Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR

Anna M. Agathangelou and Heather M. Turcotte

Chapter 6 in Handbook on Gender in World Politics, 2026, pp 31-37 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter advances postcolonial feminisms as a critical analytic, political practice, and ethical sensibility for understanding gender and power in international relations (IR). Drawing on memory as a postcolonial method, the chapter conceptualizes remembrance as a generative force that exposes the enduring violences of colonialism while opening space for resistance, recovery, and future-oriented justice. Postcolonial feminisms interrogate how race, class, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics are co-constituted within the interstate system and embedded in dominant forms of knowledge production, including IR pedagogy and feminist scholarship. The chapter argues that mainstream IR and liberal feminist approaches often reproduce colonial amnesia by isolating gender from other axes of power and by colluding with state-centered frameworks that sustain global hierarchies. In contrast, postcolonial feminist IR refuses such compartmentalization, foregrounding the politics of location, historical specificity, and embodied experiences shaped by imperial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal structures. By centering abolitionary rather than reformist imaginaries, postcolonial feminisms challenge narratives of development, protection, and global sisterhood that obscure structural violence and privilege the Global North. The chapter concludes that postcolonial feminist IR is indispensable to the study of gender and world politics, offering memory as a tool of subversion and possibility through which alternative futures and solidarities can be imagined and enacted.

Keywords: Postcolonial Feminisms; Feminist International Relations; Memory Politics; Colonial Power and Knowledge; Intersectionality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803923765
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