Introduction

Tanya Jakimow

The term ‘decolonising’ was debated among the editorial team before we settled on the title of this section. Ubiquitous in higher education and development institutions, ‘decolonising’ often amounts to what Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence in Chapter 5 describes as ‘thin decolonisation’, compared with the transformative practices required of ‘thick decolonisation’. Performative acts, such as labelling a section in an edited volume, can, and should, become a lightning rod for critique: provocative not because they challenge power, but because they do not.

We have stuck with ‘decolonising’, but as a question, not a claim. That what constitutes decolonising—and related terms decolonisation and decoloniality—should be kept open is demonstrated in Margaret Jolly’s Chapter 6 (and indeed her larger oeuvre). She shows that ‘authoritative’ definitions—even in the plural—still largely overlook the intellectual thought and action beyond the Americas, Africa and Asia. In Jolly’s and Lawrence’s chapters, the contributions of scholar-activists from Oceania are centred, offering correctives and insights not only for knowledge or action for gender equity in politics, but also for the open and ongoing process of defining (in order to practice) decoloniality in and beyond the region.

‘Decolonisation’ adds further value to a project like ours through its demand for historicity. Margaret Jolly’s chapter shows how gender inequality is deeply rooted in colonialism and the introduction of novel binaries that profoundly changed gender relations in Oceania. Oceanic feminist and decolonial lenses reveal that achieving national independence further strengthened male dominance in politics and reinforced women’s subordination. While the gender and politics literature has (belatedly) acknowledged colonialism as introducing novel forms of gender inequities that persist today, Jolly reminds us that the history of ‘decolonisation’ itself also needs critical feminist attention for its contemporary legacies.

Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence locates colonial and decolonial legacies in international development. She, too, shows how feminist/activist thought from Oceania is crucial to interrogating contemporary harms, including the damage caused by the neglect of this knowledge in dominant epistemic frames. She gifts the reader conceptual tools such as cultural fluency, methodological tools such as relational ‘both/and’ thinking and new lines of sight, including state power and gendered violence. By showing the fecundity of scholarship from Anne Nealibo Dickson-Waiko, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Teresia Teaiwa and Orovu Sepoe—scholar-activists largely absent from the gender and politics canon—Lawrence and Jolly demonstrate the urgent need to centre such thinking in our reimagining of the field.

At the same time, I share Lawrence’s discomfort with our section title. Even as we reject the label of decolonising project in the Introduction, our ambition to centre Asia and Oceania in thinking about gender and politics faces the knotty reality that all the co-editors are based in institutions in settler Australia. How does someone like me—a white feminist working in a well-resourced institution—contribute to decoloniality? Contrary to representations, I come across very few feminists who are white and privileged who are not grappling with what our positions in global racial hierarchies mean for practice. How do we cede space, speak with but not over, while taking responsibility and sharing the burden of meaningful action?

The point is not to answer the question, but to grapple with it. This ‘grappling’ with decolonising practices is exemplified in Chapter 7 by Camilla Batalibasi, Chandy Eng, Donna Makini, Vani Nailumu and Geraldine Valei with Sonia Palmieri and Melissa MacLean. It starts by privileging the voices of ‘local’ researchers through methodologies such as autoethnography and collaborative writing practices. They use institutional power to facilitate access and enable transformative research, but also demonstrate the necessity of what Lawrence describes as ‘cultural fluency’. By putting aside predefined questions, the researchers excavated stories not commonly told about women’s political leadership. Distinctly different to standard narratives in the gender and politics literature, they invite new questions, new frames and new levels of understanding.

The three chapters in this section underline the importance of keeping ‘decolonising’ as an open question and, with every humility, an ambition. In so doing, we aim to disrupt the canon of gender and politics, celebrate and learn from activists and/or scholars from overlooked regions, gain new conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools and, importantly, produce grounded, nuanced knowledge of the lives and experiences of a much wider pool of women in (or excluded from) politics.