Transnational Feminisms

Invocations of transnational feminisms can be found as early as the 1960s through the ideals of “global sisterhood.” The term transnational in reference to feminism is distinct from “global” feminism. With the publication of Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global in 1984, it became evident that many mainstream US frameworks of feminism were still rooted within western notions of progress and oppression that foregrounded the points of views of white, middle-class, and liberal feminism. Transnational feminism critiqued the assumption of a global sisterhood, rooted within white, middle-class, western feminist subject positions that frequently have ignored non-western cultures, geopolitics, and paradigms, and the lived experiences of women in the Global South. Furthermore, transnational feminism and feminists attempt to dismantle the hegemonic power structures implicit in this divide between western feminists as “saviors” and feminists attempting to save the disadvantaged women from non-western spaces. Instead, transnational feminism pushes for radically reshaping feminist geopolitics by including perspectives of women and feminist movements that otherwise have been ignored or glossed over. Transnational feminism also suggests a politics rooted in solidarity, rather than an assumed shared experience.

Transnational feminists believe that the term international emphasizes nation-states as distinct entities, while the term global speaks to liberal feminist theories on “global sisterhood” that ignore so-called women in the Global South, especially perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC). The fact that perspectives of feminists from the Global South have been ignored is most evident in discussions on gender inequality, labor politics, economic disparities, and various other imbalances produced by globalization and neoliberalism that privileges capital and profit-making while glossing over the working conditions of the poor and working classes, women, and racialized subjects.

Transnational feminist academic paradigms draw from various frameworks that investigate interlocking systems of oppression, including postcolonial feminist theories and critical race feminism (CRF). While these theories intersect with and draw from each other, transnational feminism is distinct from postcolonial feminism and critical race feminism. For instance, a postcolonial perspective is rooted in decentering the white, western, Eurocentric experience. Hence a postcolonial feminist lens seeks to both understand and undo the legacies of colonialism within feminist activism using a postcolonial perspective, emphasizing how colonialist legacies, racism, colorism, and casteism have shaped and continue to shape the social, economic, and political oppression of people across the globe.

Critical race feminism, in contrast, derives from the intertwining of three jurisprudential movements: (1) critical legal studies (CLS), (2) critical race theory (CRT), and (3) feminist jurisprudence/womanist theory. Feminist jurisprudence/womanist theory is rooted in the belief that while law is necessary, it is not sufficient to overcome discrimination and achieve success for communities of color. CRT favors a multidisciplinary approach that intersects with various social science, education, and humanities-oriented disciplines to developing the rights of people of color, particularly women. Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the notion of intersectionality (which is a part of the CRT and CRF framework within the legal discourse) to fully understand the complex situation of women of color, rooted in Black feminism. According to Crenshaw, understanding the oppression of Black women requires us to not only look at their race and gender, but to also explore the intersection of these identities, as well as class, sexuality, ability, and geography, among other aspects of identity and experience.

Transnational Black feminism foregrounds the long history of Black feminist praxis and theorization, dating back to the nineteenth century with writings by Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. According to the Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group, “transnational Black feminisms can move us beyond survivability and demands for recognition, and instead generate alternative frames and understandings around belonging, community, justice, and equity” (Naylor and Nadasen n.d.). Transnational Black feminisms also emphasize the importance of racial politics in the development of capitalism and global politics—what Cedric Robinson (1983) called “racial capitalism”—as well as the need to integrate a gendered analysis.

CRF literature has expanded beyond the borders of the United States. Global CRF offers transnational perspectives and contributes to postcolonial theory, given that women of color around the world are marginalized within various contexts. Global and transnational CRF promotes the perspectives of women in the development of international and comparative law, including public international law, human rights, and international business transactions. While transnational feminism rejects the idea that people from different regions have the same subject position and subjectivities and experiences with gender inequality, it recognizes that global capitalism has also created similar relations of exploitation and inequality. Nadine Naber, in “Arab and Black Feminisms: Joint Struggle and Transnational Anti-Imperialist Activism,” charts the formation of the diasporic anti-imperialist Arab feminist group and the Women of Color Resource Center in the United States. By tracing its history from the 1960s and 1970s, Naber maps the alliances among Black feminist thought, radical women of color movements, and Palestinian history and contemporary methods of decolonization (Naber 2016, 116-25).

In order to address issues of inequality and intersectional oppressions, transnational feminist practice is involved with and rooted in activist movements across the globe that work together to understand the role of gender, race, class, sexuality, and the state in critiquing and resisting heteropatriarchal, capitalist power structures. Thus transnational feminism is both a liberatory formation and a practice that continuously resists forces of colonialism, racism, and imperialism rather than being complicit with these historic forms of oppression.

In the early 1970s, Angela Davis visited Egypt, later writing about her visit in the book Women, Culture, and Politics (1990). Davis’s trip and her thoughts exposed how white western feminists have both represented and excluded many of the lived experiences and conditions of Egyptian women. Davis’s collaboration marked an approach of transnational feminist solidarity through the eyes of multiple generations of Egyptian feminists and African American women contextualizing gender oppression within multiple structures, including globalized capitalism.

Conditions in Egypt in the 1950s through to the 1970s allowed for the formation of new international forms of solidarity focused on material conditions. This enabled Egyptian feminists to forge solidarity with women across the globe, including with Angela Davis, who located gender oppression within the same structures—namely, capitalism and imperialism. More recently and in a post-9/11 world, Arab feminists like Lila Abu‐Lughod challenge western representations of oppressed Muslim women. In her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? she writes, “gendered orientalism has taken on a new life and new forms in our feminist twenty first century” (Abu-Lughod 2013, 202). And in her important critical essay, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” Abu-Lughod explores the ethics of the war on terror and justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women.

Rather than “saving,” Abu-Lughod (2002) writes:

I argue that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires. Further, I argue that rather than seeking to “save” others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. (783)

Transnational feminist activism has also forged deep alliances with Palestinian women linking their struggles for gender equality to national liberation. Feminists in the Global North have failed to understand the importance of connections between gender and nation, and as a result, “Palestinian women have been at the receiving end of well-intentioned but misguided initiatives which have disregarded their agency, needs and resilience, and have focused on a narrow understanding of ‘women’s issues’ and critiques of patriarchy and nationalism” (Sharoni et al. 2015, 654). There are, however, encouraging signs of emerging transnational feminist solidarity in response to the political and humanitarian crisis in Palestine. Foremost among these actions is the emergence of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has created new momentum for a coherent feminist response to the crisis in Palestine.

In November 2014, at the annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, several members of the association crafted a petition that presented a rationale for feminist support of the BDS movement. The group was moved to action in the aftermath of the siege on Gaza a few months earlier and sought to stress the connections between systemic forms of oppression and the transformative potential of collective transnational resistance and solidarity (Sharoni et al. 2015, 654).

Transnational feminist theorists and practitioners vary their use of terminology. Some of the variations used include “transnational feminisms,” “transnational feminist praxis,” and “transnational practices.” Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr, in their book Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, provide a list of terms that have been used at various historical moments to describe transnational feminist practices. They emphasize that the term transnational feminism is merely a product of its time in US and Canadian academic institutions. The terms previously used to describe transnational feminist solidarity include “women of color” feminism (Combahee River Collective 1981), “Third World” feminism (Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991), “multicultural” feminism (Shohat 1998), “international” feminism (Enloe 1990), and “global” feminism (Morgan 1984).

In Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, two prominent scholars of transnational feminism, claim that they do not think the term “transnational” is better suited than either “international” or “global,” but that it is useful inasmuch as it is free from the implications that other terms may have:

Transnational as a term is useful only when it signals attention to uneven and dissimilar circuits of culture and capital. Through such critical recognition, the links among patriarchies, colonialisms, racisms, and feminisms become more apparent and available for critique or appropriation. The history of the term “international,” by contrast, is quite different. (2002, 73)

Along with Grewal and Kaplan, other feminist scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander claim that the term transnational feminism has political power and can intervene into essentialist binaries like First World/Third World, or heteronormative gender constructs. These scholars believe that the term “international” puts more emphasis on nation-states as distinct entities, while the emphasis on the “global” draws attention to liberal feminist theories and the concept of what Robin Morgan calls “global sisterhood” (Morgan 1996), without taking into consideration race, class, culture, or colonialist and imperialist histories. It is evident that under the term “feminism,” transnational feminism intersects with these concepts while also remaining its own distinct entity.

Transnational feminism, then, begins with the idea that power—economic, political, cultural, social, and other forms—has become global where borders are crossed. These border crossings have multiple implications, as the act of crossing borders entails subjects being confronted with one’s alliances with multiple national identities and citizenships. The prefix trans– suggests on or to the other side of, across, or beyond. So, this idea of movement across borders is at the core of transnational feminism as people are constantly influx. For instance, workers move across borders to find jobs. Money and currencies move all over the place, at faster and faster rates. Movements are not only global but also transnational and transactional.

