An Anatomy of Sexism: The Colonized Vagina

“Grab them by the pussy,” Donald Trump declared on a hot microphone in 2005. This statement went viral late in the 2016 United States (US) presidential campaign, indicating how the colonized vagina still shapes the anatomy of contemporary sexism. This article develops an intersectional genealogy of sexism at its point of emergence in early radical feminist writings of the 1960s and 1970s read through Franz Fanon’s influential work at the time on colonization and decolonization. This reading locates essentialism and universalism as two interconnected limits on sexism’s analytic purchase within a colonialist discourse used to identify women’s global oppression while simultaneously deploying it in ways that excluded Black and Third World women. A dualistic logic of colonization constituted by the three operations of internalization, totalization, and ossification arises from this analysis to reveal a colonialist logic woven into sexism’s conceptual fabric through the colonized vagina. Sexism retains colonial residues that resurface in contemporary feminist activism and discourse as illustrated by Western feminist organizing which uncritically equates the Designer Vagina industry with female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) in African and Middle Eastern countries, a move that erases differences and hinders building cross-cultural coalitions much less a transnational feminist movement. Decolonizing the colonized vagina, occupied by a range of forces except the women in whom it resides, I argue, is critical to loosening the universalist and essentialist bonds on sexism enough to reclaim the vagina as home for women to advance their belonging as fully embodied heterogeneous subjects in various communities. Contemporary feminists, I conclude, should claim their “right to return,” in this case to the vagina as home and place of belonging on the fluid borderlands between the hymen and uterus, as a step toward ending sexism.