A BELATED happy International Women’s Day. Rarely has the day seemed more necessary than in 2015, as debate rages about the ethics and timing of the BBC documentary on the Delhi rape case, India’s Daughter. In this documentary, Mukesh Singh, one of the accused rapists, damns himself through his own mouth. Troublingly, his interview was broadcast before the case has gone to appeal.

Lest India’s Daughter tempts us to think that violence and sexual abuse against women is a South Asian problem, a campaign was launched by the Salvation Army, capitalising on the optical illusion dress that went viral recently. It shows a badly bruised white woman wearing the dress in white and gold (the colours that many of us saw in the badly lit original photograph), with the caption, “Why is it so hard to see black and blue”. This indicates that violence against women cuts across all cultures.

In this column I examine some of the key feminist essays of the last four decades in order to explore the productive overlap that exists between postcolonial studies and feminism.

Julia Kristeva’s ‘About Chinese Women’ (1977) is in some ways an example of a Western feminist making universalising, even racist assumptions. The psychoanalytic critic wrote her essay in the context of leftist politics in France, wherein China was held up as a model society. However, the piece suffered when it was digested by a wider audience, many of whom felt Kristeva was homogenising the Chinese women under study, and after the late 1970s it mostly disappeared from view.

Kristeva seems progressive on difference, warning against looking for answers in Chinese society to solve Western problems. She shows awareness of the symbiotic relationship between knowledge and power, claiming that she wants to create “open-ended” research. This is praiseworthy, but in a sense she does precisely these two things, imposing a knowledge system on others and projecting Chinese culture as a blank screen on which to resolve Western women’s dilemmas. She idealises male-female relations in China, associating the Chinese woman stereotypically with “an inexhaustible yin essence” and portraying the man as “the delicate artisan” of the woman’s jouissance, or sexual pleasure. Readers may wonder how Kristeva could have known this from a short visit and without speaking Mandarin or Cantonese.

Postcolonial feminism helps to identify and correct the blind spots of Western feminist theory which, according to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, often produces a “singular ‘Third World woman’” as a byword for “underdevelopment, oppressive traditions, high illiteracy, rural and urban poverty, religious fanaticism and overpopulation”. Mohanty argues that such negative assumptions about the Third World woman do not capture the complexity and fluidity of the lives of these women, plural. A ‘Third World woman’ isn’t automatically oppressed. If she is from a powerful class or family, she may have more power and agency than a working-class woman or even a man in ‘the West’.

Following Mohanty’s critique, Anna Rutherford and Kirsten Holst Petersen tried to unite postcolonialism and feminism through recognition of the overlap between colonialism and patriarchy in their idea of “double colonisation”. However, this suggests that racism and sexism function in the same way and only highlights two forms of oppression.

Gayatri Spivak extends double colonisation through her reinterpretation of subalternity. She writes about the difficulty of non-elite people — tribals, peasants, women, low castes and the working class — having their voices heard in an undistorted way: “Clearly, if you are poor, black, and female you get it in three ways. […] As a product of these considerations I have put together the sentence ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’.”

Here Spivak, whose writing can be impenetrable, gives us two lovely phrases. Firstly, the idea that poor, black women “get it in three ways” indicates that a person can experience more than singular or double oppressions. This anticipates the 1990s theory of intersectionality, to which I will return. Secondly, the famous slogan “White men are saving brown women from brown men” is heavily ironic and anticipates 2000s thinking about saviours, rescue, and assumptions of superiority.

Lila Abu-Lughod wrote her essay ‘Do Muslim Women Really Needs Saving?’ in 2002 against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan’s initial phase. She takes as her point of departure the toxic but hilarious George W. Bushism “women of cover”, which conflates the politically sensitive American term “person of colour” with the issue of modest Muslim dress. By contrast, Abu-Lughod provides a textured reading of the veiling debate. Rather than the universal symbol of oppression that many Americans assume it to be, the burqa is a Pakhtun garment and there can be empowerment in it — one anthropologist describes it as “portable seclusion”. Abu-Lughod disagrees with any enforcement of the wearing of burqas, but observes that many women wear these outfits voluntarily and don’t wish to discard them.

Abu-Lughod next challenges (George W. Bush’s wife) Laura Bush’s November 2001 speech in which the latter implicitly assumes that Afghan women will automatically be delighted to be rescued by American troops. Abu-Lughod writes: “It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her?”

Abu-Lughod encourages us to think about women who may or may not want to be rescued, but more importantly deserve justice. Finally, she advocates respect for difference while not endorsing cultural relativism — the idea that everything can be understood and justified in the context of its culture. She shows that it is no self-contradiction to dislike the Taliban, while simultaneously rejecting crude online petitions about “Muslim men oppressing Muslim women”. What we should say is: a plague on both their houses.

Whereas Rutherford and Petersen talk about “double colonisation”, Spivak turns this into a triumvirate, saying if you are poor, black, and female you get it in three ways. From a postsecular perspective, Abu-Lughod and the Turkish-American scholar Esra Santesso show that if you are poor, black, Muslim and female you get it in four ways. The progression from single issue feminism or postcolonialism, to double, triple, and quadruple approaches shows there is a need for a theory which takes into account multiple oppressions.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1993 concept of intersectionality fills this gap. It was further developed by Avtar Brah in a South Asian diasporic context. Intersectionality is the idea that you can have multiple identity components and grounds for oppression at once. As well as race and gender, there is class (and caste), religious background, age, disability, sexual orientation, and so on. As Mohanty delineated in the 1980s, it is important not to see a woman as an ahistoric, monolithic subject. Rather, we have to see women in context. Intersectionality assumes that sexism and racism, rather than being separate and aberrant phenomena, actually inform each other.

Perhaps intersectionality provides the best psychological scaffolding for global 21st-century women. We need to think about and resist different oppressions together without reducing differences between them or decanting one into the other.

CLAIRE CHAMBERS teaches global literature at the University of York and is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers.