Race and Coloniality

‘Race’ is a powerful organising structure of the international system, although it is often excluded from gender analyses by feminist scholars. Responding to this erasure, postcolonialism and decoloniality as distinct (thought interrelated) traditions of thought within which postcolonial feminism can be located as an intellectual framework draws attention to the productive interplay, and co-constitution, of ‘race’, gender and coloniality, as well as other forms of hierarchical social power. This chapter begins to unearth how the interplay among ‘race’, gender and coloniality operates in practice through a postcolonial, and intersectional, feminist analyses of the case of migrant women at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Britain, and in particular the global-colonial character of the ‘naked protest’ that took place there in 2008. This chapter therefore draws attention to how migration and claims of citizenship are intimately bound to micro- and macro-structures of patriarchy, sexuality, racism, imperialism, coloniality, neoliberalism and global capitalism. In so doing, this chapter demonstrates why it is absolutely necessary to take ‘race’ and coloniality seriously as a feminist researcher.