Decolonizing Universalism Quotes

“Western interest in “other” women seems highly selective—and, in some cases, only tenuously connected to feminism. George W. Bush notoriously supported the contemporaneous war on US women’s access to abortion and contraception. He rarely used his platform to criticize harmful traditional practices that affect U.S. women.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“Onora O’Neill (1987) argues that idealization occurs when, in the process of abstraction required by theorizing, we represent objects in ways that distort them. The distortion usually occurs by falsely attributing (putatively) positive features to the object or by downplaying negative ones. As feminist philosophers have consistently argued, practices of abstracting about objects in order to theorize about them risk—under unjust background conditions, at least—not random forms of distortion but rather emphasizing attributes that are associated with the dominant or that justify domination.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“Knowledge about which political strategies would work is likely to require first-personal information from the people affected and attention to the fact that women have interests besides gender interests—including human interests, such as basic health, and other group-based interests, such as interests in not being victims of imperialist domination.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“Missionary feminism is instead characterized by a brand of universalism that is ethnocentric, justice monist (beholden to the idea that there is one possible set of gender-just cultural forms) and that is beholden to epistemic habits of idealization and moralism (the reduction of political actions to moral statements) that inure Western culture and Western intervention to criticism.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“Westerners often assume that what is universally valuable for women just is (an idealized form of) the Western way of life. In many theoretical discussions, this peculiar narrow and ethnocentric variant of universalism is what is meant by “universalism.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“The causes related to women in the global South that capture Western fascination are often those whose discussion participates in justifying—or at least does not challenge—imperialist domination.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic