Women's Rights and Transnational Feminisms: Panel Reflection

Contemporarily, aligning with “feminism” is not simply supporting “equity for women.” While this stance might be perceived on a superficial level as the unifying force behind this notion of universal feminism, a more critical approach reveals the ways in which we should not be speaking about feminism, but feminisms. Even within localized Western communities, feminisms manifest themselves in response to the particularities of the needs of the communities who create and appropriate facets from this larger historical discourse. The rise of hood feminism, transfeminism, womanism, intersectional feminism, Black and Chican@ feminisms (among various other iterations and reimaginings) highlight this desire for specificity that pays careful attention to our positionalities and locations within a larger framework that does not merely operate around a dichotomous “man” and “woman.” Instead, there is an acknowledgment of the ways in which our approaches to feminism are informed by salient identities outside of this essentialist division. Grounded in this mutual recognition for separatism along lines of difference, the question then becomes, “if a universal feminism can exist then, arguably to destabilize global patriarchal structures of power, what exactly does this feminism look like?” It is this particular question that drove the opening panel discussion for the African Women’s Rights & Resilience conference.

Engaged in a conversation with one another and the audience simultaneously, scholars Amina Mama and Sylvia Tamale as well as activist Abigail Disney and first lady of the Ekiti state in Nigeria, Bisi Fayemi, sought to navigate this notion of global feminism, or more specifically, transnational feminism, in relation to their own work as both scholars within the academy and political activists working within populations. Just as our concept of Western feminism has transformed into these nuanced and particular subdivisions of a broader “feminism,” these women each possessed their own understanding of what it means to attain a feminist vision of equity. Arguably, these four women referenced the same underlying structure that informs the guiding practices of their feminisms—dismantling the neoliberal state. Transnational feminism’s existence should concern itself with undermining current neoliberal constructions that tend to locate individuality and marketplace structures as sites of power. If a global or transnational unified feminism is to exist, it must begin to think outside of those structures in order to imagine a more complex view of international gendered relations that center accountability, voice and listening, and arguably a rhetoric of justice over rights in order to establish sustainable and transformative structures of non-patriarchal power and relations.

As the first lady of the Ekiti state, Bisi Fayemi has been intimately linked to the current structures of centralized male and masculinist power. While this claim is not to assert that Fayemi’s husband is explicitly and knowingly involved in this reproduction of power, the cultural landscape that he and Fayemi inhabit engenders this type of location of power among men and solidifies existing regimes wherein women are used as political pawns. In recognizing this relationship, Fayemi had the strongest stance towards an overt sense of accountability for both herself and her husband in serving the women of her state. No endeavor could be made without the explicit recognition of the populations that Fayemi was representing. She even extended this argument into the very physical space in which these four women inhabited, framing the conference as a moment of accountability. During these types of round-table discussions, accountability manifests itself through a public system of checking-in and awareness. As Fayemi asserted, they hold themselves accountable through these forums, which might seem removed from the populations that they are representing, but this process of discourse cultivates relationships founded in transparency and trust. These two qualities are necessary components of larger community building endeavors that through the nature of prioritizing communal relations over individualized narratives begins to decenter the goal of the neoliberal state, which seeks to create divided and privatized market-like citizens. Through holding ourselves accountable to the communities and relations that we seek to build through this active process of discussion and public transparency, the foundation for an actual unified global or transnational feminism can be laid.

