Proposal for a “State of the Field” Study on Transnational Feminisms

Prepared by Catherine Sameh
Associate Director Barnard Center for Research on Women
August 2010

I choose “feminism without borders,” then, to stress that our most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them.

—Chandra Talpade Mohanty(2003)

The vision of feminism without borders remains, on the one hand, deeply inspirational and on the other, profoundly difficult to realize. For those of us working for gender justice for whom a truly comprehensive women’s movement and nothing less than the broadest vision of feminism are key goals, how we attend to the realities of local, national, regional, and other kinds of boundaries while also trying to rise above them and build larger networks, organizations and movements, is an ongoing puzzle. How do we navigate the tightrope that binds macro-political structures to the micro-climates that shape local work? How do women in different corners of the globe build and sustain relationships of solidarity, trust and collectivity while honoring and preserving their own and others’ specificities and differences? How do we avoid the pitfalls of earlier invocations of global and international feminisms? These are only a few of the key questions that have animated transnational feminism for the last two decades.

BCRW proposes a comprehensive “state of the field” study on transnational feminisms to be undertaken in academic year 2010-2011. The study will examine different models, visions and projects of transnational feminist work and scholarship, and explore the key possibilities, tensions, conflicts and dilemmas that inhere in such projects. Our study will generate BCRW initiatives aimed at connecting the Center and the College to feminist work transnationally.

The field of transnational feminism grew out of the desire for cross-border collaboration around activism and scholarship that marked earlier international and global feminisms, yet incorporated post-colonial and anti-racist critiques of universalism, cultural imperialism, neo-liberalism and Western hegemony. The critique of universalism shed light on the ways in which the global scale flattened out important differences among women (geography, class, race, etc.) and centered the experiences of Western white, middle-class women as the norm. Unexamined universalist feminism and invocations of “sisterhood” as “global” tended to reproduce and entrench the hegemony of the West and Western feminists within global spaces.

Transnational feminism also questioned the boundaries, meaning and relevance of “the national,” and identified connections within, above and beyond the nation-state as sites of power and oppression, as well as agency. Grewal and Kaplan (1994) argued for a new analysis of “scattered hegemonies,” more dispersed and less centralized sites of power and resistance. They suggested that transnational flows of economy, politics and culture must be analyzed for their multi-directionality, radically destabilizing the notion that power flows “from the West to the rest” or from the “core to the periphery.” Their argument challenged rigid binaries between North and South, economic and cultural, opening up space for and contributing to ideas about borders and hybridities, and the complexity of social locations and subjectivities that defy a binary logic.

For scholars and activists attentive to global power imbalances, transnational feminist politics have the potential to offer an alternative to global capitalism, war, poverty and all systems of hierarchy, exploitation and domination that deeply infuse all local realties. While universalist global “sisterhood” is problematic, dangerous, and largely discredited among those doing transnational work, the desire for solidarity, collective power, and community remain at the heart of many feminist activist and scholarly endeavors. Out of transnational feminist work have come new political strategies and theoretical insights, and vibrant, long-lasting networks.

Some scholars claim that regardless of its most pressing challenges, transnational feminism has been the most effective way of confronting serious global injustices against women. Moghadam (1996) argues that transnational feminist movements have been able to challenge problems like structural inequality more effectively than local movements because these injustices are products of and responses to globalization, which force particular links between women. Transnational feminist movements can potentially leverage far more powerful and successful responses than can local movements. For instance, privileged women’s entry into the workforce in the global North has produced a crisis in care whereby they hire women from the global South to fulfill their gendered obligations for children and domestic labor. Transnational feminist analyses and movements see all women linked through the gendered expectation that care work is women’s work, yet recognize that women have different positions and experiences within the global care chain based on race, class, nationality, etc.

Transnational feminism has also been an effective response to local patriarchies and religious fundamentalisms that have consolidated power through transnational alliances. For example, the Vatican has forged coalitions with patriarchal secular, Protestant, Islamic and Jewish campaigns to curtail women’s reproductive and sexual lives. Feminists have responded by building activist networks through UN conferences. These networks continue to challenge transnational patriarchy and also work to shift dominant understandings of fundamentalism. Instead of the hegemonic framing of Islam as inherently patriarchal and fundamentalist, transnational feminist networks look at the similarities between patriarchal interpretations of women’s reproductive and sexual lives that spring from all kinds of (but not all) religious and secular sites. Transnational feminist networks like the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders also offer an alternative religious framework based on social justice and women’s equality. Their work unsettles the regnant notion that justice for women can only be achieved through secular frameworks.

Transnational feminisms are promising precisely because they acknowledge similarities and differences between women as products of history and politics, not women’s “essential” natures or geographical locations. As Mackie (2001) argues:

In many cases, women will form links across national boundaries because they feel that their situation is similar to that of women in other countries. This is a notion of similarity based on social location rather than nationality, ethnicity or a simple binary notion of gender. … In other cases, it is not similarity which brings women together, but a recognition of mutual imbrication in structures of inequality, which privilege some while placing others in a situation of oppression, repression or exploitation (194-195).

Transnational feminist praxis highlights how women are connected along axes of power, and points to possibilities for solidarity that disrupt rather than reproduce relations of inequality and domination.

Exchanges between and solidarity among women around “shared contexts of struggle” (Mohanty 2003) can lead to new theoretical and political insights. For instance, women of color around the world have challenged the narrow focus of the reproductive rights movement on abortion, expanding the framework to one of reproductive justice which looks at the necessary conditions that would make all women’s reproductive choices meaningful. Through long-term collaboration and struggle, transnational feminist work can restructure power within women’s movements, foregrounding the theoretical and activist contributions and leadership of women from the global South. From the UN conferences and gatherings of women to the more recent World Social Forum feminist networking to the multiple grassroots movements that meet up at more informal sites, the desire among feminists for something more effective than their local movements at confronting transnational govermentality and transforming the world remains alive.

Yet the potential and notable successes of transnational feminist politics do not suggest a dearth of challenges. Doing transnational politics within the context of Western/U.S. hegemony and deep global imbalances between the North and South means that transnational feminism can sometimes reinscribe and reproduce such power differentials. In her seminal essay in the first edition of a then new journal, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Amrita Basu (2000) argued that despite the work of transnational feminism to interrogate Western hegemony and inequalities between women of the North and South, economic and political power differentials remain difficult to eradicate. Cultural imperialism (the idea that all that emanates from the West is best) continues to create problematic slippages in which women from the global North, and the US in particular, see themselves as global/cosmopolitan/liberated and women from the global South as local/parochial/oppressed. This discourse has deep roots in nineteenth century Western colonialsim, as well as the histories of Christian missions to and anthropological representations of “Other” women.

Feminists have pointed to the political implications of representation, underscoring the ways in which knowledge production of “others” is always complicit in relations of power. Gayatri Spivak (1999) argues that the dual notions of representation, to represent aesthetically and politically get conflated, leading to a misrecognition by Western feminists of the ways in which seemingly benign knowledge projects reproduce modes of domination, exclusion and silencing of the very women they seek to “represent.” For example, Western feminist scholarship on women from the global South—on work, reproduction, sexuality, etc.—can reproduce monolithic representations of the “oppressed Third World woman,” without the capacity for agency. In this framing, “she” (Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim/African/Latin American, etc., as they are all the same) is categorically oppressed, often violently so, by her society, with no power or agency.

One can see this problem play out, for instance, in the human rights framework. On the one hand, the human rights framework travels so ubiquitously, it can be one of the most effective ways of redressing women’s oppression, particularly when notions of women’s “rights” are implemented in culturally specific ways. A human rights framework can garner legitimacy in the eyes of NGO donors, the state, or other formal institutions and actors. On the other hand, because Western neoliberal discourses are globally dominant, the plethora of rights language and meanings is often pared down to the narrowest (hegemonic) set of concepts. What gets included in the markers of what it means to be a fully agentic woman then, is a thin set of signs: secular (or privately religious and/or unveiled), publicly sexual, consumerist, cosmopolitan, etc. Western women are seen as rights-bearing, responsible for “saving” their rights-needing Third World sisters.

These rescue narratives were manifest in the rhetorical strategies of the George W. Bush Administration, which deployed global feminism (liberating Afghan women) as a rational for war and occupation, meanwhile actively working against feminism in the US. Many feminists, though anti-war and critical of the Bush Administration, followed suit (see Pollitt in The Nation and the Feminist Majority Foundation). Witness also the recent controversy over the Time magazine cover featuring an Afghan woman disfigured by her husband. The title of the cover story, “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?” suggests that U.S. imperial presence in Afghanistan is the only means of saving Afghan women. There is no analysis of how U.S. imperialism has actually worsened conditions for women by exacerbating the cycle of permanent war. Nor is there an analysis of how the violence of war creates a cycle of violent responses, including spousal abuse or murder by returning U.S. soldiers, their own suicides, or the violence of poverty and environmental destruction that war produces. The construction of Afghan women as “sympathetic victims” needing rescue by U.S. soldiers, what Spivak (1999) calls “white men saving brown women from brown men,” reinforces the colonial narrative that Third World women, as Uma Narayan (1997) argues, suffer “death by culture.”

