When silence becomes complicity: Western liberal feminism, coloniality, and grievability in Gaza

Abstract

This article examines the uneven responses of dominant Western liberal feminist actors to the destruction of civilian life in Gaza, ranging from silence and hesitation to selective condemnation and justificatory discourse. It argues that these responses are not merely individual moral failures, but structural effects of liberal feminism’s entanglement with colonial modernity and the Enlightenment’s narrow universalism. Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship, theories of grievability, and critiques of racial capitalism, the article demonstrates how dominant feminist frameworks circulating within Global North institutions often reproduce racialised hierarchies of humanity, shaping which suffering becomes publicly recognisable and politically actionable. Situating Gaza within longer histories of settler colonialism, dispossession, and imperial governance, the article argues that feminist commitments to justice remain limited when detached from anti-colonial analysis. It further contends that selective solidarities expose the epistemic and political limits of feminist paradigms grounded primarily in liberal rights discourse. In response, it advances a decolonial feminist ethics of political care centred on relationality, solidarity, accountability, and equal grievability. Such a reorientation, it suggests, is necessary if feminist scholarship is to sustain its emancipatory and transformative aspirations, grounded in commitment to justice.