S. Khader, Decolonizing universalism

Shay Welch

pp. 725-734

in: Human Studies 42 (4), 2019.

Abstract

In Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethics, Serene Khader seeks to address and redress difficulties in feminist political praxes that emerge when Western feminists presume that Western norms of liberalism are key to achieving gender justice in a global context. Khader wants the reader to reorient their perspective away from Western conceptions of ideal gender justice and, instead, to investigate the role of imperialism in “other” women’s lives. Moreover, she enjoins the reader to grasp the extent to which presumptions regarding the universal uprightness of liberal moral and political values can actually increase cultural domination and imperialism in real time and therefore can worsen the life of “other” women. To elicit an appropriate anti-imperial and transnational feminist political approach and normative attitude, Khader surveys and critiques what many Western feminists take to be impervious normative values they take to constitute a universal ideal of gender...

Cited authors

Khader Serene