But wartime rhetoric is not the only place where “saving” and “rescue” narratives surface, nor is it the only discursive arena for marking global power imbalances among women. A persistent conflict within transnational feminism is around the proliferation of transnational NGOs. Some scholars argue that transnational NGOs have become bureaucratic and exclusive, creating new divisions between elite feminists who further the interests of the institutions of global governance and women doing feminist work “on the ground.” Critics ask to what extent the UN—the staging ground for much of the work of transnational feminism—will ever be fully accessible to feminists or if it will remain a mostly masculine, bureaucratic and hierarchical institution. If the latter, the UN focus on “women’s issues” ultimately separates feminist activism away from the very issues – war, poverty, environmental destruction – that destroy many women’s lives.

This “NGO-ization” of the women’s movement means that only the narrowest issues, those that can be articulated within the framework of global governance and deemed winnable, get raised at the transnational level. For instance, violence against women has achieved recognition as a global problem to which the majority of people are sympathetic. Part of the “winnableness” of violence as a problem has been the construction of non-Western women as sympathetic victims suffering at the hands of their inherently violent men/cultures. Women’s poverty, on the other hand, has less currency because structural economic inequality has not been framed so sensationally.

Many feminist NGOs, often against their desires or interests, have become strange bedfellows with the institutions of transnational governance as they are called upon to meet the needs of their constituents. This has created divisions, hierarchies and tensions within transnational feminist movements as feminist elites within NGOs are forced to make deals and compromises. The political economy of privatization and structural adjustment by the World Bank, IMF, and other international finance organizations has meant that the traditional responsibilities of the state have been “outsourced” to NGOs (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). On the other hand, NGOs are neither all the same nor static. Some operate more bureaucratically and are more beholden to donors and transnational governance than others. But as Alvarez (1999) suggests, some NGOs have returned to the strategy of letting movements and movement issues drive them. These NGOs remain closer to and a part of their grassroots constituencies, but can also be excluded from access to funding or other tools necessary to meet the needs of their constituents.

Discursive bedfellow to such a global political economy is the regnant Western liberal framework of “freedom,” “autonomy,” and “individualism.” In this discourse, one is free when one is fully autonomous and independent—from patriarchy, from state welfare, from the “excesses” of one’s “culture.” Of course, this discourse fails to recognize that all humans depend in one form or another on other humans, their families, cultures, and the state for various needs. NGOs and transnational feminist elites can reinforce Western liberal ideas about “freedom” by narrowing feminist demands (civil and political rights over economic security), as well as brokering deals with international financial and governmental organizations. The imbrication of transnational feminism in this hegemonic set of economic, political and cultural conditions has forced many transnational feminist theorists to ask, as Conway does:

Does the signifier “transnational feminism” denote, implicitly or explicitly, a specific cluster of practices and discourses with particular political content, carried by particular agents, reproduced through particular cultures of politics, and rooted in particular histories, but which is projecting itself as universal—a revived global sisterhood project carried by the high politics of a new, now multicultural, highly mobile, well-resourced and globally visible feminist vanguard (Conway 2008: 211)?

Can transnational feminism cut through what Bahkru (2008: 202) calls the “colonizing nature of research as well as the colonizing nature of globalization?” Does transnational feminist work and research inevitably reproduce the epistemic privilege of Northern/Western feminism and its imbrication in colonialist and imperialist histories? Do the dilemmas of transnational collaboration—the inherent imbalances of power, the problems of representation—mean that feminists should abstain from this work? Or are there modes of collaborative activism, research and transnational practices between women in disparate parts of the world that might prefigure the democratic, ethical and egalitarian world feminists are working towards?

As a leader in cutting-edge research and new forms of feminist collaboration and activism, BCRW is well-positioned to undertake a study of how similar academic centers in conjunction with feminist movements in different areas of the world have addressed these challenges. Out of this study we hope to produce a set of initiatives that would contribute to the scholarly field and its activist component, while developing potential partners for collaboration in furthering Barnard’s feminist mission. As with all of BCRW’s initiatives, our goal in any internationalizing effort would be to bring scholarship and activism together in such a way that genuine, long-term and mutual collaboration might be established. Attentive to the inherent dilemmas of transnational feminist work, we would both acknowledge and critically examine the ways in which our participation in transnational work as an elite U.S. institution might reinforce relations of power.

One of the ways we might do this would be to model ourselves after transnational feminist projects that have similarly attended to such dilemmas. For instance, we might look at networks like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), which brings together research and advocacy towards economic and gender justice for women in the global South, or the Congress on Islamic Feminism, which brings together Islamic feminists around the world to strategize about alternatives to patriarchal Islam. We would also reach out to research centers around the world similar in method and structure to BCRW. If, in our research, we find two or three interested partners, we could envision creating a network of feminist centers around the world that bring research and advocacy together in the service of a feminist social justice vision. Ultimately we would try to build regular conferences, initiate collaborative research projects, as well as create a study abroad component that brings faculty, students and research administrators together around transnational feminist politics.