Saskia Sassen has studied the new economies and transnational movements in which she elaborates on how power as understood by transnational feminism has become global caused by movement and migration of workers. Along with this labor movement is the movement of transactions—labor and economic, familial, religious, education, and skills. In Cities in a World Economy, Sassen describes the situation of the global economy as existing on the backs of women and other marginalized people:

The last decade has seen a growing presence of women in a variety of cross-border circuits. These circuits are enormously diverse but share one feature: They are profit- or revenue-making circuits developed on the backs of the truly disadvantaged . . . They include cross-border migrations, both documented and not, which have become an important source of hard currency for governments in home countries. The formation and strengthening of these circuits is in good part a consequence of broader structural conditions. . . . I conceptualize these circuits as countergeographies of globalization. (Sassen 2006, 185-86)

Transnational Feminism and Globalization

Within the past decade, Global South nations have entered the new global economy by sending women across borders to work in wealthier countries and send home their wages as remittances. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas in her book Servants of Globalization (2015) studies migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Parreñas’s groundbreaking work discusses the invisibility of labor migration and transnational families. She explores the role of domestic workers and their labors, the separation from their children and children reunifying with their mothers, and the plight of the aging care workers.

Such feminization of labor is also linked to what Sassen refers to as “feminization of survival” (Sassen 2003, 59-77). The government of the Philippines, for example, sends women as care workers—in particular, nurses and domestic workers—as part of its national economic development program. While nurses are often considered part of the middle-class professional stream of migrants, two-thirds of the female migrants from Philippines are domestic workers. These women migrant workers go to Canada, China, Hong Kong, Italy, countries in the Middle East, and the United States. As a result, many of these migrant workers are often exploited as their cultures become displaced; this transaction becomes transnational given the multiple borders being crossed on both a geographical and bodily level. Not only are these migrant women exploited, but also their loss of relationship with their children constitutes a sacrifice. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, in The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (2018), discusses her interviews and collaborations with a group of working migrant mothers from the Philippines. Francisco-Menchavez provides an analysis of the emotional sacrifices resulting from the separations between migrant workers and their children, and explores circuits of care for these transnational migrant mothers. She pays particular attention to how technologies like Facebook, Skype, and recorded video have opened up transformative ways of bridging distances produced by globalization while still supporting traditional family dynamics. All of these practices demonstrate what Sassen (2006) has called the “feminization of survival.” In “The Feminization of Survival: Alternative Global Circuits,” she writes,

These circuits can be thought of as indicating the—albeit partial—feminization of survival, because it is increasingly women who make a living, create a profit and secure government revenue. Thus in using the notion of feminization of survival I am not only referring to the fact that households and whole communities are increasingly dependent on women for their survival. I want to emphasize the fact that also governments are dependent on women’s earnings in these various circuits, and so are types of enterprises whose ways of profit-making exist at the margins of the “licit” economy. Finally, in using the term circuits, I want to underline the fact that there is a degree of institutionalization in these dynamics—they are not simply aggregates of individual actions. (Sassen 2003, 61)

Transnational in Transnational Feminist Research

Transnational feminist research is seen both as a radical and an essential framework that seeks to reveal connections and various forms of inequalities between the Global North and South. Given the histories of global colonialism and the forces of capitalism and globalization, such research allows transnational feminists to confront colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism and the multiple forms of political oppression based on gender and sexuality.

In “What Is the Transnational in Transnational Feminist Research?” (2019), Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Ioana Szeman, and Joanna Pares Hoare articulate the aims of the transnational in feminist research.

The focus on the transnational in feminist research aims to decentre Western epistemologies, shaking the foundation of the sometimes taken-for-granted framework of Western—and specifically UK, US or European-focused—feminist research in the English language; it aims to disrupt the embedded hegemonies of nationalist ideologies, in all their heteropatriarchal connotations. (3)

It is also important to note how “transnational feminisms, as activism and scholarship, have largely been developed and influenced by the work of self-identified women-of-colour feminists located in the Global North and postcolonial scholars or ‘Third World feminists’ located both in the North and South” (Hundle, Szeman, and Hoare 2019, 3).

Transnational feminists also locate and articulate various intersections of power and domination across the globe. They critique many central sites of domination/subordination to determine where power is concentrated and how gender is defined within these various sites of power. Grewal and Kaplan refer to these sites as scattered hegemonies. As the understanding of feminism and its intersections with movement continued, the theory termed “transnational feminism” was first used by Grewal and Kaplan in their book Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, which situated transnational feminism among other theories of feminism, modernity, and postmodernity. Grewal and Kaplan remind us that

We need to articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, “authentic” forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels . . . transnational feminist practices require this kind of comparative work rather than the relativistic linking of “differences” undertaken by proponents of “global feminism”; that is, to compare multiple, overlapping, and discrete oppressions rather than to construct a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified theory of gender. (1994, 18)

Here, “scattered hegemonies” suggests a way of thinking about dominations across the globe from various disciplines. Grewal and Kaplan urge critics to consider and locate these ways of thinking by taking in multiple and intersectional perspectives and reading them side by side, rather than developing an entirely new and singular definition.

