Expanding the Archives of Global Feminisms: Narratives of Feminism and Activism

Author(s): Abigail J. Stewart, Jayati Lal and Kristin McGuire

Source: Signs , Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 889-914
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Abigail J. Stewart
Jayati Lal
Kristin McGuire

Expanding the Archives of Global Feminisms: Narratives of

Feminism and Activism

C onsidering feminist activism from an international perspective has long

been of interest and concern to feminist scholars everywhere. How-
ever, for U.S. feminist scholars it has not been easy to shift from a
focus on the United States or to shed the ethnocentric lens through which
“other” histories were read (Ong 1988; Mohanty 1991). Almost two
decades ago, the introduction to a Women’s Studies International Forum
special issue titled “Reaching for Global Feminism in the Curriculum”
addressed strategies to incorporate global perspectives into women’s stud-
ies courses in the United States (Monk, Betteridge, and Newhall 1991).1
The essays in the issue addressed topics that grew out of debates in U.S.
women’s studies in the 1980s, including Western representations of non-
Western women; intersections of identities that encompassed gender, race,
and sexuality; and the relationship of Western feminism to feminisms

We are most grateful to our key site collaborators (Elizabeth Cole, C. S. Lakshmi, Zhang
Jian and Wang Jinling, and Sławomira Walczewska), our University of Michigan faculty and
student collaborators (Nicola Curtin, Zakiya Luna, Justyna Pas, Magdalena Zaborowska,
Ying Zhang, and Wang Zheng), and many students and others who organized the archives,
completed interviews and translations, assisted with dubbing, and annotated interviews (in-
cluding Miriam Asnes, Maria Cotera, Kim Dorazio, Alexandra Gross, Jana Haritatos, Helen
Ho, Cheng Jishong, Anna Kirkland, Emily Lawsin, Julianna Lee, Sumiao Li, Jennifer Lyle,
Kasia Kietlińska, Leslie Marsh, Julia MacMillan, Nadine Naber, Sridevi Nair, Rosa Peralta,
Libby Pozolo, Desdamona Rios, Shana Schoem, Megan Williamson, and Alena Zemanek).
We are also grateful to Keith Rainwater for maintaining the Global Feminisms Web site. Of
course we deeply appreciate the generosity of the women who contributed their narratives
to the archive and the Rackham Graduate School, which provided funding.
1
On the impact of global influences on international feminisms, see Mohanty (1991),
Mohanty, Russo, and Torres (1991), Grewal and Kaplan (1994), and Basu (1995). On the
overlapping concerns of segments of U.S. feminism and third world feminism and on the
need to integrate the latter into a broader conceptualization of feminism, see Zinn et al.
(1986), Sandoval (1991), and Shohat (1998).

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2011, vol. 36, no. 4]
䉷 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2011/3604-0008$10.00

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890 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

throughout the world. The editors called for women’s studies to modify
curricula so that students and faculty would think differently about
women’s issues and activism and develop much broader, less Western-
centric, understandings of feminism. Discussions about how to understand
and teach international feminisms continued in the 1990s, and the 1995
UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in particular gen-
erated key challenges to a monolithic understanding of feminism. In 1998,
Women’s Studies Quarterly devoted a double issue to “Internationalizing
the Curriculum: Integrating Area Studies, Women’s Studies, and Ethnic
Studies,” with articles on internationalizing feminist theory and on
women’s activisms (Rosenfelt 1998). And in 1999, in a special issue of
Women’s Studies International Forum titled “Local Feminisms, Global
Futures,” scholars discussed the importance of taking into account how
feminisms develop differently in different national and local contexts (Flew
et al. 1999). In the summer of 2001 this dialogue continued with a special
issue of Signs, “Globalization and Gender,” that documented how
women’s activism in many parts of the world was directed at and influenced
by globalization (Basu et al. 2001). Debate ensued about how to un-
derstand the processes and patterns of globalization in the effort to teach
differently about feminism and women transnationally.
A number of projects grew out of the increasing awareness that women’s
studies programs in the U.S. academy had a long way to go to develop
curricula that incorporated broader, cross-cultural understandings of fem-
inism. The Ford Foundation supported a national initiative in the mid-
1990s to encourage academic dialogue and exchange about how to develop
curricula that would internationalize the study of women throughout the
United States. In 1995, this initiative launched the Women’s Studies, Area
and International Studies (WSAIS) Curriculum Integration Project, which
aimed to integrate curricula from women’s studies, area studies, and inter-
national studies with a specific emphasis on including women from non-
Western societies in more courses. Thirteen institutions received grants to
implement discussions and workshops aimed toward curriculum transfor-
mation. This led to interdisciplinary and intercollegiate dialogues on the
importance and the challenges of taking seriously the relationship between
local and global and of incorporating international perspectives when teach-
ing and researching women’s lives (Lay, Monk, and Rosenfelt 2002).
The idea for the Global Feminisms Project (GFP) developed in the
context of debates about how to incorporate new understandings of fem-
inisms into women’s studies curricula.2 Our project aimed to contribute

