Postcolonial Representations of Women: Critical Issues for Education

Description

In this accessible combination of post-colonial theory, feminism and pedagogy, the author advocates using subversive and contemporary artistic representations of women to remodel traditional stereotypes in education. It is in this key sector that values and norms are molded and prejudice kept at bay, yet the legacy of colonialism continues to pervade official education received in classrooms as well as ‘unofficial’ education ingested via popular culture and the media. The result is a variety of distorted images of women and gender in which women appear as two-dimensional stereotypes. The text analyzes both current and historical colonial representations of women in a pedagogical context. In doing so, it seeks to recast our conception of what ‘difference’ is, challenging historical, patriarchal gender relations with their stereotypical representations that continue to marginalize minority populations in the first world and billions of women elsewhere. These distorted images, the book argues, can be subverted using the semiology provided by postcolonialism and transnational feminism and the work of contemporary artists who rethink and recontextualize the visual codes of colonialism. These resistive images, created by women who challenge and subvert patriarchal modes of representation, can be used to create educational environments that provide an alternative view of women of non-western origin. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-21 Development of Feminist Postcolonial Theory....Pages 23-38 Histories of Dominance, Colonialism, and Globalization....Pages 39-64 Distorted Visions: Ethnocentric Forms of Education....Pages 65-100 History of the Visual Regime....Pages 101-115 The Gendered Subject/Object in Popular Culture....Pages 117-133 Case Study: The Veiled Women in the Visual Imagination of the West....Pages 135-167 Possibilities for Subverting the Dominant Visual Regime....Pages 169-193 Creating Postcolonial Visual Pedagogy....Pages 195-219 Back Matter....Pages 221-234