Postcolonial Feminist Theologies

While feminist theology is not necessarily Christian, it emerged out of Christian European and North American contexts. This chapter focuses on postcolonial feminist theological interventions in Christianity because of the inextricable connections between Christianity, gender, racism, and European colonialism. Postcolonial feminist theology asserts that Christian actors and epistemologies—frameworks of knowledge—perform a central role in European colonial projects of the past and present. Thus, Christianity’s continuing significance in national and global politics; individual, local, and national identity formation; and the constitution of gendered subjectivity necessitates further analysis and critique (Donaldson and Kwok 2002). While the particular conditions of European colonial regimes varied enormously over time and between each colonized territory, Christianity, in general, spread alongside political and cultural colonization, through the dismantling, exclusion, and disparagement of indigenous peoples’ worldviews. Widespread hostility and suspicion of indigenous traditions and practices resulted from unconscious and overt Eurocentric evaluations of indigenous cultures. Eurocentrism, the measuring of other cultures according to European Christian social and cultural ideals, also encouraged colonizers to interpret indigenous gender roles, social structures, and systems of knowledge as evidence of savagery and the absence of ‘‘civilization.’’ Therefore, postcolonial feminist theologies are particularly concerned with imagining and enacting new concepts of, and relationships with, God that depart from the imperialistic theologies of colonizer cultures and restore indigenous traditions and practices as inherent aspects of their theological imaginaries.