Dreaming Global Change, Doing Local Feminisms

Visions of Feminism. Global North/Global South Encounters, Conversations and Disagreements

Lena Martinsson, Diana Mulinari, Lena Martinsson, Diana Mulinari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138555990
• eBook ISBN: 9781351369350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a world where frontiers are militarised and classifications systems defining rights and belonging are reinforced, transnational feminist agendas are fundamental. We use the concept of 'scholarships of hope' to analyse the diversity of feminist struggles and imaginaries in diverse geopolitical locations.

Dreaming Global Change, Doing Local Feminisms explores subversive practices of knowledge production that challenge Eurocentric scientific models and agendas. The book also explores the tensions and challenges of doing transnational feminist theory at the crossroads between feminist scholarship and feminist activism.

In conjunction, these chapters provide a solid analysis framed by feminist methodologies opening complexities and contradictions of individual and collective feminist and trans identity struggles in Argentina, Belarus, Pakistan, Sweden, Taiwan and Turkey. These identities and struggles are rooted in transnational and local genealogies that go beyond the narratives of the West as the origin for democracy and human rights, providing powerful agendas for alternative futures.

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Introduction

Transnational feminism: a working agenda

Lena Martinsson and Diana Mulinari

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ¹

Do works that matters. Vale la pena.

Gloria Anzaldúa

At a challenging moment in our history, let us remind ourselves that we the hundreds of thousands, the millions of women, trans people, men and youth who are here at the Women’s March, we represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism, hetero-patriarchy from rising again. We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages

Angela Davis, Women’s march, Washington, January 21, 2017²

Adichie, Anzaldúa and Davies; three writers that have inspired, nurtured and comforted us during these turbulent times. The three of them strongly believe in the power of words and the responsibility that goes with the wording. These quotes embody the fundamental topics explored in this anthology: the diverse, and constantly changing, role of transnational feminism as a theoretical and political agenda within social theory more generally, and within gender studies more specifically, and the other role of feminist transnational struggles in the creation of scholarships of hope.

The work presented in this anthology is inspired by transnational feminist studies in its critique of Western academic knowledge regimes and their emphasis on the relationship between Eurocentric, imperialist and colonial power and the politics of knowledge. The politics of knowledge and the link between modernity and colonialism has brought optimism and hope for some during the centuries, while bringing despair, exclusion, exploitation and loss of communities, histories and visions for the future for others (cf Fanon 1961/1963). However, today the notion of European modernity as an origin of democracy, welfare, women- and LGBT-friendly gender regimes and societal development has been subverted and challenged globally (Puar 2007; Massad 2008; Rivera Cusicanqui 2012). Some of us experience an academic and societal context in the West, where a discursive production of dystopic futures located within the frame of white nostalgia in remembrance of a modern past is on the rise; a good example of how highly political the emergence of hope and dystopia is.

The connection between the European Enlightenment and conquest, the link between modernity and colonialism, and the on-going production of dystopia as well as of hope and political imaginaries are therefore important topics in this anthology. We hope to (de)place and thereby limit the dystopic notion of a modern past and search for other emergences, stories, communities, convivialities and possible political imaginaries and hope.

The book takes as its starting point the diversity of feminists’ knowledge production as embodied in the intervention of Black feminist scholar Angela Davis in the Women´s march in Washington in January 2017 quoted above, but also in the variety of feminist, queer and trans knowledge evolving from struggles and visions outside the scope of Western media; for example, #NiUnaMenos – “Not One Less”, the Latin American feminist mobilisations and campaigns against all forms of hetero-patriarchal violence.

Transnational feminism

The term transnational feminism is a contested one, meaning different things to different activists and researchers. Some scholars argue that the term transnational feminism runs the risk of being appropriated and depoliticised within neo-liberal academic landscapes as a commodity to be consumed, marginalising its historical roots within activism and feminist political struggles (Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey 2009; Conway 2011). It is in this context that feminist genealogies – the way feminists read their past to understand their present – are fundamental.

In resisting processes of Western cultural appropriation and academic institutionalisation, we want to locate this anthology within forms of knowledge production that are both situated in specific places and trans-located. The tradition of transnational feminism does not advocate the rejection of generalisation in social (feminist) theory. However, it does take a point of departure in the centrality of situated knowledges, which is, according to Donna Haraway and in contrast to relativism, “partial, locatable, critical knowledges, sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology perspectives” (Haraway 1988: 854). It also takes its points of departure in acknowledging the relevance of outside/within positions (Collins 1999; Trinh 2011) and the need for ‘dirty theory’ (Connell 2009: 207). We think of dirty theory as ways of doing the theoretical, where intellectual labour is understood as an embodied practice in which those (embodied) scholars/activists search for forms of writing the social that transcend the rigidity of mono-vocal analytical models, a rigidity that often reinforces the framework of Eurocentric knowledge. In other words, ‘dirty theory’ aims to engage in analytical work that challenges the reproduction of Western academic classification systems.

