A Comparative Analysis of Angela Davis & Gayatri Spivak
Their Take on Postcolonial Feminism
Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak are both amazing authors who focus on issues of postcolonial feminism. Issues like womb envy and the prison industrial system and the role that men and women play in those issues. However, the view that both authors have are similar yet different in many ways and thus, the remainder of the article will focus on those similarities and differences.
First, on the one hand we have Angela Davis who is a black women activist, author, professor, etc, the list goes on. She was born on January 26, 1944 and has lived through the civil rights movement, an important moment in out history. Not only that but, “After spending time traveling and lecturing, Angela Davis returned to teaching. Today, she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on the history of consciousness.” Then on the other side we have Gayatri Spivak who was born in Calcutta, India on February 24, 1942. She is a professor at Columbia University and many of her writings focus on post colonialism especially in regards to feminism. Specifically, she is a, “…literary theorist, feminist critic, postcolonial theorist, and professor of comparative literature noted for her personal brand of deconstructive criticism, which she called ‘interventionist.’” Davis and Spivak have lived almost completely different lives and it is interesting to see how that has played a role in the way they view post colonial feminism.
As for the view that both women hold about post colonial feminism, spivak takes on the womb envy approach while Davis takes on the prison industrial complex approach. Ultimately both women believe that it is a gendered issue set up that way because of capitalism and both are thus critics of Marxism. Spivak states in her article Feminism and Critical Theory that,
“The possession of a tangible place of production, the womb, situates women as agents in any theory of production. Marx’s dialectics of externalization-alienation followed by fetish formation are inadequate because he has not taken into account one fundamental human relationship to a product and labor.”
In this quote Spivak is talking about the fact that a women’s womb is a production site but Marx ignores this so as to not give credit to the female body. She is saying that by not acknowledging the women body, Marx does not give it power, instead it helps to further perpetuate the idea that man owns all production including that of the womb and all for the means of capitalism. For example by man controlling when a female can produce a child through the many birth control methods out there.
Then, Davis too talks about gendered practices when she mentions that prisons geared toward women are meant to domesticate women. While for men it is meant to be punishment for the bad deeds done. Davis says this when she states,
Davis also adds that, “Paradoxically, prison reform movements in general have tended to bolster, rather than diminish, the stronghold of prisons on the lives of the individuals whom they hold captive.” Instead, the government and those in power continue to capitalize on the prison system by taking advantage of the inmates and trying to increase the number of jailed persons rather than decrease that number. Thus, Davis too is critical of Marxism because it is another way in which men take power away from women by capitalizing off women prisons.
Hence, it is easy to see how both women agree on the fact that men want to capitalize off women and continue to do so by taking away their power and owning all means of production. However, the only difference is that while both women talk about feminism, Angela Davis tends to focus more on women of color while Gayatri Spivak focuses on the overall encompass of feminism. Henceforth, I make the assumption that this is the case because of their backgrounds. Davis is known to be a huge activist and being a women of color herself, it is easy enough to understand why her writings focus on women of color rights. For example when she states, “…imprisonment of women of color — it should be pointed out that throughout urban areas of Europe and the United States, a vastly disproportionate number of women prisoners come from racially marginalized communities.” On the other hand Spivak is not known to be a big activist so her approach to feminism is not as centered on a specific feminist topic but more so broadly focused. For example, the fact that she focuses on broad issues such as abortion when she states, “The current struggle over abortion rights has foregrounded this unacknowledged agenda.” At the end of the day however, both women bring an interesting incite to post colonial feminism.
Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak are inspirational women who look at the concept of Feminism in ways not necessarily brought forth before. They have inspired me and made me look at these issues in a new light too. Without them I would not have known what womb envy is or how gender played a role in the prison industrial system. So thus, I urge everyone to take the time to read some of their works in the hopes that you too will gain a new perspective on these very important issues.
