Transnational Feminism in the United States

Knowledge, Ethics, Power

Leela Fernandes

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780814770337
• eBook ISBN: 9780814760529
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid
global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the
importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues.
Transnational feminist perspectives have provided a unique outlook on women's
lives and have deepened our understanding of the gendered nature of global
processes. Transnational Feminism in the
United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in
which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United
States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national
narratives and public discourses within the country itself.
An innovative theoretical
project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist
thought, primarily through case
studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of
traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses
ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the
nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links
between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such
as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist
perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully
contributes to the field of Women's
Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and
gender from a global perspective.

1

Introduction

WHILE SIFTING THROUGH the mass of e-mails that accumulate at the beginning of a new academic year, I was struck by the subject heading of one message. The message line exclaimed, “Saudi Women Drive! NEW at Ms. in the Classroom.” Upon opening the message, I found a generic informational advertisement recommending the use of a digital version of Ms. magazine for my courses. Buried at the bottom was a note that said, “P.S. The NEW Summer 2011 issue is available at Ms. in the Classroom, which includes Saudi Women Drive! Get the whole story on the fight for gender equality, including women’s right to vote, in Saudi Arabia.”¹ I was immediately struck by some of the contradictory implications of this small piece of feminist advertising. The use of an internationally oriented marker for a generic teaching-oriented advertisement seems to imply a widespread public interest and a presumed marketability of a sign of the “global” fight for women’s rights. Yet this presumption is rooted in a mainstream national cultural symbol in the United States—the ability or right to drive. Driving and sociocultural identification with the car one drives are deep-rooted cultural symbols in the United States that circulate widely in public discourses and popular culture.² The deployment of the global or international in this instance was thus firmly cast through a national framing of the feminist imagination. This kind of vision is particularly striking given the fact that academic feminists (to whom the e-mail ad was clearly addressed) writing about global issues have placed significant emphasis on the dangers of casting global or international gender issues through the subtle historical legacies of colonial images of inferior others. The message thus also underlines the disjuncture between advances in feminist theorizing within the academy and the more public, mainstream rhetoric of U.S. feminists. In this case, the symbol of Saudi women driving is presented in a message devoid of any description, reference, or context of the campaign, the country, or even the region. Saudi Arabia is presented as a site that has been vacated of any empirical, historical, or contextual depth. The idea of Saudi women driving is thus emblematic of a U.S. national imagination. The geographic imagination at play here is defined by the borders of the nation-state rather than by a transnational perspective.

The complex issues and disjunctures that leak out of this example point to larger challenges that continually arise for feminists who write and teach about women, gender, and sexuality in locations that want to move outside of a national American narrative. Feminist scholars have increasingly sought to develop transnational perspectives in order to break from national narratives and decenter U.S.-oriented approaches. Yet, as this anecdote suggests, feminist efforts to invoke global or transnational perspectives are continually challenged by nation-centered narratives and visions of the world. In this book, I examine such challenges that arise in the creation of knowledge about the world. In particular, I examine the possibilities and the limits of the paradigm of transnational feminism that has arisen in interdisciplinary fields of study that have specifically been committed to breaking from nation-centric visions of the world. While I focus on the paradigm of transnational feminism, the issues I address speak to broader challenges of how to write and teach about the world in the current historical moment in the U.S. academy.

The anecdote that I have begun with captures some of the larger issues that continue to trouble the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the world within and outside the academy in the United States. In recent years, American universities and colleges have increasingly sought to expand the global dimensions of their curricula and academic programs. Institutions of higher education in the United States have long had programs focused on international studies, many of which evolved out of area-based programs that were developed during the Cold War period in the 1950s.³ What is distinctive about the current emphasis on a global perspective is the attempt of new programs and avenues of intellectual inquiry to grapple with and move beyond the traditional borders of nation-states, regional areas, and disciplinary territories. The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid global flows of people, capital, and cultural goods and information have intensified this search for global frames of analysis. The growing emphasis on global perspectives in academic institutions in the United States is in this sense partly an effect of globalization. Academics have sought to create programs of study that can make sense of the border-crossing flows that have been produced by or have intensified with globalization.⁴ Meanwhile, the emergence and expansion of interdisciplinary fields of study within the academy (such as postcolonial studies, women’s studies, and cultural studies) have produced a move away from older approaches to international studies that used the nation-state as a foundational analytical and political lens. Scholars writing in these fields have persistently called attention to processes of migration and diasporic identification that have unsettled the nation-state and produced new forms of cultural and political identities and practices.⁵ The result has been a wide range of research and scholarship on various transnational political and sociocultural formations.⁶

As such formulations become institutionalized within the academy, the question that arises and that frames this book is one that asks how these paradigms shape the ways in which we produce, consume, and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States. Such a question immediately becomes a fraught one given the contemporary historical and political context in which we pose it. The first decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by an intense confluence of intersecting local, national, regional, and international conflict, crisis, and change. Consider the key events that frame both public and intellectual understandings of the world within the United States. One of the overarching sets of events marking this period has, of course, been the post-9/11 U.S. “war on terror” and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hypernationalism in the post-9/11 United States has already unsettled romanticized beliefs in a deterritorialized postnational world that had begun to gain currency among some interdisciplinary academic avenues.⁷ U.S. national interests have become further enmeshed with long-standing regional conflicts, including those between Israel-Palestine and India-Pakistan, among others. The twenty-first century has also been marked by the continued and intensified contradictions of economic globalization. On the one hand, states and international institutions continue to promote economic policies of liberalization. On the other hand, global economic crisis has served to reveal the continued significance of the state in structuring national and global economic activity. In both the United States and Europe, states have had to intervene to manage financial and political conflicts that have emerged over the nature of state intervention in the economy.⁸ Meanwhile, the concurrent rise of China and India as growing global economic forces that has accompanied economic decline in the United States has produced new often fear-driven desires to know about these nations. The creation of “global” forms of knowledge that emerge on American campuses are thus often shaped by motives and affinities that are complex configurations of the instrumental (the need to know about regions and processes that affect individual, local, and national self-interest), affective (the emotional fears and desires that conflicts, crisis, and real or perceived threats create and that direct the will to know and understand), and the ethical (the desire to find responsible and accountable ways of engaging with the world).

Through this sketch of recent global events, I want to foreground the ways in which the framing of this global context is already a nationalized process. Thus, while large-scale events and processes are certainly transnational, they are perceived, framed, experienced, and negotiated in ways that are shaped by distinctive local and national contexts. The academy is one institutional site where such nationalized framings and negotiations are produced, disseminated, and consumed in important ways in the United States. Any interdisciplinary project that seeks to study questions that are comparative, global, transnational, or simply non-U.S.-centric emerges within a set of historically situated national discussions that have already been taking place both within and outside the academy in the United States.

The Rise of the Paradigm of Transnationalism

Consider some of the ways in which such national conversations and contexts have shaped the emerging paradigms of global and transnational studies in the United States. At one level, institutional resources and student interests have been shaped by the broad contours of these events. This is illustrated, for instance, by an increased interest in China and a continued and intensified interest in regions such as the Middle East that represent visible areas of conflict that are inextricably linked to U.S. governmental policies and state interests (particularly, of course, in relation to national security and economic interests). As students feel the impact of globalization on their own lives through their perceived threat of outsourcing of white-collar jobs and uncertain employment prospects, their interest in economic globalization and its effects has also grown. Intellectual paradigms have also been shaped by such events. Scholarly research agendas have been affected by the responses of both supporters of U.S. foreign and economic policy and critics of these policies (particularly in relation to war and economic globalization).

Meanwhile, processes of migration and the emergence of varied immigrant communities and forms of cultural identification have meant that students and faculty have also focused on both the countries of origins in regions such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia and the transnational ties between these regions and the United States. This has also intersected with the cultural dimensions of globalization as cultural goods such as film and media now routinely cross borders. Such cultural products are simultaneously local and transnational as they are consumed by multiple audiences in multiple locations. As scholars of cultural globalization have noted, this has led to new forms of cultural identification and new ways in which people and communities imagine their identities that no longer directly correspond to the territorial borders of the nation-state.⁹ Some social theorists, for instance, have focused on the idea of cosmopolitanism as a way to break from nation-centric modes of identification.¹⁰ These scholars have sought to identify ethical bases for identification and action that break both from territorialized nation-centric conceptions of the world and from state-centered ideas of citizenship. Meanwhile, the growth of studies focused on diasporic communities has produced a rich interdisciplinary body of scholarship on the intersecting identities of sexuality, race, ethnicity, and gender.¹¹

Such approaches have consciously sought to dislodge nation-centric approaches to the world. However, the fields of knowledge that are produced through such paradigms often struggle to break from narratives that do not reproduce analytical frames or narratives that are implicitly associated with the U.S. nation-state. Ella Shohat, for instance, has cautioned against a kind of “submerged American nationalism” that permeates “a number of ethnic studies/women’s studies/gender studies/queer studies curricula.”¹² Meanwhile, writing about the field of Asian American studies, Kandice Chuh has provided an important discussion of such struggles to break from nation-centric frames of analysis.¹³ Writing about the field, Chuh argues for a continual interrogation of “‘Asian American’ as the subject/object of Asian Americanist discourse and of U.S. nationalist ideology, and Asian American studies as the subject/object of dominant paradigms of the U.S. university” in order to ensure that the field does not reproduce the exclusionary dynamics of U.S. nationalism.¹⁴ While Chuh is discussing the field of Asian American studies, she touches on a broader risk that also permeates fields of study that have explicitly sought to use transnational perspectives that seek to move outside of a U.S. frame. For instance, when transnational perspectives take liminal transnational identities of diasporic communities as unquestioned subjects, the generation and consumption of knowledge may inadvertently be located within particular kinds of U.S.-centered interests and concerns by centering transnational flows through the territorial space of the United States.

