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Feminist Theory Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) vol. 3(3): 313332. [1464-7001 (200212) 3:3; 313332; 029162]
Introduction
In this article, I interrogate the meaning of transnational feminisms in two ways: rst, I ask about their theoretical soundness; and, second, I examine their political effectiveness at the practical level. I propose to do so because I remain preoccupied with deterministic claims of transnational solidarity between women without clarifying the grounds and conditions on which such transnational solidarity stands and occurs. Assuredly, the claim that many feminists make of the existence of an organic transnational solidarity between women underlying diverse systems of power circulates among different thematic and disciplinary domains. Similarly, the concrete struggle of women for a transnational solidarity occurs in different planes and settings, and their outcomes are of a variegated nature which makes my endeavor the more complicated. My own inquiry on the subject matter will focus mainly on determining the distinction between the new buzzword of transnational feminism and the old notion of global sisterhood. Thus, I will concentrate on the most recent theoretical strategies deployed within feminist postcolonial
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Transnational feminisms
Although many feminists adhere to what is postulated in contemporary globalization theories and transnationalism, as described above, some would see this overarching way of understanding globalization as a masculinist recuperation of Marxism and poststructuralism (Kaplan and Grewal, 1999: 352). Foremost, what this male transnational thinking leaves out, postcolonial feminists would say, is the gendered and patriarchal nature of the moribund nation state and nationalist politics and the reliance on the exploitation of Third World female labor of the global economy. And still others would add that the masculinist nature of the technoculture of the Internet is also overlooked. If globalizationist male thinkers obliterate the gendered nature of globalization, then feminists need to develop their own transnational theories to ll in the gaps that their thinking leaves open. However, feminists have always given their own coinage and history to terms such as globalism and transnationalism. Robin Morgans concept of global sisterhood, as we know, is frequently seen as a founding element of global feminism (Morgan, 1984; for a critique, see Mohanty, 1992). Assuming a universal patriarchy and a common experience of oppression of women around the globe, early feminists of the second wave believed that women could build a unied front against patriarchy by disregarding divisions of class, race, sexuality and national origin between women. And, more recently, Charlotte Bunch has reconstituted the notion of global feminism in an add and stir formula whereby diverse, local, and particularized womens movements (2001: 132) conglomerate into a global rainbow coalition against male discrimination and violence. But older concepts such as the housewization of work, developed by German socialist feminists (see Mies et al., 1988), also articulated a certain kind of feminist globalism. For instance, the idea that the conditions of womens housework were becoming a generalized form of labor exploitation under late capitalism and that this created a common context of exploitation and domination among women of the First and Third Worlds (and Third World peasants subsistence producers as well as marginalized urban dwellers) implicated a nexus that in many ways transcended national boundaries and
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank Mary Hawkesworth, Jane Bayes, Kathryn Sorrells and Savitri Bisnath for their patient reviewing of the original version of this article.
Notes
1. Charlotte Bunch (2001) denes global feminism as the spread of feminism around the globe, the feminist global networking that takes place around UN agendas and what she perceives as the universality of the feminist struggle around the world in the commonality of our opposition (to male discrimination and violence) that presumably enshrines this global networking. 2. For a discussion of the notion of a common context of struggle, see Mohanty (1991, 1997). 3. According to Habermas (2001), globalization confronts western states with the compulsory need to develop cosmopolitan solidarity and a cosmopolitan democracy that can take over the redistributive functions of the dismantled welfare state. Without cosmopolitan democracy, Western Europe will necessarily succumb to the destructive forces of capitalism
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References
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