Feminist and Postcolonial Thoeries

Throughout this essay I’m going to look at the two main topics of the feminist and postcolonial theories. Both of these topics I will examine and discuss referring to their potential advantages and limitations and also their use in geography. Both very broad and important topics which are struggling in society. I will compare these two theories and point out their similarities and difference.

Feminism is the belief that men and woman should have the same opportunities and equal rights. Over many years it has been a struggle for women to have equal rights to men as there is always the stereotype of the ‘stay at home mother’ while the man of the house is out at work. In the recent years there ratio to men and women in the workforce has become more steady although it is still stereotypical of the traditional family where the mother stays at home and the father goes out to work to earn the money for the family. The roles of feminism are to outline the importance of women and their relevance and to mainly bring out the gender equality. Feminist theory which has emerged from feminist movements, their aim is to find out the womans lived experiences and their social roles. As it stands today the mens perspective on life is being taken and no one even wonders about the womens point of view. Feminism are movements which aim to achieve equal political, economic, and social rights for women. ‘ Thus the purpose of feminist geography was, in the initial years to illustrate the unfairness of women’s exclusion from the discipline and more generally from the ‘public’ realm of waged work and politics , demonstrating the social construction rather than’naturalness’….’( McDowell, 1993).

‘The intersections between identity and space have been of increasing interest to feminist geographers’(Natter and Jones 1993; Massey 1994; Pile and Thrift 1995).The feminist movement is known as the womens way of campaigning for many reasons such as domestic violence, equal pay to men and reproductive rights. This movement began in the western world in the 19th century in places like the UK and the US. Women from both countries decided to form organizations so they could fight for their rights. There were many inspirational women in history who stood up for their rights and fought for the women of their countries, these women such as Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are inspirational. These women took steps to achieve what they believed was what they believed was earned and that they should be equal. They took a stand and we wouldn’t be where we are today without strong women like these voicing their opinions. Women in the past were under control of when and earned 58% of what men earned and if women wanted to gain credit it would be necessary that they had a signature of either their husband or their fathers in order to do so. In 1970 women took a big step and organized to have a protest at the annual Miss World pageant. In this exact same year the very first National Women's Liberation Conference demanded for women to receive equal pay, equal education and opportunities as men. Also that 24-hour nurseries were on duty and that free contraception and abortion were allowed in the country and on demand. In the previous years many more doors have been opened for women and slowly but surely they are becoming more equal and there are many women in the workforce now depending on the country and the religion.

‘Postcolonialism is to do with the cultural identity in colonised societies and with the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule’. Postcolonialism is the time after colonialism, where in society there were some political problems. It is how society reacts to legal or political systems after colonial power and the rejection of it. Colonialism is the maintenance of one group of people in a territory from another territory. It is provided with an equal power between the colonists and the other population of the territory. Between the 16th and the 19th century was the time of the European colonial power, including about 7 countries who used their powers. Portugal, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy and France set up colonies in Asia , Africa and America. They did this to strengthen the economy in their countries, by doing this they only allowed trade with the mother Country. In the 19th century Britain gave up and now has free trade. ‘the assumption of postcolonial studies is that many of the wrongs, if not crimes, against humanity are a product of the economic dominance of the north and the south’ ( ‘Colonalism and the Politics of postcolonial critique’)

Feminist geography is taken in a approach of human geography and it applies the methods, theories and critique of feminism to the study of society, human environment and geographical space. As it is said it is as if men are representatives of the species, species of a human. In feminist geography there are three main themes for the economy which have been informed by spatial analysis : gender, race and ethnicity. ‘Gender biases in conventional economic geography reflect the aggregation of workforce data with the implicit assumption that male and female work experiences are similar. Increasing attention to empirical differences in men’s and women’s economic activities has affected theoretical and methodological approaches that no longer ignore the implications of gender in economic behaviour’ (Hanson and Pratt 1995). Gender and work is an important theme in early literature because it outlines the inequality of woman in society, in the household and in the workforce. ‘Feminist geography is a sub-field within human geography that relies on gender and place-based analyses to more fully understand the interface between human and natural environments ’(Hansen E, 2012). Hansen outlines that when you apply the methods and theories of the feminist approach and use the critique to examine the different possible ways in which cultural processes can interact with the biophysical environment, feminist geographers focus in on the socially constructed gender roles and these in turn are defined by local cultural and physical realities.

As many women have initially become more independent from men, in other countries women have little or no equal rights to men. Feminist geographers have come up with the fact that they will have to take the class, culture and ethnic analyses into account before defining the rights of the women. Feminist theory is linked to geography in the sense that you have to take the background and the culture, race and ethnicity of the women into account,