AustLit

'This special issue on “Contested Terrains” features feminist scholarship that explores the varied geopolitical landscapes on which contestations about feminist theories and practices regarding women of color and Third World women are situated. The experiences and perspectives of women of color and Third World women have been frequently erased, distorted, and manipulated both by dominant feminist discourses and by dominant geopolitical discourses. Long after the proclaimed demise of second‐wave feminism in the academy, neoliberal feminist discourses continue to dominate within neocolonial geopolitical regimes. These neoliberal discourses reduce women's liberation to the right to work, to accumulate private property, and to choose lifestyles based on Western patterns of consumption. Such discourses fail to address the pervasive impact of colonialism, structural racism, and Eurocentric cultural imperialism on women's lives in both the so‐called First World and the Third World. Within the Western context, dominant feminist discourses highlighting personal choice overshadow discussions of the public good and leave the most vulnerable members of neoliberal states—often women and girls of color—“free” to fend for themselves and responsible for what are deemed their own failures (Davis and Kelley 2012). At the same time, neoliberal feminist perspectives portray women from the Third World as lacking freedom and the ability to self‐govern. Portrayed as helpless victims of incorrigible Third World patriarchies, Third World women are constructed as dependent on interventions from the First World for their liberation (Spivak 1996; Abu‐Lughod 2002; Urs 2014). In both cases, the role of colonial and neocolonial perspectives and policies in creating, shaping, and sustaining women's oppression is largely ignored.' (Publication introduction)