Discussion does not merely involve the act of speaking or production of voice, however. In order for the foundational material for a unified feminism to be set, we must also re-theorize the act of listening as Sylvia Tamale asserted. Accountability hinges on the active process of understanding the needs of our community members. While neoliberalism often prioritizes and foregrounds individuals as singular beings and attributes their successes to individualized efforts, this assumption ignores the ways in which various social identities (e.g. race, class, nation, sexuality, gender, ability, et cetera) impact the access that individuals have in order to attain this individualized success. Tamale highlights this failure of neoliberalism in her discussion of “sillies,” or casual moments that depend on assumptions being made about her quality of life based on a neoliberal checklist of sorts. In understanding Tamale’s postionality as a professor and renowned scholar, a neoliberal reading of her personhood would ascribe a measure of success that hinged on monetary wealth, high social capital, and almost unregulated access to resources; however, in listening to the actualized experiences of Tamale, this neoliberal image immediately crumples and cannot sustain itself. Tamale cites a particular moment in which she attended a conference in New York and was placed into a lavish and pre-paid hotel suite. While the amenities were appreciated, Tamale remembers the hunger that she experienced from not being able to afford the inflated prices of food within a city and nation that devalued her Ugandan currency. In re-theorizing the practice of listening, we move away from depending on our expectations of individuals and their personhood as dictated by a neoliberal framework, and instead, we shift accounts and moments of authenticity into the bodies of our community members. We can hold ourselves accountable through this act of listening in order to understand the actualized needs of human subjects and not the idealized assumptions of what should be deemed “needed.” Listening shifts from a passive form of reaction to speech and becomes a pre-planned action in itself. Listening should exist within the space that speech is not filling in order to continuously understand the shifting realities of the people within our communities, who exist outside of merely theoretical ideologies such as neoliberalism.

In accepting this paradigmatic shift in listening as a necessary component of moving towards a global feminism, there is also a simultaneous shift from a movement centered around rights to one around justice. Amina Mama and Abigail Disney embodied this tension between these two competing discourses both physically and verbally throughout their exchange. There existed a palpable tension between Mama and Disney along lines of rethinking practices for reaching a global feminism. While I acknowledge that Disney’s approach towards achieving this reality is grounded in a practical notion and language of rights and economic redistribution, there is ultimately nothing radical about this configuration (i.e. this solution still depends on a capitalist system of exploitation and is a temporary aid for larger structural problems). Mama’s focus on an ideology of “transformative justice” begins to conceive of a theoretical shift that does not immediately translate into real-world applications, yet it stands as a more nuanced and counter-neoliberal theorization. Within Mama’s framework, there is a distancing of human equity from “rights,” which takes these “rights” as inherent and in-born, and a movement towards “justice” that inherently depends on communal accountability and relations. Through a system of justice, we begin to retheorize frameworks instead of merely working within them. Much in the same way that Evelynn Hammonds asserts within her writing, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” we cannot merely rest on existing structures for liberation. Hammonds states, “To the second question—what is it like inside of a black hole?—the answer is that we must think in terms of a different geometry. Rather than assuming that black female sexualities are structured along an axis of normal or perverse paralleling that of white women, we might find that for black women a different geometry operates” (Hammonds 139). This idea of rethinking and abandoning certain facets of existing structures in order to make Black women’s bodies legible can be explicitly applied to Mama’s argument. Merely tweaking the current neoliberal structure and framework obscures the actual underlying issues that sustain the inequity that Disney was so opposed to. If a permanent shift in power and power relations is to occur, our thinking must begin outside of the bounds of the limitations of our current ideological structures.

In theorizing global feminism then, we cannot place ourselves into the explicit realm of reality. The imagination is central in conceptualizing a viable global feminism. The imagination becomes a crux for supporting a holistic feminism that serves not only populations of specific women, but seeks to address communal violences and disparities. And when locating this work within the realm of imagination, I am not asserting that we can abstract ourselves from our lived experiences and those knowledges. Rather, as Mama asserted throughout her points, this involvement of the imagination beyond current ideological structures truly allows for a shift into possibilities for “transformative justice.” In a practical and applied sense, Leymah Gbowee’s work during the war in Liberia is an instance in which transformative justice begins to look like a reality. Despite the differences among ethnic and religious groups, there was a prioritization and use of listening and accountability amongst the united women of Liberia. Through the late night church gatherings and confessionals, these women cultivated a community of trust and support grounded in the same justice that Mama and the other panelists sought to highlight (Reticker). They defied militarist factions and hegemonic narratives of how they should act towards one another as women from various competing backgrounds in order to establish a unified collective of women—a collective diametrically opposed to the central idea of singularity within neoliberal discourse. Transnational feminism can thus exist in a preliminary capacity in this same framework as demonstrated by Gbowee and the women of Liberia. Through a system of accountability, listening, and an ultimate vie for justice instead of rights, there arises a fundamental challenge to the established order of global politics—neoliberal states and subjects—that allows for these transnational communities to ultimately engage with a universalized feminism that benefits more localized subjects than causing harm as witnessed in current endeavors of building a transnational feminist community.

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