In this article, Spivak enumerated numerous fragmentary theories about cognition, humanism, consciousness and woman through the deconstruction of historiography and the Subaltern Studies. Derrida’s works had latent influence on her. The narrative of historiography represents the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This kind of knowledge reveals the inauguration of politicization for the colonized. All critical concept-metaphors would indicate force and power. Spivak thought Guha radicalized the historiography of colonial India, and she argued that to judge the failure and success in the terms of level of consciousness is too simple for the practice of the collective. For the elite historiography, the relation between manipulation and culture replaced the relation of consciousness and culture in the case of the subaltern. In acts of consciousness, the alienation is irreducible, thus, elite historiography, the bourgeois nationalist account and re-inscription by the Subaltern Studies group are all operated by alienation.
As a female critic, her theories have a distinct feminist flavor. The study of the subject-deprivation of the female and the female subaltern consciousness is important as a derived important question. Through the criticism and analysis of social change described in the historiography caused by economic and class relations, Spivak criticized the dual hegemony of imperialist discourse and male discourse which has marginalized female consciousness. There is an affinity between the Subaltern Studies group and subalternity, the perspective of historians and authors is underlined here. Despite of this affinity, Spivak believed “woman is the neglected syntagm of the semiosis of subalternity of insurgency”. Woman is the one who is always giving and sacrificing herself. Spivak suggested that the woman plays an important role in the “caste-solidarity” and consanguinal patrilineage. Especially the urban sub-proletarian female became the paradigmatic subject of the configuration of the International Division of Labor. Besides, Spivak also revealed the truth that the female subaltern is always silent in the historiography. Sexual difference is excluded from the Subaltern Studies, it seems the group don’t have to analyze the figure of woman. Authors of the historiography, the main part of the insurgence and ideological construction are male, the consciousness and subjectivity of female became a marginal issue. Under the gender discrimination and the oppression of class and race, the subordinate status and subaltern identity of the female were not being taken seriously, women are drained of their proper identity—they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented—like the epigraphs Said uses at the beginning of Orientalism. Moreover, Spivak also argued Orientalism of Said also remains in the perspective of a male author.
As for the function of female in the Subaltern Studies and the Insurgency, this “gendered subaltern” introduced by Spivak has a new female perspective, it brought a new direction for the research of post-colonization and the Subaltern Studies.