The emergence of the study of global and transnational processes in this context presses us to think of “the global” and “the transnational” not merely as a neutral geographic level of analysis but as conceptual categories that have emerged from specific political, economic, and historical circumstances. The kind of “global” or “transnational” perspective that has emerged is in many ways a national conception—it is shaped by the specific context of the U.S. academy.¹⁵ A central argument that will unfold in this book is that interdisciplinary research on global and “non-U.S.” locations is itself inadvertently nationalized. Such an argument may appear provocative to scholars who identify with such interdisciplinary paradigms, since much of the impetus of such theory and research (in crosscutting fields such as women’s studies, postcolonial studies, and diasporic studies) is driven by an intellectual and political imperative of moving beyond the nation-state. In fact, interdisciplinary research (both feminist and nonfeminist) on transnationalism has identified itself with an ideological position that has been critical of nationalism and usually depicts the idea of the nation-state as an outdated or regressive political formation. Within the terrain of academic institutional practices, transnational interdisciplinary scholarship has also defined itself against older models of “area studies” scholarship whose origins lay within the specific geopolitical context of U.S. state interests during the Cold War. Certainly, the very “areas” that were carved out and institutionalized within the U.S. academy were derived from U.S. state conceptions of specific regional spheres of influence in which the U.S. state was competing with Soviet state power and influence. Transnational approaches have thus often explicitly attempted to dislodge such artificial boundaries that frequently created rigid institutionalized barriers to cross-regional, comparative, or transnational intellectual engagements.¹⁶ Within such interdisciplinary sites, scholarship that takes the nation-state as the primary or foundational unit of analysis is now often viewed as an antiquated approach that has not kept up with newer understandings of the transnational nature of culture, politics, and economics. Yet, as I argue in this book, discarding the nation-state as a unit of analysis does not automatically dislodge a U.S.-centric epistemic project.

My argument is not, of course, that contemporary transnational and global intellectual or academic activities are explicitly shaped by nationalist interests in a self-evident or deterministic way or that such knowledge necessarily serves the interests of the American state or of U.S. foreign policy in any simplistic fashion—nor that individual writers and texts cannot or have not broken from nation-oriented visions of the world. Intellectual production is situated within and shaped by the historical compulsions of time and place but is never determined in a simplistic way by historical and structural conditions. Rather, the nationalization of interdisciplinary research and theory unfolds in more nuanced and indiscernible ways precisely because this research often normatively seeks to move beyond nation-centric perspectives. For instance, an overdetermined analytical and political compulsion to move beyond the nation-state often inadvertently transforms the “transnational” or “global” into a territorialized concept. Global and transnational research and theory are driven by the search for spaces and processes (whether they are cultural, political, or economic) that are not contained within the nation-state. The result, as I will illustrate in chapter 4, is that the space of the transnational becomes territorialized through the search for border-crossing activities and phenomena. The realm of the transnational in effect becomes a kind of derivative discourse that ironically mirrors the ways in which, as postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee has argued, postcolonial nationalisms became trapped by the discursive colonial models of thought they sought to oppose and replace.¹⁷ Chatterjee has argued in his reading of Indian nationalism that core elements of the nationalist movement mirrored and reproduced the very categories of colonial rule they sought to displace. It is this kind of oppositional mirroring that is increasingly becoming codified within transnational/global research. Locked in opposition to the nation-state, transnational research often mirrors the borders of the sovereign, bounded form of the nation it seeks to move beyond.

The seductive danger of this nationalization of global and transnational research is intensified when we consider the ways in which the global and the transnational are not transcendent categories that simply empirically describe the broadest geographic or sociocultural scale of being and action but are categories that are constructed and operate within a specific historical and political context. In the case of U.S. transnationalism, the postnational imperative must be contextualized within and in relation to the ways in which U.S. national interests have been expressed through global claims of justice, democracy, and freedom. The postnational, in other words, is itself an American national concept in whic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. U.S. State Practices and the Rhetoric of Human Rights
• 3. Transnational Economies of Representation and the Labor of the Traveling Subaltern
• 4. Regimes of Visibility and Transnational Feminist Knowledge
• 5. Institutional Practice and the Field of Women’s Studies
• 6. Race, Transnational Feminism, and Paradigms of Difference
• 7. Afterword: The Moment of Transnational Feminism in the United States
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author