The Global & Transnational in Feminist Theory(ies)

According to Mohanty[i] (2002) “the critique and resistance to global capitalism, and uncovering of the naturalization of its masculinist and racist values, begin to build a transnational feminist practice. A transnational feminist practice depends on building feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, belief, and so on. ..[And] the differences and borders of each of our identities connect us to each other, more than they sever. So the enterprise here is to forge informed, self-reflexive solidarities among ourselves…So, the borders here are not really fixed. Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations” (p. 530).

Moghadam[ii]  adds that “the transnational nature of feminist networks calls into question theorizing that begins and ends with single societies. One may continue to argue the need for nationally oriented research and point out the continued salience of nation-states and domestic organizations. But nation-states, national economies and cultural formations- including social movements and organizations are increasingly affected by global processes, with the result that the appropriate unit of analysis must combine global, regional and local” (p. 80).

Sassen[iii] in 1996 suggested that “by emphasizing the fact that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories, such a focus introduces new variables in current conceptions about economic globalization and the shrinking regulatory role of the State. That is to say, the space economy for major new transnational economic processes diverges in significant ways from the duality global/national presupposed in much analysis of the global economy” (p. 17). Additionally, “globalization is creating new operational and formal openings for the participation of non-State actors and subjects. Once the sovereign State is no longer viewed as the exclusive representative of its population in the international arena, women and other non-State actors can gain more representation in international law; contribute to the making of international law; and give new meaning to older forms of international participation, such as women’s longstanding work in international peace efforts” (Sassen, p. 31). Sassn argues that “two institutional arenas have emerged as new sites for normativity alongside the more traditional normative order represented by the nation-state: the global capital market and the international human rights regime” (p. 32).

Grewal[iv] notes, in reference to “human rights” that “America has remained hegemonically constructed as a land of freedom and rights through its ability to adjudicate whether other countries and communities had them or needed them, and through the work of many organizations and activists committed to working for the human rights of women who were seen as less free than Americans” (p. 150).  Grewal adds that “it is unfortunate but unavoidable that the “moral superiority” of American geopolitical discourse should have become part of the new global feminism in the United States…, constructing “American” feminists as saviors and rescuers of “oppressed women” elsewhere within a “global” economy run by a few powerful states” (p. 152). Puar[v] exemplifies the problematic s of American exceptionalism and moral superiority in “the recent embrace of the case of Afghani and Iraqi women and Musilim women in general by western feminists has generated many forms of U.S. gender exceptionalism. Gender exceptionalism works as a missionary discourse to rescue Muslim women from their oppressive male counterparts. It also works to suggest that, in contrast to women, in the United States, Muslim women are, at the end of the day, unsavable. More insidiously, these discourses of exceptionalism allude to the unsalvageable nature of Muslim women even by their own feminists, positioning the American feminist as the feminist subject par excellence” (p. 5).

           Overall, Grewal reminds feminist scholars that “ it is only by critically engaging with established and traditional disciplinary formations, and critiquing all kinds of knowledge productions in different sites that produce regimes of truth and discourses of power that we will being to untangle the knot of pow

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[i] Mohanty, C. T. (2002). “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity

through Anticapitalist Struggles. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (2). pp. 499- 535.

[ii] Mohagdam, V. (2000). Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective action in an era of

globalization. International Sociology, 15(1). pp. 57-85.

[iii] Sassen, S. (1996). Toward a feminist analytics of the global economy. Indiana Journal of Global

Legal Studies, 4(1). pp. 7-41.

[iv] Grewal, I. (2005). Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.

[v] Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Sexual Violence

Andrea Smith’s (2005) work Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide is a critical piece of work that brings to the table some important and relevant information and insights to gender, race, class, politics, Native Americans, communities of color, reproductive politics, and the criminal justice system (this list is NOT exhaustive). For example she interrogates the current “pro-choice” framework and argues that it “undergirds the mainstream reproductive rights movement [and] is inadequate for addressing the attacks on the reproductive rights of indigenous women, women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities” (p. 4). Additionally, she argues that “the antiviolence movement has relied on a racist and colonial criminal legal system to stop domestic and sexual violence with insufficient attention to how this system oppresses communities of color” (p. 5).

