Postcolonial and Postmodern Critiques. In the 1980s and 1990s, following postcolonial theorists such as Xxxxx Xxxxx (1952), Xxxxxx Xxxxx (1957), Xxxxxx Xxxx (1978), and Xxxx Xxxxxx (1983; 1994), feminist movements in non-western countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, started criticizing the Western white middle-class bias in feminism. They claimed that the prevalent definition of what a women is and what she needs, did not apply to women all over the world. Furthermore, white feminism had constructed an image of the ‘Third World woman’ that did not correspond to reality, and was experienced as a new form of suppression. They rejected the typically Western points of view, and started asking new pertinent questions about the relation between gender and imperialism, colonialism, and race. This gave this new feminist strand the name of postcolonial feminism. Feminists from cultural minorities in Western societies also started to challenge the class-based analyses which excluded them (XxXxxxxxx, 2000: 209). Indigenous and First Nation feminists took a stand in the theoretical discourse, and showed that they had specific needs. Among the main postcolonial feminist authors are Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx, with her essay “Under Western Eyes” (1984), Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxx, with her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), and Xxxxx X. Xxxx-xx with her work Woman, Native, Other. Writing postcoloniality and feminism (1989). In the context of this work, postcolonial theory offers important points of view that are discussed in the theoretical chapter. The realization that there was no ‘universal womanhood’ led to a third feminist wave: postmodern feminism. Modernism always considered that societies were structured, and therefore could be analyzed, whereas postmodernism rejected the grand theories and metanarratives. According to postmodernist theorists, social science could merely aspire to describe particular social processes within their specific context (Xxxxxxx, 2008: 64). Third wave feminism was mainly influenced by postmodern and post-structuralist theorists, such as Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx (deconstructivism), and Xxxxxxx Xxxxx (psychoanalysis). The work of Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx was especially important, because of his emphasis on the material body, and the discourses of power. He pointed out how theorists built dominant discourses, and thus created fixed identities. Victorian psychologists created, for example, the image of ‘the hysterical woman’. This discourse influenced the way people...