Three years after the publication of Scattered Hegemonies, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty published Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, an important book in formulating transnational feminist frameworks. This text, building on Grewal and Kaplan’s, focused more on the ways in which a theory of transnational feminism foregrounds feminist activist practices in global contexts. We can see this today in many contexts. For instance, various activisms addressing global racial justice and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement have led to intersectional collaborations. BLM is a global networked organization and a decentralized movement that has highlighted police brutality and criminalization of Black people. Furthermore, the BLM network works to connect global struggles of Black subjects by organizing and highlighting how oppressive systems (including those resulting from white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism) continue to threaten Black girls, women, femmes, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people.

Given that our lives are saturated with images, transnational feminism is also deployed within the fields of film and media studies in order to understand and analyze transnational media representations. Topics ranging from decolonization and gender to the global circulation of gendered images and their effects within and outside of national polities, along with critiques of contemporary forms of Orientalism within transnational media forums (from gendered perspectives), are all evident in feminist studies of transnational media representations. The edited volume Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (Marciniak, Imre, and O’Healy 2007) extends the dialogue beyond the academic debate in understanding how media representations vis-à-vis the analysis of film, television, theater, music, visual culture, various art installations, and video art have global and transnational implications. The book, according to Sandra Ponzanesi, provides

a thought provoking and refreshing analysis of the transformed understanding of migration, borders and media that has shifted in focus from the postcolonial subjects to new racialized others: Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers who reshape notions of East/West, North/South, but also of Europeanness through a focus on Eastern Europe, linking questions of transnationalism to postcoloniality and postsocialism. (2011, 353)

For example, the multilingual Academy Award-winning film Babel (2006), by Alejandro González Iñárritu, creates a transnational framework by challenging old and new global borders post 9/11 along with the portrayal of women, namely, Moroccan women who are represented as voiceless and seductive, replicating Orientalist tropes. Similarly, another Oscar-winning documentary, Born into Brothels (2004), while representing women in the sex industry in Calcutta advances the trope of both a white savior complex and the narrative of the unfit mother. The documentary centers around a white western woman’s attempt to rescue the children who are born into brothels from the abuse and neglect of their mothers. Patti Duncan in her article “Saving Other Children from Other Women: Born into Brothels” explores how such rescue narratives are both gendered and racialized and are shaped by various colonialist, imperialist, and Orientalist tropes (Duncan 2013).

Research Methods, Methodological Approaches, and Praxis: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Research methods, methodological approaches, and praxis in transnational feminism are interdisciplinary and continue to evolve. They include qualitative, quantitative, and empirical approaches, using an intersectional feminist lens of gender, economics, human rights, and the politics of race and ethnicity, often located within the context of colonialism, imperialism, nation, nationalism, and nation-states. Transnational feminist research focuses deliberately on the problem of epistemology, particularly western epistemology as a site of knowing and being. Epistemology can be understood as the study of knowledge where questions of how one knows, what one knows, and how that came to be are studied. This type of research relies heavily on one’s experiences (as experiences are a valid form of knowledge) to draw conclusions about what transnational feminism is. Such knowledge that comes from spaces of colonial structures is important to consider when attempting to subvert and push back against knowledge that emerges from sites of colonial oppression.

The study of epistemology is vital to feminist methodologies and praxis since it is used to locate the positionality of women and gender geographically and geopolitically as a way to decenter and interrogate colonial structures. By interrogating what has been considered by western feminists as “liberatory frameworks,” transnational feminists interrogate the very mode of organizing knowledge and its relationship to heteropatriarchal and hegemonic power structures.

Transnational feminist frameworks are also continuously subject to interrogation and contestation. These critiques, as Nagar and Lock Swarr (2010), Fernandes (2013), Roy (2017), and others suggest, when they operate within the same systems of power and privilege, and from the same imperialist networks they seek to critique, do not address any change or seek to empower the disenfranchised. In fact, critiques that try to amass power and pander to neoliberalism and other liberal political projects do not advance transnational feminist practices.

Transnational feminist research and praxis is therefore a radical framework with an ability to connect various forms of inequalities between the Global North and South; to confront histories and contemporary practices of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism and their effects on women, gender, and sexuality; and to displace Eurocentric and liberal feminist theories and ideologies. Much of the research relies on role of reflexivity within transnational feminist research while being cognizant of one’s positionality and sites of what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges.” Situated knowledge reflects the particular location of the knower and rejects any impulse to universalize and essentialize both knowledge and experiences (Haraway 1988, 575-99). In other words, all knowledge comes from particular positions we hold and reflects particular conditions within which each form of knowledge is produced. Thus, in conducting and reading about transnational feminist research, one must also be reflexive; considering one’s own identity and biases is key to contributing to this research in ways that can incite change and enact movements for social justice.

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