Our use of a transnational feminism frame is inspired by the work of what are today considered two canonical interventions in the field: Scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist practice (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) and Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). We are also inspired by what we consider a landmark in transnational feminist studies, Jacqui Alexander’s intervention in Pedagogics of crossing (Alexander 2006), which underlines the need for gender studies to explore transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy and racial formation. Her emphasis on the need to re-conceptualise modernity to account for the hetero-normative, and – we want to add – gender-binary, regulatory practices of modern state formations, is an important contribution to the ways in which gender and sexual regimes are conceptualised within gender studies today (cf Spade 2011).

The field of transnational feminism is not a monolithic one and covers diverse theoretical frameworks and political debates. To a certain extent the field reproduces the tension between transnational feminism as a conceptual framework and transnational feminism as a field of study (Naples and Bickman 2014). It also reproduces the tension between the more post-structuralistically oriented framework of Scattered Hegemonies and the emphasis on global capitalism and labour in the work of Alexander and Mohanty (Swarr and Nagar 2010; Patil 2017). We are inspired by a transnational feminist tradition that has put the issue of racism at the core of feminist theory and that understands and reads racism through an analysis of colonialism, imperialism and nation-state building. Transnational feminism is, as we read the tradition, a call to de-centre the colonising voice of Western feminism, a call to provincialise Europe and challenge European universalism. It is a call for the development of Southern theory.

Despite the differences in form and content, transnational feminism as a theoretical framework evolved as a response and a critique of notions of global feminism. A transnational feminist agenda challenges fantasies of global feminism as a powerful metaphor of shared sisterhood between women, a fantasy evolving from a theoretical understanding of power narrowly regulated through the binary opposition between victims (women) and perpetrators (men). Global feminism often fails to mention the experiences of colonialism, racism, imperialism and class exploitation, experiences that have shaped the theoretical interventions of Black, Women of Colour, Indigenous, Postcolonial and Decolonial feminism.

Postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty’s (1997) well-known, and for us very important, arguments about the making of the theoretical subject of Western feminism has challenged a Eurocentric tradition of gender studies narrowed to the analytical categories of gender and sexuality. We are particularly concerned with Western feminism’s complicity in Eurocentric notions of personal autonomy and freedom and of personhood solidly located in the self-sufficient, non-dependent individual adult (cf Mahmood 2012). Or, rather, we are concerned with the suppression of other epistemologies, a suppression that seems to be a necessary condition for the (apparent) universality of Western feminist theory.

Following the work of Mohanty, transnational feminism underlines the need to pay attention to borders in order to transgress them (Mohanty 2003: 18). The tradition provides a thinking of space inspired by feminist geographers, such as Doreen Massey (Massey 2013; Meegan 2017) in her exploration of the relationship between space, gender and power. Close to this tradition is also the queer scholar Jasbin Puar (2007), who challenges the naturalisation of spatial constructs and borders and the constantly re-centring of the West and Europe as the progressive centre of democracy, where sexual rights become a national trait. We have also been influenced by concepts such as necropolitics, which identifies and names processes of control of specific groups and populations, what postcolonial thinkers Achile Mbembe and Libby Meinties (2003) identify as necropolitical regimes where specific populations (often racialised) are marked for death. Borders, border-work and border-struggles are concepts used here to focus on the on-going materialisation or production of space, territories and categories as well as on the struggles that challenge or transform them (cf, Mohanty 2003; Reeves 2014; Trinh 2011). The concept of border is not only referring to borders between nations. Borders, as we use the concept, also appear in divides like subject-object, north-south, religious-secular. Borders are racialised, classed and gendered and with the materialisation of gender, class and race follow borders. Borders go between as well as inside communities and individuals.

Drawing on Mohanty’s work and emphasising situated knowledge is not contradictory to acknowledging global processes. We are aware of the structural transformations of gender relations on a global level – such as the feminisation of labour and migration – and how, as feminist scholars argue, this has changed the ways by which gender issues and gender subjectivities enter the public political arena. Most feminist scholars are also concerned with issues of nation-state belonging, migration and the effects of climate change, and agree that globalisation is generating a new agenda for national and supra-national policy-making regarding gender. The globalisation of capital, transnational production, biotechnology, and the acceleration in the flow of cultural products and people are all gendered and have affected and transformed the lives of women and men in both similar and in different ways (Kaplan et al 1999; Basu et al 2001; Salzinger 2003; Ferree and Tripp 2006). We are also well aware of the role of the International Monetary Fund in continuing to impose structural adjustment programmes on Third World countries and the role of the World Bank in imposing neo-liberal models and regulating (unfair) trade in the last three decades (Sparr 1994; Lindio-McGovern and Wallimann, 2009; Rätzhel et al 2014).

