Decolonial FeminismPapers

This research critically examines how feminism and social work have historically participated in colonial projects, perpetuating structural violence rooted in white supremacy. The author proposes an Indigenous decolonial feminist framework, emphasizing that social work should reorient its justice goals toward collective liberation and sovereignty for Indigenous peoples.

A case study of Zapotec women in San José del Progreso, Oaxaca, tracing how mining reshapes land, water, and community life - and how refusal sustains relations beyond extraction.

Through Kwezens’s maple-sap story and her own schooling, Simpson shows how land, kinship and Nishnaabeg knowledge shape education - and how colonial schooling suppresses Indigenous intelligence.

Sylvia Tamale analyzes how colonial law, organized religion, nationalism, and contemporary politics manufacture supposedly timeless African sexual norms and police nonconforming bodies.

Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill show how settler rule reshapes land, kinship, gender, and knowledge - and why feminist inclusion alone cannot undo those relations.

Sylvia Tamale examines Baganda women’s erotic knowledge as a contested archive shaped by female instruction, colonial morality, religion, commodification, and feminist struggles over pleasure.

Andrea Smith’s 2005 essay challenges the feminist/nonfeminist binary and asks how Native women’s diverse political frameworks make sovereignty central to debates about gender justice.

Obioma Nnaemeka’s 2004 essay links nego-feminism to who makes theory, controls research, and defines culture. Its examples show negotiation as situated practice - not a universal rule for African women.

In this 1998 EPW essay, Sharmila Rege asks how Dalit women's situated experience can become collective feminist knowledge without turning identity into either silence or an unquestionable credential.

This foundational text of postcolonial feminist theory questions the possibility of Western intellectuals representing the oppressed. Through analyzing colonial discourse on Indian widow immolation (sati), Spivak reveals the imperialist logic of 'white men saving brown women from brown men,' arguing that subaltern women are structurally silenced under the dual oppression of colonialism and patriarchy.

This influential essay critiques exclusionary practices within the feminist movement, arguing that using the tools and methods of oppressive systems to fight oppression is doomed to fail. Lorde calls for recognizing and embracing difference as a source of strength, emphasizing that true liberation requires creating entirely new frameworks rather than seeking reform within existing power structures.