decolonIzIng mAstery 37of color, of whom Fanon “knows nothing.” (I will turn in the following
chapters to the crucial importance of writing ourselves as impossibly split
subjects, and to the gendered, raced, and hybrid possibilities of such writ-
ing.) Given Fanon’s own psychoanalytic frame, one in which the black male
body is “universal,” Capécia’s writing is always already indecipherable to
him. Within Fanon’s own narrative of decolonization, the woman of color’s
narration must be proleptically dismissed.
Gandhian (Ef )feminism
Instrumental and disposable. Allies and excesses. What becomes clear is
that in the formation of Fanon’s own masterfully embodied emergent sub-
jectivity—a subjectivity that for him is necessary to decolonization—other
specifically gendered and sexualized figures must be eschewed in its mak-
ing. Likewise, in Gandhi’s own narrative accounts and pursuits of swaraj
(self- rule)—a state of being produced by and through practices of mas-
tery—women play a tricky role. As Madhu Kishwar (1985) has illustrated,
Gandhi was inclusive of women in the movement toward national libera-
tion and saw them as critical constituents to producing social change. For
Gandhi, accounting for women was in fact instrumental to the transfor-
mation of the body politic at large, and he was quick to see the relations
between the personal (the home) and the political, especially in terms of
the embodied politics of ahimsa (nonviolence) as a devotional practice. He
persistently situated women in the home as wives and mothers even while
he created social change that sought to alleviate gender oppression. As pro-
gressive as Gandhi’s inclusivity of women appeared, as Kishwar argues, he
failed to understand that gender oppression was a historically grounded
and social experience that could not simply be overcome through the moral
dedication of women.
If the proper place of women for Gandhi was as devoted homemakers,
he also selectively employed the figure of the improper woman to frame
British life and its illnesses. In Hind Swaraj, a narrative framed as a discus-
sion between an inquisitive, well- educated “Reader” and an “Editor” (the
loosely veiled figure of Gandhi himself ), the Editor argues that the British
Parliament, hailed “the Mother of Parliaments,” is like a “sterile woman and
a prostitute” (1997, 32). While Gandhi- as-Editor acknowledges that these
are “harsh terms,” he also abides by them, affirming that the British Parlia-