Friday, Week 4
“Yet, the empowering history described here of irua ria atumia and its connection to anti-colonial resistance is unrecognizable from this view that reinforces stereotypes of “third world women” rather than illuminates complexity. Close scrutiny of the implications of such over-generalized, colonial-inspired accounts are necessary if feminism is to be meaningful to diff erent women in diff erent places.” -- Wairimũ Ngarũiya Njambi
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Glossary of Haunting:
“Woman”: a western colonial construct that categorizes gender based on biological difference. It has harmed and erase the existence of those who do not fit into the binary of (white) man/woman and (white) male/female.
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Discussion:
How we construct, practice, and produce gender and sex are closely intertwined with western colonial discourse. As Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí explains in her book, The Invention of Women, western society fixes itself of “bio-logic”: that ones biology is the logical way to organize the physical as well as the “social world” (Oyěwùmí ix). Their concepts of gender was violently imposed onto the many indigenious peoples that colonists came face to face with. And since then, much of the discourse, particularly scholarly, have talked about gender and sex through western ideologies, silencing other ways of living that do not base themselves on biology.
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Orphaned beginnings can be found in Wairimũ Ngarũiya Njambi’s article, “Irua Ria Atumia and Anti-Colonial Struggles Among the Gĩkũyũ of Kenya: A Counter Narrative on ‘Female Genital Mutulation’”. Here, Njambi discusses how “female genital mutilation” or FGP is a colonial narrative that has perpetuated binaries of first world/third world and civilized/barbaric. This narrative inaccurately demonstrates their cultural practice of irua as something backward and primitive and erases the fact that it is actually “a from of empowerment and resistance” (Njambi 690). The Gĩkũyũ are then orphaned of their indigenious identities quite literally through colonial laws that forbid these traditions.
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The liberatory futures that can be taken from this week is as our professor said, realizing that they have been here all along. This is demonstrated through the Gĩkũyũ’s practices of irua and the Yorùbá who challenge the social constructs of gender: the liberatory futures that exist outside of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism have existed for thousands of years. They exist in the indigenious cultures and lands. They are embedded in their resistance to continue to exist. Liberatory futures is building a world that takes into account that the answers of living is multiple. There is no right or wrong way as colonialism has made us to believe.
