Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the rac... more Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the 'white savior complex,' we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile 'civilizing mission' to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as 'saving the environment.' Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of 'saving' and 'helping' the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.
Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden mo... more Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational-colonial as well as 'postcolonial'-processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community.
ABSTRACT We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical ... more ABSTRACT We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the “Indian Mutiny” in contrast to local perspectives, and which were rearticulated by development and human rights organizations. We show that at each moment, Global north voices and institutions dominate. The processes of articulation emanating from Global north institutions serve to realize a racialized transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture. Our framework points to the “soft” power and fluidity of racializing processes, the heterogeneity, and the multiple logics that appear disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain racialized power structures.
Offers a history, theory, and method for centering empire in productions of sex, gender, and sexu... more Offers a history, theory, and method for centering empire in productions of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Introduction 1. Kinship Politics and Space, Identity and International Community Prior to Legal D... more Introduction 1. Kinship Politics and Space, Identity and International Community Prior to Legal Decolonization: The Problem and the Query 2. (Re)negotiating the Colonial Problematic: The UN Charter, the Emergence of Asia-Africa, and the Anti-Colonial Challenge to Kinship 3. The Limits of the Anti-Colonial Critique: Anti-Colonialists' Visions and Divisions 4. Contending Perspectives?: The Overlap between Colonialist and Anti-Colonialist Narratives on Dependency and Sovereignty 5. Masculinity, Time and Brotherhood: Resolving the Colonial Problematic 6. Conclusion: Twentieth Century Transformations of Space, Identity and International Community. Appendix: Tables and Figures
Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. ... more Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has beco...
Ghanaian fertility decline may not be associated with women's having greater control over rep... more Ghanaian fertility decline may not be associated with women's having greater control over reproduction. Focus groups of young Ghanaian men and women indicate that attitudes supporting men's dominance in fertility decisions characterize even the highly educated. Young women with high fertility desires anticipate being able to stop childbearing when they want to, but they do not expect to be able to continue if their husband wants to stop. Those with low fertility desires do not anticipate being able to stop without husband consent, but they envision support for continuing childbearing. Women's expected influence appears limited to situations where their fertility desires conform to normative expectations.
International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 2002
We use focus groups of adolescents and young adults in urban Ghana to explore both fertility pref... more We use focus groups of adolescents and young adults in urban Ghana to explore both fertility preferences and expectations about the ability to implement these preferences. The attitudes expressed in groups from a range of educational institutions do not support some ...
While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality stud... more While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality studies, it is a curiously aspatial and atemporal concept. This paper seeks to re-embed it within space and time by situating its emergence with colonial and imperial histories. Based on this discussion, it ends with three lessons for contemporary work on gender and sexuality, as well as a broader theorization of sex-gender-sexuality regimes beyond the heterosexual matrix.
We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and ... more We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the “Indian Mutiny” in contrast to local perspectives, and which were rearticulated by development and human rights organizations. We show that at each moment, Global north voices and institutions dominate. The processes of articulation emanating from Global north institutions serve to realize a racialized transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture. Our framework points to the “soft” power and fluidity of racializing processes, the heterogeneity, and the multiple logics that appear disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain racialized power structures.
Intersectional analyses represent an enormously important advance in understanding how people ide... more Intersectional analyses represent an enormously important advance in understanding how people identify whether as individuals, families or other social groups. However , the overwhelming majority of research taking an inter-sectional approach to date is hampered by limiting its analysis to the confines of any given country. Such Bdomestic i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y ^ do e s n ot re f l e ct t h e gr ow i n g transnationalization of people's lives and family matters given that over 200 million people now live outside the nation where they were born. A key objective of this article is to make a case explicitly for broadening intersectional analyses to the trans-national scale. Moreover, the article argues that feminist analysis of families is greatly enhanced when their standpoints are examined simultaneously at multiple social scales including the intimate, local, national and transnational scales. Intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, race, nation, etc. can and typically do shift as we move across scales of analysis. Thus, a family who enjoys a privileged standpoint in their homeland community can, and often does, occupy a marginalized standpoint abroad, albeit marginalization vis-à-vis the society in the country of relocation and enhanced privilege concurrently in the home community. Within the same transnational family— indeed within any family—there will be variability in individ-uals' standpoints as well. This article provides a blueprint for how such multi-scalar intersectional analyses can be accomplished and then executes it for one set of transnational families—Hindu Bengalis who conduct their family life between India and South Florida.
Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the rac... more Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the 'white savior complex,' we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile 'civilizing mission' to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as 'saving the environment.' Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of 'saving' and 'helping' the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.
Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden mo... more Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational-colonial as well as 'postcolonial'-processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community.
ABSTRACT We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical ... more ABSTRACT We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the “Indian Mutiny” in contrast to local perspectives, and which were rearticulated by development and human rights organizations. We show that at each moment, Global north voices and institutions dominate. The processes of articulation emanating from Global north institutions serve to realize a racialized transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture. Our framework points to the “soft” power and fluidity of racializing processes, the heterogeneity, and the multiple logics that appear disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain racialized power structures.
Offers a history, theory, and method for centering empire in productions of sex, gender, and sexu... more Offers a history, theory, and method for centering empire in productions of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Introduction 1. Kinship Politics and Space, Identity and International Community Prior to Legal D... more Introduction 1. Kinship Politics and Space, Identity and International Community Prior to Legal Decolonization: The Problem and the Query 2. (Re)negotiating the Colonial Problematic: The UN Charter, the Emergence of Asia-Africa, and the Anti-Colonial Challenge to Kinship 3. The Limits of the Anti-Colonial Critique: Anti-Colonialists' Visions and Divisions 4. Contending Perspectives?: The Overlap between Colonialist and Anti-Colonialist Narratives on Dependency and Sovereignty 5. Masculinity, Time and Brotherhood: Resolving the Colonial Problematic 6. Conclusion: Twentieth Century Transformations of Space, Identity and International Community. Appendix: Tables and Figures
Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. ... more Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has beco...
Ghanaian fertility decline may not be associated with women's having greater control over rep... more Ghanaian fertility decline may not be associated with women's having greater control over reproduction. Focus groups of young Ghanaian men and women indicate that attitudes supporting men's dominance in fertility decisions characterize even the highly educated. Young women with high fertility desires anticipate being able to stop childbearing when they want to, but they do not expect to be able to continue if their husband wants to stop. Those with low fertility desires do not anticipate being able to stop without husband consent, but they envision support for continuing childbearing. Women's expected influence appears limited to situations where their fertility desires conform to normative expectations.
International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 2002
We use focus groups of adolescents and young adults in urban Ghana to explore both fertility pref... more We use focus groups of adolescents and young adults in urban Ghana to explore both fertility preferences and expectations about the ability to implement these preferences. The attitudes expressed in groups from a range of educational institutions do not support some ...
While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality stud... more While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality studies, it is a curiously aspatial and atemporal concept. This paper seeks to re-embed it within space and time by situating its emergence with colonial and imperial histories. Based on this discussion, it ends with three lessons for contemporary work on gender and sexuality, as well as a broader theorization of sex-gender-sexuality regimes beyond the heterosexual matrix.
We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and ... more We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the “Indian Mutiny” in contrast to local perspectives, and which were rearticulated by development and human rights organizations. We show that at each moment, Global north voices and institutions dominate. The processes of articulation emanating from Global north institutions serve to realize a racialized transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture. Our framework points to the “soft” power and fluidity of racializing processes, the heterogeneity, and the multiple logics that appear disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain racialized power structures.
Intersectional analyses represent an enormously important advance in understanding how people ide... more Intersectional analyses represent an enormously important advance in understanding how people identify whether as individuals, families or other social groups. However , the overwhelming majority of research taking an inter-sectional approach to date is hampered by limiting its analysis to the confines of any given country. Such Bdomestic i n t e r s e c t i o n a l i t y ^ do e s n ot re f l e ct t h e gr ow i n g transnationalization of people's lives and family matters given that over 200 million people now live outside the nation where they were born. A key objective of this article is to make a case explicitly for broadening intersectional analyses to the trans-national scale. Moreover, the article argues that feminist analysis of families is greatly enhanced when their standpoints are examined simultaneously at multiple social scales including the intimate, local, national and transnational scales. Intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, race, nation, etc. can and typically do shift as we move across scales of analysis. Thus, a family who enjoys a privileged standpoint in their homeland community can, and often does, occupy a marginalized standpoint abroad, albeit marginalization vis-à-vis the society in the country of relocation and enhanced privilege concurrently in the home community. Within the same transnational family— indeed within any family—there will be variability in individ-uals' standpoints as well. This article provides a blueprint for how such multi-scalar intersectional analyses can be accomplished and then executes it for one set of transnational families—Hindu Bengalis who conduct their family life between India and South Florida.
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Papers by Vrushali Patil
disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain
racialized power structures.
disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain
racialized power structures.