Taking Women Seriously: A Feminist Approach to the Study of Colonial Violence

Since the end of official empire postcolonial research has changed our image of colonialism to foreground the multiple forms of violence that lay at the heart of it. Drawing on increasingly critical feminist research approaches, I argue that this understanding must and can be extended to our conception of white women’s role in colonialism. In order to push this research further, this paper advocates for a more systematic approach to the study of European women in colonial violence. Therefore, using case studies of both German and British empires, a theoretical argument is made to show how we can conceptualise white women’s violence in empire. Then, the paper proposes a systematic approach to how such studies of European women’s role in colonial violence may be undertaken by combining feminist International Relations scholarship and postcolonial feminisms with Bourgois’ continuum of violence.