.
  18. Hortense J Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ (1987) 17 Diacritics 65, at 77–78.
  19. Ratna Kapur, ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’ (2002) 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal 1, at 6.
  20. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (Sage Publications, 1997) 1.
  21. Shahabuddin, supra note 13, at 27; Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Rutgers University Press, 1990), at 234.
  22. Sikata Banerjee, ‘Gender and Nationalism: The Masculinization of Hinduism and Female Political Participation in India’ (2003) 26 Women’s Studies International Forum 167, 175; Radhika Coomaraswamy, ‘Identity Within Cultural Relativism, Minority Rights and the Empowerment of Women’ 34 George Washington International Law Review 483, at 6; Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Womens Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990 (Zubaan, 1993) 345; See also, ‘Motherlands, mothers and nationalist sons: theorising the en-gendered nation’ in Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women (Manchester University Press, 2005), at 22.
  23. Kumar, supra note 21, at 292–293.
  24. Amrita Basu, ‘Feminism Inverted: The Real Women and Gendered Imagery of Hindu Nationalism’ (1993) 25 Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 25, at 35; See also, Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’ in Sangari and Vaid, supra note 20.
  25. Kapur, supra note 4; Makau Mutua, ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’ (2001) 42 Harvard International Law Journal 201.
  26. Nesiah, supra note 2.
  27. Ratna Kapur, ‘In the Aftermath of Critique We Are Not in Epistemic Free Fall: Human Rights, the Subaltern Subject, and Non-Liberal Search for Freedom and Happiness’ (2014) 25 Law and Critique 25.