How Colonial Feminism Fails: A Critique Through the Lens of Philanthropy by Saint-Saëns Aşli

Saint-Saëns Aşli is a writer, editor and community educator. He orients his writing and community work around gender abolition and community building for racial and class justice. They are transgender, originating from and residing in the global South and seek to imbue all work with this imbricated perspective.

Philanthropy and the non-profit sector have, over the past four decades, done the bare minimum to make space for feminist concerns about funding. A review of the standards being set and met will, unfortunately, reveal that not only are these interventions insufficient, but the sector has also taken a significant detour down the wrong path. 

Deficient definitions of feminism qualify it as a form of equality for the sexes, on social, political, and economic grounds. The lack and neglect emboldened by this definition is evident in the disproportionate allocation of funding. Most funding for “feminist” initiatives are routed towards cisgender women who collude with patriarchal labour division and exploitation under capitalism. We can see this in the outpouring of funding for campaigns that focus on increasing the representation of cisgender women in male-dominated industries.

How feminism fails historically oppressed communities

Second-wave feminism focused on cisgender women gaining the right to work outside the home and be paid fairly. Unfortunately, this focus continues to shape mainstream feminism today. As a result, the movement often prioritises including cisgender women in harmful and exploitative structures rather than challenging those systems, resulting in a stagnant mainstream feminist movement. Although marginalised feminist groups like transfeminism and anarchafeminism are doing vital work to fight patriarchy, they’re often dismissed as not fitting with the goals of dominant, colonial forms of feminism.

Colonial feminism here refers to the previously mentioned framework rooted in biological “sex”.  This is a framework that is violently enforced through a white supremacist gender binary. Put another way: if the goal of feminism is for cisgender women to attain the same positions of power as cisgender men within a violent patriarchal system, then the goal of feminism is to legitimise a violent patriarchal system. Moreover, this type of feminism takes for granted that cisness is true and immutable. 

However, when looking closer, you can see what cisness truly is: a regime into which children are forcefully conscripted to grow up to be cisgender adults.  Gender, when viewed through a bio-essentialist (a rigid, unchangeable, biological, male-female lens), is used to control the distribution of resources within traditional family structures. In this setup, “women” (usually meaning cisgender, heterosexual tradwives) are expected to do unpaid work at home. This allows “men” (typically cisgender, heterosexual men in power) to save their energy, continue to disregard housework as labour worth compensatin,g whilst continuing to hoard wealth, because society treats this unpaid labour as just a natural part of being a woman in a relationship.

Brainwashing children into cisnormativity follows this same archaic practice of inheritance. Nowadays, in place of male legacy, we see preferences for inheritance that privilege cisgender, heterosexual and monogamous relationships as the “normal” and “right way to live.” This perpetuates outdated notions about who is considered worthy of inheriting family wealth or legacy. Today, instead of favouring firstborn sons, families often favour children who fit into traditional gender and sexuality roles. This is one of the many ways in which colonial feminism falls short. By ignoring how queer and trans people are punished or excluded by family systems, it overlooks how being queer or trans can affect someone’s class or financial situation. 

When feminism only aims to give cisgender women the same power as cisgender men, it misses these deeper issues. To pursue equality under patriarchy instead of dismantling the system itself, queer and transgender people are being implicitly named as acceptable targets of patriarchal violence instead of cisgender women. 

Currently, the present political moment is calling for feminist organisers to respond differently. In the non-profit sector, there are glaring gaps in the existing model.  Gender-marginalised people left behind in favour of empty victories in the name of “women’s rights” are exposing, by their continued neglect, the places where colonial feminism falls short. In the UK, disabled women, queer and trans people are being left for dead under PIP (Personal Independence Payment) cuts.

Moreover, the list for public gender-affirming care under the NHS has transgender people waiting upwards of two years. Often to see cisgender therapists for hormone prescriptions, without whose approval, transgender people cannot access surgical interventions. This happens while Kemi Badenoch becomes the face of “inclusive” Conservatism. This highlights where intersectional feminism is falling short of its purported liberatory potential. 

In the U.S., the right to abortion granted by Roe v. Wade was never constitutionalised, even decades after the ruling, leaving it vulnerable to being overturned. Meanwhile, in the same political environment, valid criticisms of Kamala Harris’s role in supporting the U.S. government's actions in Palestine were shut down by people who claimed that these critiques are just unfair attacks on a Black woman. This type of identity-based deflection overlooks the harm being caused and prevents crucial conversations about accountability in the name of ‘feminism’

It feels obligatory to challenge the premises being put forth: If JK Rowling, who abbreviated her name to avoid misogyny from publishers, can ever gain enough power to harass non-white cisgender athletes like Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif, then feminism that seeks only to empower white cisgender women economically has a lot to answer for. When white feminism is put to task, with people asking it to account for the nuances of race, if the political empowerment of Black cisgender women results in political figureheads like Harris and Badenoch lending their identities as a smoke screen for the fascist project of Empire, then intersectionality too, is a project that has been co-opted, misappropriated, thus made culpable for expanding Empire’s capacities for violence. 

What has become evident through these failures of colonial feminism is that the industrialising of social justice has not even inhibited the expansion, let alone solved the problems, of patriarchy.

