The Politics of Disinheritance

Why do my students from non-Western backgrounds often reveal and critique their family members' misogyny? To answer, I theorize the politics of disinheritance, or the disavowing of one's family, as part of colonial structures of knowledge production that require "native informants" to offer up tales of family oppression, particularly of gender violence. Disinheritance ultimately strengthens "rescue narratives" that offer "Western freedom" to non-Western women. I then use the work of transnational feminist writers to offer ways to politically engage with and retell family stories so as to disrupt the politics of disinheritance and to cultivate transnational feminist praxis.