Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia

Gita Rajan, Jigna Desai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138008977
• eBook ISBN: 9781135701598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Transnational feminism has been critical to feminist theorizing in the global North over the last few decades. Perhaps due to its broad terminology, transnational feminism can become vague and dislocated, losing its ability to name specific critiques of and responses to empire, race, and globalization that are emboldened by its transnational remit. This volume encompasses an expansive engagement and exploration of transnational South Asian feminist movements, networks, and critiques within the context of the popular and the diaspora in South Asia. The contributing authors address key issues in a global context, especially as they operate both in a situated and the diasporic imaginary of South Asia.

While the idea of the popular in South Asia has often been circumscribed by the spaces and cultural politics of Bollywood, this interdisciplinary volume takes an innovative turn to examine how academics, advocates, activists, and artists envision the inroads and consequences of nationalism, globalization and/or empire, which continually remake communities and alter needs and allegiances. Through ethnography, literature, dance, cinema, activism, poetry, and storytelling, the authorsd analyse popular and social justice using a focused, multidisciplinary gendered lens.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Transnational feminism and global advocacy in South Asia

Gita Rajan and Jigna Desai

This collection presents South Asian and diasporic strands of transnational feminism that intermingle with the forces of globalization and empire and that are strategically deployed using models of advocacy and activism. The scholars in this collection explore how a series of existing and emerging feminist ideas and theories address, intersect, and measure-up against development goals, empowerment work, and postcolonial representations in South Asia and its diasporas. Together, the essays examine the multiplicity of modes through which academics, activists, advocates, Non Governmental Organization (NGO) workers, and artists, often in collaboration with people on the ground, articulate relations of power, advocate for subjects, and envision and remake communities. Both the issues they write about and the sites they operate in are useful in contesting and re-imagining ways of knowing and being within South Asia and its diasporas. Hence, a thematic strain in this anthology is a scrutiny of factors and agents that inhibit and create transformations in the experiential realities and lived imaginaries of South Asian people, both rooted and diasporic. This insistence on capturing the broad brush-strokes as well as the fine nuances of circumstances of situated and diasporic peoples is to signal how conditioned both are by a wide range of global forces, and consequently, how they are mutually, albeit unevenly interrelated and inclusive. Our goal is to highlight such spaces or more accurately gesture to connections that function as localized zones, as intersecting points, as links and networks, and as places that activate transnational and global momentum to theorize new visions of community formations grounded upon social justice. The deliberate breach of discourse categories (or genre boundaries) in this volume, ranging from theoretical and personal reflections to literary analysis and ethnographic accounts, is an attempt to capture trajectories of global forces playing out in actual spaces, and trace sites where transformative opportunities can occur. The potential of such transformations is the ability to translate change to signal social justice for the people across multiple venues.

Transnational Feminism

Posed as an alternative to international and global feminisms as well as a means to address gender within a shifting, differential global context, transnational feminism as a site of theory and praxis has burgeoned within the last few decades. Arguing against a global sisterhood and the siloing off of feminisms within state territorial boundaries, transnational feminism has emerged as a predominant way to understand processes at a scale smaller and larger than the nation-state. Within this context, scholars have insisted upon transnational feminism’s supple abilities to address a host of growing concerns including empire, nationalism, race, capitalism, war, neoliberalism, and state violence. Often seen as incorporating other feminisms such as postcolonial and Third World feminisms within its rubric, transnational feminism has become central to feminist interrogations of globalization, empire, and the nation-state in the global North and South. Suffice to say, rather than suggesting some universal category of gender and woman at its foundation, transnational feminism has sought to articulate the gendered impact of a wide range of global processes and forces within their particular geopolitical contexts.

Transnational feminist scholarship is frequently positioned at a generalized theoretical level that signals the global, but then functions as an analysis by proxy of specific, national and local particularities. In light of long deliberations about its domains, scope, and location, it is now time to consider specific iterations of transnational feminism. This is to say that transnational feminisms are neither general and universal nor only particular and local. We can understand transnational feminism in its many distinguishable formations. Straddling regions, networks, and diasporas, manifestations of transnational feminism, such as transnational South Asian feminism, may function as particular yet partly ambiguous iterations of what we now call transnational feminism. We argue that it may be appropriate to identify distinctive manifestations of transnational feminism that are both generalized and particular in order to build more specific and rich theorizations of feminism. Transnational South Asian feminism(s) can be seen as epistemic and geopolitical formulations constituted by multiple nodes located within the region of South Asia and its diasporas.

South Asia as a region evokes the prolonged history of area studies. While South Asia is understood as a region within the context of Cold War era area studies, scholars from the global South have used the term to designate their own understanding of this geopolitical space with related, if not intersecting, concerns. This collection of essay emerges from a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture, a journal that very consciously locates itself transnationally while theorizing and negotiating the complexity of the region of South Asia and its diasporas. Clearly, the essays featured here reflect a similar engagement with South Asia, even as they replicate the general academic and activist geopolitical bias towards India and production from within the US academy. While it is accurate to state that many of the essays herein are accounts of how transnational feminist principles and/or theories function within local frameworks, and many of these incentives have activist aspirations, the work of these scholars signal the potential to be extrapolated and to engage in advocacy discussions.