The non-profit sector is complicit in cisheteronormativity

To be clear, this is an indictment of the non-profit industrial complex and the defanging of revolutionary capacity inherent to its existence and prolonged sustenance. The nonprofit sector’s understanding of feminism asks nothing more than that cisgender women are “empowered” and “equipped” to compete in arenas once forcefully restricted by and for cisgender men. In other words, the existence of feminist concerns and interventions begins and ends with entrusting cisgender women with the bomb and gun that have ensured and maintained the place of cisgender men in the patriarchal hierarchy. Owing to the ever-relevant words of Audre Lorde, we know the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. 

In the same way, Margaret Thatcher introduced tax cuts for the wealthy and deepened poverty that doomed generations of women, so too, has Kamala Harris abandoned transgender people, even after an inauthentic Democrat courting of the rainbow vote.

Space has emerged to posit a salient, necessary intervention: bequeathing the master's house and, further, the master's plantation to a mistress does not soften or weaken the violence of the plantation.

The implications are explicit: feminisms that prioritise cisgender women commandeering the imperial systems pioneered and centralised by cisgender men are not progress towards liberation. The non-profit sector knows this and ensures this, contrary to frequent assertions that cisgender women in the present “have it all” by nature of simply having more than they’ve ever had. 

Incremental interventions have not worked because entrenched systems like imperial patriarchy need more than a fresh Black, feminine coat of paint. Intersectional feminism, and feminism more widely, cannot create or sustain lasting change in the absence of reckoning with the logics that necessitate and support the violence of cis-sexist binary gender. Historically exploited groups have been led to believe that the pinnacle of progress and justice is legislative “protection” under the Law. Important to this solely symbolic change is the refusal to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of a legal system that is inherently colonial and unequivocally serves the interests of those who seek the truncheon and baton of imperial power. 

Only gender abolition will save us.

A closer examination of the overlapping systems at play reveals that our response must be abolitionist in nature and method. The idea of gender abolition unsettles both cisgender women and gender-transgressive victims of patriarchy alike. Gender abolition, at its core, is an honest assessment of the material conditions of patriarchy. It is the belief that liberation is only possible through the elimination of gender as a tool of oppression. 

Typically, people respond to the premise of gender abolition with scepticism or negation due to a false assumption that this means that people's gender identities and expressions will become policed, outlawed or marginalised (as they are under the existing system of cisheteronormative hegemony).

On the contrary, dismantling patriarchal gender dominance ensures that people have equitable access to justice based on personhood rather than on the sufficient performance of gender roles. Understanding gender as a mechanism for deciding who has access to money and resources within capitalism reveals the need for a class-conscious reallocation of resources to historically under-resourced groups as central to the abolition of gender within white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. 

The non-profit sector has an integral role to play in this change, and that role lies in its inevitable death. The best way that the non-profit sector can answer for its complicity in the stagnation of feminist progress and the prolonging of capitalist patriarchy is the redistribution of its financial assets to organisers doing the work. Work that the sector inhibits through policing mechanisms, such as restricting funding eligibility to “registered” (read: consensually surveilled) organisations and robust reporting schemes that ultimately dictate programming possibilities.

Breaking free from patriarchy

Eligibility requirements, funding restrictions and the search for “aligned” proposed projects can and should all be rendered unnecessary and inhibiting. The existing criteria can be replaced by a single, compelling question: Is the proposed funding scheme instituting a surveilling or gatekeeping barrier to resources, masquerading as a community improvement measure? Put another way, would this problem be better solved by providing the affected people with direct aid in the form of financial assistance? The answer to that is almost always yes. 

The reluctance of funders (and, more broadly, the sector) to ask this question betrays its revolutionary potential. The liquidation of financial assets by funders with large endowments must be prioritised going forward. The sector cannot be allowed to stand unless the premise is upheld: if actual change should happen, the non-profit sector must be eradicated as a roadblock on the journey to liberation. Philanthropy needs to be unseated from its position of unchecked power. This can only be done through abdication of this power, where applicable, led by the most marginalised people allegedly being served. 

On the part of feminist organisations, the commitment to colonial methods of leadership and representation must be critically questioned. On the part of funding bodies, a commitment must be made to dismantling these organisations, based on the acknowledgement that their existence does nothing except prop up the colonial order by instituting bureaucratic hurdles to change. As much as feminist organising needs to abandon pursuing inclusion in favour of abolition, philanthropic powerhouses need to equip the movement’s decentralisation by pivoting to unqualified disbursement of funds for unrestricted use, with the ultimate goal of permanent inactivity. 

Ultimately, the problem and solution are both clear, and the two are inextricable: nothing changes if nothing changes. A reliance on tradition is dangerous. Even more dangerous, though, is a reluctance to tell the truth. No diversity and inclusion initiatives added within patriarchal structures will liberate women. No legislative proclamations will make queer, transgender and gender non-conforming people safer under patriarchy so long as gender is seen as a site of conformity rather than one of personal expression. No larger allotments, nor geographical expansion, nor pivoting away from programme-restricted funding will make the non-profit sector any more just or liberatory. Reform, as usual, has been revealed to be an empty platitude that serves only the preservation of the colonial order. 

Nothing will work but disorder. Nothing will work except the honest confrontation of colonial legacies, which must be dismantled as sites of hoarded power. Nothing can be built without prior destruction. And nothing will change if nothing changes.