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.

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.

Postmodernism & Desconstruction

There are many criticisms, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations of ‘deconstruction’ out there, as well as postmodern and poststructuralist. To those critics, I first ask you to read some quotes from Butler[i].

                                           

“I don’t know what postmodern is, but I do have some sense of what it might mean to subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive critique. To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is not to negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the context in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power” (Butler, p. 17).  Additionally, “to take the construction of the subject as a political problematic is not the same as doing away with the subject; to deconstruct the subject is not to negate or throw away the concept; on the contrary, deconstruction implies only that we suspend all commitments to that to which the term, “the subject”, refers, and that we consider the linguistic functions it serves in the consolidation and concealment of authority. To deconstruct is not to negate or to dismiss, but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized” (Butler, p. 15).

Additionally, when trying to understand postmodernism Haraway[ii] (1991) reminds us that “the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now” (p. 182). Thus, when universalizing and totalizing remarks are made about postmodernism, I argue one should be skeptical.

Haraway, in the “Cyborg Manifesto” suggests that ”cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel of heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues …it means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories” (p. 181). Additionally, she ads “the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one” (Haraway, p. 173).  Thus, “there is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism” (Haraway, p. 155). 

          Grewal & Kaplan (2006)[iii] add to the conversation about totalization in their critique of “global feminism”, which they argue “has stood for a kind of Western cultural imperialism. The term “global feminism” has elided the diversity of women’s agency in favor of a universalized Western model of women’s liberation that celebrates individuality and modernity” (p. 17). They add, “universalizing, anti-poststructuralist, anti-postmodernist movements toward an albeit nonessentialist but universal category called woman allows state power and the power of fundamentalist groups to mobilize forces against all female persons” (p. 28). Finally, they also suggest that there are misrepresentations and practices of postmodernism which “see postmodernism as a movement toward ambivalence, the decentered subject, and so on, rather than as a thorough critique of modernity and its related institutions” (Grewal & Kaplan, p. 21).

       Thus, postmodernist work and those that deconstruct arguably are not in the practice of nihilism, rather this work is typically dedicated to deconstructing, networking, and pealing back layers in order to interrogate power, markings, and discourses that shape, construct, and influence.

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[i] Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the question of “postmodernism””. pp. 3-21. Retrieved from http://cleandraws.com/butler_contingentfoundations.pdf

[ii] Donna Haraway, (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

[iii] Grewal, I. & Kaplan, C. (Eds). (2006). Ch 1 Introduction: Transnational Feminist practices and Questions of Postmodernity. pp. 1-36.  From Scattered Hegemonies.