We understand these global processes as possible illustrations of what British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall captured in the notion of the West and the Rest (Hall, 1996). In the different chapters of this book, the neo-liberal normativity reiterated around the world, and the role of capitalist formations and the state and their relationship to one another, are two interrelated and recurrent themes. However, in this book we also claim the necessity to challenge the impact of these global processes and their representations in order to shine a light on the many complex forms of transforming counter-hegemonic border-struggles that are going on when these processes are reiterated.

We will provide ample examples of how the neo-liberal model, which is one of many global processes today, is imposed on or embraced (in contradictory ways) by feminist and trans* movements’ struggles. We try to explore these connections as well as cultural representations of neo-liberalism and the role and representations of the state and the nation from below, from the situation on the ground. What do transnational and neo-liberal aid and donors imply for those on the ground; how does this affect how the work is oriented? What happens to neo-liberal or transnational discourses when they are reiterated? How are they transformed and articulated alongside other norms and discourses? Instead of understanding neo-liberalism as a single dominant global order, we look for its many emergences, its sometimes contradictory role and its both predictable and unpredictable articulations alongside local norms and discourses (cf Rofel 2007). We ask what role feminist scholarship and activists play, in this neo-liberal situation, in creating arenas through which visions of social justice can be named and practices of social injustice challenged.

Instead of focusing on what could be understood as processes of neo-liberal globalisation, and other global forces ‘spreading’ around the world, we are interested in the emergence of a transforming, complex and contradictory transnational sphere. This transnational sphere becomes a space in its own right (Alvarez et al 2014). As such it is also a space in which there exist many different positions, frictions, new and old borders between different communities and hierarchies as an effect of colonialism, imperialism, racialisation and nationalisation. To discuss the transnational space makes it possible to discern alternative communities, migrant movements as well as hierarchies and borders marked by colonialism, racism, gender and class constructions on a level beyond nations but still recognising the impact of the constructions of nations and of local and global discourses. It is a way of abolishing an idea of a global community, which, as Trinh T. Minh-ha critically states, has “overcome frontiers” (2011: 1). Trinh also illuminates the complexity of migration and refugeeism, which, in profound ways, transform and challenge any simple understanding of a transnational space. She describes migration and refugeeism, the home as far away and at the same time “right here”, as a displacement that takes on many faces: “The source has been travelling and dwelling on hybrid ground” (2011: 12, 46).

A transnational feminist agenda, as we read it, has its critical starting point, on the one hand, in methodological globalism – closely related to Mohanty’s concept of methodological universalism (2003) – where borders and differences seem to be erased by strong global forces and notions of a global community are created. On the other hand, it has its starting point in a critique against methodological nationalism, which is at the core of Western scholarship with its focus on nation states. We also find four important traits in transnational feminist work. Firstly, instead of focusing on global processes or nations, transnational feminists explore the shared location of specific categories of people – migrant female workers, LGBT communities etc. – across national frontiers and in contrast to a universal global community. Secondly; a transnational feminism is a theoretical framework, which makes it possible to study the becoming, reiteration and transformation of colonial, racist and gendered positions beyond nations. Thirdly, transnational feminism theorises gender and sexuality as social relations and classificatory systems, as well as the forms of identities and communities evolving from these categories in similar contexts across the world – in the floor-shops of neo-liberal globalisation, within migratory movements, in on-going border-crossings and in diaspora communities. Finally, transnational feminism is both a theoretical tradition and a commitment to political practice, which, while recognising different locations and exploring privileges, emphasises the need for and the possibility of building solidarity and shared communities of struggle. The tradition challenges the binary opposition between theory and activism and underlines the centrality of collective practices in the production of feminist knowledge (Blackwell et al 2015), providing solid and original models of activist s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction – transnational feminism: a working agenda
• 2. Transnational messiness, political subjectivity and feminism across borders: in conversation with three Pakistani activists
• 3. Women resisting border regimes: two case studies from Eastern and Northern Europe
• 4. In, against (and beyond?) the state: women’s rights, global gender equality regime, and feminist counterpublics in 21st-century Turkey
• 5. Is the social democracy gone? Performing feminisms in times of right-wing populism
• 6. Dreaming of home: a feminist strategy for importing the Nordic model to Taiwan
• 7. Make(ing) room in transnational surges: Pakistani Khwaja Sira organising
• 8. Putting (left) politics back into (Western) feminist theory: conversations with feminist activists and scholars in Argentina
• Epilogue
• Index