In the chapter titled “Better Dead than Pregnant” Smith talks about sterilization and long term contraception abuses towards women, listing off a number of different sterilization and contraception campaigns (often without consent) for Medicaid recipients, Native Americans, people in the “Global South”, and others that continue around the country and globe. Additionally, in this chapter she is critical of reproductive campaigns that advocate choice over rights, and those which “have not addressed racism in reproductive rights policies, marginalizing them as “women’s” issues” (p. 97). For example, “Some activists refuse to address racism in abortion policies, arguing that abortion access represents “genocide” for communities of color. These advocates fail to consider that restrictions to abortions can become another strategy to coerce Native women or women of color to pursue sterilization or long-acting hormonal contraceptives” (p. 87).  

Smith proposes that “a variety of scholars and activists have critiqued the choice paradigm because it rests on essentially individualist, consumerist notions of “free” choice that do not take into consideration all the social, economic, and political conditions that frame the so-called choices that women are forced to make” (p. 99).

She continues that “the choice paradigm continues to govern much of the policies of mainstream groups in a manner which continues the marginalization of women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities. One example of this marginalization is how pro-choice organizations narrow their advocacy to legislation that affects the right to choose to have an abortion- without addressing the conditions that put women in the position of having to make the decision in the first place” (p. 99).  She argues that “we must reject single-issue politics of the mainstream reproductive rights movement as an agenda that not only does not serve women of color but actually promotes the structures of oppression which keep women of color from having real choices or healthy lives” (p. 104-5). 

Overall, she argues that “conceptualizing sexual violence as a tool of genocide and colonialism fundamentally alters the strategies for combating it. We must develop anticolonial strategies for addressing interpersonal violence that also address state violence” (p. 139); [and] “it is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system” (p. 170).

BODY

When I was younger, I was a dancer. I remember a particular point in my dance career when I became uncomfortable with my body, it started when my body began to change, and it wasn’t soon after I became hyper-conscious about my changes that I stopped dancing. I would be in a leotard and tights, lined up with others and I couldn’t help but become self conscious about my body and compare it to others. In ballet, the girl, especially, is to be thin, and although I was thin, I couldn’t help but want to be thinner, to have a different shape than what I had.

I remember around that same age, I wore very baggy clothes and ate very little- and I know that a lot of this was attributed to a self depreciating self image, I wanted to be thin, I thought I wasn’t, and so I hid my body and deprived it of food. I wasn’t alone. My friends and I were in a world where if a girl was pretty, that girl was for sure thin; at that time it was inconceivable for anyone who wasn’t thin to be considered pretty.

As I went into high school, and as I continue to get older- it seems as though these issues wax(ed) and wane(d) for me, but were forever present within my circle of friends. I had friends, who didn’t just use diet pills to stay thin, but tried and at times even became heavy users of hard drugs- just to remain thin. Interventions began to happen in order to “save their souls” from the harms of such drugs, but never based on the idea that one didn’t need to check their body for their weight- just that they should refrain from such harsh drugs. Similarly, friends who had, and to this day some still have, eating disorders as severe as bulimia were counseled for their detrimental practices to their bodies- not necessarily the fact that they shouldn’t be concerned with their body images generally.

Years later, I look back and can’t really believe how skinny I was, and how I never saw that. Instead, when I looked in the mirror, and still to this day- I have realized that I have a skewed perception of my body. I never saw skinny, and I still never see skinny. “It seems the body that we experience and conceptualize is always mediated by constructs, associations, images of a cultural nature”[i] (Bordo, p, 35).

The desire to stay skinny stays with me. Concern for body image is all around me. My peers are constantly dieting, family members ask me how I am doing with my weight, and to be honest- at this point in my life, I wouldn’t be able to pay for a new wardrobe even if I needed one.

In addition to “maintaining” a certain body, I “put on my face” almost every time I go out. In fact, if I am going somewhere social and or professional, I feel more comfortable with makeup. I have been wearing make up in my everyday life since junior high. More heavy at times, and almost nothing at other times- but I certainly, now, feel more comfortable in “public” with make-up. Although I had acne which is something I always wished to cover up, I now am gaining wrinkles and uneven skin tones- which again, I work to cover up. Make-up smoothes out the skin, and when I wear it in “public” I feel more confident and comfortable with myself. I can only presume that my self-consciousness about the changes in my face and skin will exacerbate as I get older. According to Bordo, “these actresses, whose images surround us on television and in videos and films, are changing cultural expectations of what women “should” look like at forty-five and fifty” (p. 25).

I have a similar issue with my hair, I feel more comfortable with long hair- and feel an attachment to it. As if I shaved my head, cut my hair short, or dyed it the opposite color- I would risk any “beauty” it, or I, may possess.