South Asian feminism has focused on a constellation of concerns engendered by the South Asian histories of colonialism, nationalism, war, caste, global capitalism, and/or religious hegemony. This volume more narrowly offers several perspectives on transnational South Asian feminism as a method for addressing issues of global advocacy, gender, and social justice. We hope that this collection is timely in imagining some of the terrain of transnational South Asian feminisms as few scholarly books offer such a focus, especially within a global context. Of course, this modest set of essays cannot ensure coverage of South Asian feminisms, if there were such a thing. Instead, specific transnational South Asian feminisms are implicitly and explicitly delineated through engagements with various concerns recognized under the rubric of transnational South Asian feminism. Within this collection, South Asian feminism is neither singularly coherent nor distinctively fixed. Each of the scholars here understands transnational South Asian feminism differently as she highlights different concerns and conversations extend South Asian feminism beyond the nation and region. While some consider racialization and empire, war and NGOization, or the trauma of Partition, others evoke diasporic, North-South, or women of color collaborations in their commitment to the transnational. If anything as we are forced to consider the numerous facets of transnational South Asian feminism — those that address globalization, empire, nationalism, war, and NGOization, — it is clear that there cannot be a singularity of meaning, but instead an interrelated constellation of concerns. In fact, transnational South Asian feminisms forge and maintain conversations that bridge these concerns within the region and beyond.

In charting South Asian feminism through nodes of connectivity, we understand transnational feminisms as specific but unfixed formations of material networks and epistemic clusters. These nodes constitute the region beyond geopolitical territories and nation states, and demand that we participate with responsible attentiveness to the multiple iterations of transnational South Asian feminism.

Global Advocacy

Over the last three decades or so, even as the sheer number of people speaking about the nature, significance, and impact of globalization has increased exponentially, the discussions themselves have remained discrete and guided by disciplinary premises, albeit with a few infrequent overlaps amongst the discussants and their viewpoints. And, even as we seem to privilege the paths that global forces take, we are cognizant (as our authors here) of the fact that the postcolonial predicament is very real for many peoples of South Asia, as are the advantages and disadvantages that diasporic agents bring to bear on national and transnational questions. Highlighting global forces thus help us mark a contemporary moment in understanding how gender advocacy operates in a transnational context, and equally important, what aspects of that advocacy are powered by what are articulated as local interests, and what issues seem worth exploring for migrant populations. While it is accurate to state that many of the essays herein are accounts of how transnational feminist principles and/or theories function within local frameworks, and many of these incentives have activist aspirations and groundings, the work of these scholars signal the potential to be extrapolated and to engage in advocacy discussions as well.

To advocate means to speak in support of, usually in relation to the law. Coming from the Latin, advocāitus, to call someone to one’s aid, was used within the context of seeking justice in court. To advocate implies to speak in relation to the authority of the law on behalf of either oneself or who one who cannot adequately speak for herself. This collection proposes that transnational feminist advocacy extends beyond the court of law to seek and define alternative sites of justice. In fact, feminist scholars have indicated the significant rise of transnational advocacy networks that cross state borders via NGOs and development capital that are now themselves critical actors within global civil society. Transnational networks engage appeals for justice across state and other borders to address globalization and other national and transnational processes. Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) generally pursue justice (whether gender, economic, social, or restorative) within the context of feminism itself, especially in development issues via alternative institutional structures such as NGOs and Community Based Organizations (CBOs).

This collection understands transnational feminist advocacy to be firmly grounded within these institutional and discursive locations, but also returns to the centrality of the insistent vox (voice) integral to advocacy. In other words, questions of voice and representation critical to advocacy are presented within this collection through an engagement with popular culture. The stories, testimonies, narratives, images, and memories that advocate for justice here identify and refuse to resolve questions of voice within the context of feminist networks. Instead, their transnational feminist engagements with popular culture address the complexities of border-crossing knowledges within globalization.

This collection approaches global advocacy in ways that trouble the authority and legitimacy afforded to policy analysis and ethnography (despite the self-critique of ethnographers) as the best methods to deliver transparent knowledge of the other within the global South. Clearly, the activists and scholars here methodologically approach knowledge and globalization from different vantage points. The various essays discuss and analyze aspects of interventions in feminist advocacy to illuminate a broad cross-section of South Asian feminism. Turning to analyses of academic knowledge production, imperial feminist media, ethnographic accounts, and storytelling as a mode of social movements, for example, authors in the collection present models for understanding how aesthetic efforts work in tandem with analytical research to engender transformations.

The rationale for raising the issue of both transnational feminism and social justice in the context of cultural projects within the volume is because much development work is being conducted in this terrain, extending in most nations beyond entertainment and media productions to activating global-local participation in political, cultural, economic, educational and religious realms. More than many other endeavors, development projects feed into this energy. While the initiatives undertaken in the name of development have been extremely uneven, for many feminists, it is still worth using that terminology to grasp why transnational feminism can be mobilized to engender change in the lives of the people. Not all change has been good for the peoples of South Asia, as has been amply proven by assessments of development goals, especially those powered by the global North. This statement alerts readers to our own ambivalence in discussing the impact of development programs. These programs carry with them the imprimatur of global agents and agencies whose understanding of local needs has a lot to be desired and has been brought into question by social movements and organizations themselves. And yet, many would argue that without the force of national and transnational agencies that chose to adopt and comply with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, many of the gains made by local states and NGOs could not be sustained.

Amartya Sen makes an invaluable point that helps clarify our (the authors and perhaps feminists in general) ambivalence in broaching the usefulness of this global endeavor. In Development as Freedom, he writes: “Development can be seen … as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance or with social modernization. Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to expanding the freedoms enjoyed by all members of society. But, freedoms depend also on other determinants, such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public discussion and scrutiny)” (29).¹ It is noteworthy that Sen incorporates other freedoms that have to do with the possibility of women exercising rights over their own lives, their economic status, health, safety, and the education for children. And, as many of the authors here discuss, it is here that transnational feminism and global advocacy can play a meaningful role.

Women in/and globalization

Discourses about globalization generally equate globalization with global capitalism. Within global advocacy discourses, capitalism operates as the primary agent of displacements that contends with more “local” forms such as culture and kinship so that transnational economic forces work with or against local formations. Typical anti-globalization narratives of capitalism propose that global capital rides roughshod over local forms that resist with varying levels of success. Transnational Feminist Networks’ discourses often frame capitalism as the singular global force that needs to be opposed by transnational feminism and gendered global advocacy. Other forces, such as war, caste-ism, and patriarchy are imagined as local phenomena, which must be accounted for, but nevertheless be subordinated to the larger significance of capitalism. Some scholars have critiqued the centrality that capitalism has been assigned within discourses on globalization arguing for nuanced and less totalizing theories of capitalism (see Mohanty, Gibson-Graham, and Grewal and Kaplan).² Underlying these discussions is a need to dismantle the spatial binary of global/local or even the awkward neologism glocal that is used to characterize these processes. Instead, we attempt to understand how the local and global are mutually constituted in ways that neither indicate the hegemony of the global (in the form of capital) nor the essential resistance of the local (imagined as local phenomena such as community and culture). Transnational South Asian feminism may need to develop the means to consider local, national, regional, and global simultaneously and as mutually constitutive within our analyses, theories, and praxis.

To enter into a discourse arena on globalization and culture, Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, the medium is the massage is worth considering. McLuhan intentionally allowed massage to be his final word (the press changed the original spelling to message), because he argues that it describes what we implicitly grasp as the large scale maneuvering of meaning in a 20th century avatar of modernity. But the strategy of managing meaning rings true of our unevenly transitioning global reality too; a condition that Arjun Appadurai describes vividly and visually as a disjuncture. Disjuncture is best understood as the jagged ends meshing together to mirror differentially merging realities of the nature and impact of global forces, i.e. there is a connectedness at the macro and micro levels of the causes and effects of global occurrences, which, in converse, also show fracture/stress lines at the level of macro-micro links. But massaging the message is a useful phrase to follow if we trace how and why various hypotheses about globalization are staged—ranging from media (both traditional and new), academia, novelists and playwrights, financial institutions, economic pundits, policy makers, NGOs, and of course, the state and transnational agencies—to hone in on a specific outcome. In this historical moment of a hyped-up mode of globalization each actor seizes specific messages to highlight, while taking exaggerated swipes at opposing ideas or less advantageous ones. For our purposes, disjuncture becomes discernible in the diverse analyses used to spotlight the complex, multi-originary, and multi-pronged trajectories that global forces have been propelled and thus resulted in very different outcomes.

For example, till very recently, development projects did not calculate or consider the strengths of local communities they worked with, i.e., a top-down approach and a needs-based formula rather than an asset-based one. Identifying this as a misstep, a whole slew of ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Transnational feminism and global advocacy in South Asia
• 2. In search of the choreographies of daily life and struggle
• 3. Churnings of a movement: Sangtin's diary
• 4. Citizenship and dissent: South Asian Muslim youth in the US after 9/11
• 5. Global nationalisms, pastoral identities: Association for India's Development (AID) negotiates transnational activism
• 6. Impact of tsunami in the East – Muslim women's perspective
• 7. Bending bodies, borders and desires in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and Deepa Mehta's Earth
• 8. Eat, pray, love, mimic: Female citizenship and otherness
• 9. Grassroots texts: Ethnographic ruptures and transnational feminist imaginaries
• Index