False Feminisms and Cultural Scapegoats: The Interaction Between Gender and Imperialism in the Subject State

Abstract

Through the examination of how imperialism affects and alters a colonized nation’s gender system, crucial insight can be gained into how contemporary gender systems exist around the world. These gender systems, which involve the gender roles, hierarchies, sexualities, and categories of gender within a culture, are not simply replaced with an imperial nation’s gender systems, but transformed through the interaction of a dominant culture and a subordinate culture in colonialism. Colonialism created a fusion of race and gender by establishing related inferior and superior cultures in the subject and settler groups respectively. Through an examination of how several cultures, broadly Hindu Indian and Egyptian culture, changed throughout their experiences with British imperialism from about 1850 until independence around 1947-1952, the ways in which each culture’s gender systems were altered can be observed. With the study of precolonial gender systems providing a control, the ways in which each gender system was altered through colonial interaction in the colonial and postcolonial periods can be discovered. Through this investigation, it was found that each culture’s gender systems were fundamentally altered through their experiences with imperialism. Both systems incorporated race through colonial domination, and the application of Western feminism within a colonial framework linked perceptions of imperialism in with the question of women. Feminists and women’s advocates had to navigate these synthesized gender systems often resulting in further entrenchment of the new system