Om kønsforståelsens kolonialitet og om kritik af ligestillingsfeminismen

Abstract

The idea of gender equality, as used by the UN, the World Bank and generally in development work in the global South, is rooted in mainstream Western conceptions of gender in terms of male dominance/female subordination, often with gendered fields of action: men dealing with money, women with care. In this context ’gender equality’ is understood as women entering into male domains of wage work and money, much less in terms of men taking over tasks of care. With a point of departure in the author’s confrontation in matrilineal northern Mozambique with very different ideas and norms regarding relations between women and men, the paper follows two different lines of investigation: the first line of investigation looks into decolonial conceptions of gender as developed by African feminist thinkers Ifi Amadiume and Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi, later picked up by Latin American philosopher Maria Lugones in her concept: ‘the coloniality of gender’. The other line of investigation looks into the historical background for Western conceptions of gender, including the decisive impacts of emerging capitalism and philosophy of modernity/Enlightenment, coinciding with extensive witch hunts. Gendered implications of the Western move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ are discussed, including critique of mainstream ideas of gender equality.