As I get older I have become much more comfortable with my body, but as you may have noticed- body issues that I have had as a child are still with me. Again, as I noted- some of this is class based- I literally would not be able to afford buying a new wardrobe if I grew out of my clothes thus I work to limit the amount of growth my body can have. But, if I am being honest- a lot of isn’t class based. Even if I had money to buy clothes as my body changed- I wouldn’t feel comfortable with any kind of drastic changes.  According to Bartky[ii] my “self surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy” (p. 416). I have and arguably am “the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance” (Bartky, p. 416).

            It is hard to negotiate my body image(s) with my own scholarly interests (highly critical, queer, feminist), especially when I am reminded by scholars about my own body practices. My own practices have become so naturalized, that they are routine. And, I am certainly not in an “unhealthy” place, but at the same time- maybe to some I am. Would I be rejecting patriarchy if I chose not to wear make-up? Or if I stopped worrying about gaining any weight? What about if I shaved my head? I don’t know. Are these simple things THE “solution”? What if I like how I look with make-up on? What if I like my hair? What if I like my body image (even though according to the poster at the doctor’s office- I am overweight for my height)?

            Again, as a critical scholar I try to be aware of my body, how I mark it, how it is marked by others, and how I may be perceived as a walking contradiction. But, at the same time- if I am to reject the “markings” of femininity, if I am to “let go” of practices that make me feel more comfortable in my own skin- just because they may be understood as “acts of resistance” or not falling into the trap of the “Panopticon” or “patriarchy”, aren’t I in some way in a double bind? By the act of rejecting what makes me feel comfortable, to only feel uncomfortable, to consciously practice what is not “feminine” isn’t that somehow- in itself, re-ifying the idea of the “feminine”?

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[i] Bordo, S. (2003). Unbearable Weight:  Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.

[ii] Sandra Lee Bartky, (2001). “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal

Power”. pp. 404-418. From McCann, C. R., & Kim, S-k. (Eds). (2010). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives 2nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge.

Agency

Agency is something that comes up frequently in feminist studies and women’s studies. Agency is sometimes thought of as the will and self determination within the construction of the “I”, or the collective will and self determination of the many “I’s”, as in a coalition. Butler[i] notes that “the enabling conditions for an assertion of “I” are provided by the structure of signification. The rules that regulate the legitimate and illegitimate invocation of that pronoun, the practices that establish the terms of intelligibility by which that pronoun can circulate” (p. 196).

        With the establishment of the “I” or “I’s”, the “Other” or “Other’s” is/are established. “The language of appropriation, instrumentality, and distanciation… pits the “I” against the “Other” and, once that separation is effected creates an artificial set of questions about the knowability and recoverability of that Other” (Butler, p. 197).

In feminist practices these “I’s” at times attempt to formulate universalistic claims about “Woman”, “Women”, and even coalitions. Butler suggests “the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of “Women” are constructed” (p. 19). Additionally, although Butler claims that coalitional politics “is not to be underestimated…the very form of coalition, of an emerging and unpredictable assemblage of positions, cannot be figured in advance” (p. 20).  Dialogic practices that work towards these universalistic claims about women, or even coalitions, do “risk relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes “agreement” and “unity”” (Butler, p. 20).  Mani[ii] (1990), adds “the example of women’s agency is a particularly good instance of the dilemmas confronted in simultaneously attempting to speak within different historical moments and to discrepant audiences” (p. 402).

Thus, “the shift from an epistemological account of identity to one which locates the problematic within practices of signification permits an analysis that takes the epistemological mode itself as one possible and contingent signifying practice. Further, the question of agency is reformulated as a question of how signification and resignification work. In other words, what is signified as an identity is not signified at a given point in time after which it is simply there as an inert piece of entitative language” (Butler, p. 198).

Further, “indeed to understand identity as a practice and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life” (Butler, p. 198).

““Agency”, then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on …repetition If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e. new possibilities of gender that contest the rigid codes of hierarchal binarisms, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (Butler, p. 199).

As such, “the critical task is…to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them” (Butler, p. 201).

Finally, “the deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms though which identity is articulated. This kind of critique brings into question the foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated” (Butler, p. 203). 

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[i] Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY: Routledge.  

[ii] Lata Mani, L. (1990). Multiple Mediations:  Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational

Reception, pp. 390- 403. From McCann, C. R., & Kim, S-k. (Eds). (2010). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives 2nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge.