Introducing Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology

Abstract

A key problem area we engage with in this chapter involves the question of how to humanise research participants (cf. Paris and Winn 2014) whose lives have been fundamentally shaped by the epistemic and material violences of colonialism; slavery and apartheid but who have simultaneously benefitted from patriarchal domination and have perpetrated violence against womxn1 partners during the course of their lives. We work with an understanding of colonial patriarchy that recognises the long shadow that colonialism casts and how it continues to shape the lives and experiences of the formerly colonised and their descendants; through structural violence and ongoing political; social and economic exclusions and marginalisations (Irwin and Umemoto 2016). In building on a body of work that takes an intersectional perspective on mxn’s lives; especially mxn located in the global South; and that acknowledges the ways in which colonialism involved the assertion of not only racist domination but also heterosexist and gendered domination (Boonzaier and van Niekerk 2018; Moolman 2013; Ratele 2013a; Salo 2007) we talk about the violence mxn perpetrate against the womxn in their lives and about their own precarities as mxn located within a colonial hypercapitalist patriarchal context.