2
As a precursor to this project, in 1996–97, as part of the WSAIS program sponsored

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 891

to feminist scholars’ capacity to think differently about feminist activism

by creating an archive of primary materials that might be used for de-
veloping new curricula as well as for research. Our work began to take
shape in 2002 when an interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars at the
University of Michigan sought to rethink how to teach issues of feminist
activism in global contexts within our own women’s studies program. We
endeavored to decenter the United States as the site of knowledge pro-
duction about other cultures, first by collaborating on an equal basis with
colleagues in other countries and second by creating a documentary ar-
chive that scholar-activists around the world could use. From the begin-
ning, we also viewed our project as contributing to a much larger trans-
national effort to better understand issues addressed by women’s
movement activists and scholars in different places—issues that reflect
sometimes overlapping and at other times distinct interests that are ap-
proached with different perspectives and methods.
At the outset, we wish to clarify our vocabulary. Our use of the term
“global” over “transnational” or “international” reflects our understand-
ing that, like the term “local,” “global” refers neither to a level of analysis
nor to an actual empirical reality. Rather, the global can be instantiated
in everyday life only in given locales that are suffused by extralocal influ-
ences. It is not only reflected in international meetings and conferences
on women but is also manifest in the discussions of small groups and in
individual actions—the grass roots, so to speak. Theoretical accounts of
transnational feminism have provided insightful critiques of the univer-
salizing claims of a global sisterhood (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kaplan
1994). Global feminism has been similarly charged with universal aspi-
rations (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 17). And depictions of international
feminism have focused on the actual points of contact between feminists
from different locations, often at the UN world conferences on women.
Likewise, recent scholarship on transnational feminist networks maps the
growth of coalitions that cross national boundaries (Sampaio 2004; Mog-
hadam 2005).
These formulations are not competing versions of the same phenom-
enon since, as Vera Mackie has suggested, they embody different historical
moments in the changing “relationship between language, discourse, cul-
tural practices, political economy, activism and social transformation”

by the Ford Foundation, faculty in the Women’s Studies Program and the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan collaborated with the In-
ternational Institute, also at Michigan, on a program called Differences among Women:
International Perspectives. This initiative explored how to integrate the teaching of gender
and women’s studies with international and area studies.

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892 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

(2001, 181). The language used to discuss the links that have existed
between feminist movements across countries since the nineteenth cen-
tury—from international, to global, to transnational—has changed to re-
flect these shifting relationships over time. It is not our intention to enter
into a debate on the efficacy of one term or the other to describe these
feminisms. Nor do we seek to fix a meaning to the term “global feminism.”
Instead, we hope to open it up to new readings and to explore the pro-
ductive tensions and different contextual outcomes that accompany the
global flows of ideologies, people, and political movements (Lal et al.
2010, 15–16). To signal this complexity and the multiple influences on
and sources of global feminism that the project archive reflects, we use
the term “global feminisms” (Coate 2000; Smith 2000).
The starting point of the GFP, then, was a commitment to challenge
the notion of a vague and totalizing global by working in specific local sites
both inside the United States and in other countries. The interdisciplinary
scholars who collaborated on the project were particularly interested in the
relationship between feminist activism and scholarship. Our central goal was
to create new possibilities for comparative studies of feminist activism and
scholarship in a variety of international locations, thereby undermining any
singular account of global feminism. The project encourages comparative
histories of women’s activism and scholarship not to mark them as different
but to foreground the historical and cultural contexts that shape contem-
porary formulations of feminist politics and scholarship. With our inter-
national colleagues, we hoped to provide one foundation for a better un-
derstanding of the complex constellations of economic, political, historical,
and social forces within and among these sites.
The core objective of the project was to develop an archive of narratives
by women’s movement activists and scholars from different countries. We
aimed to collaborate with teams in each of the four country sites that
would design and carry out ten interviews with feminist scholar-activists
to create a collection of forty interviews. (As we will describe below, the
project eventually included two additional interviews that cross site bound-
aries.) Each site established its own criteria for selecting the interviewees,
as well as its own protocol and approach to filming. Sites were not expected
to represent one or several histories of feminism in any location. Rather,
we sought to capture through individual accounts some of the strands of
contemporary feminist activism in these national contexts as a way to
recognize more fully the range of priorities and the varieties in feminisms
in different locations. Equally significant were the narratives of feminism
that emerged in each site through activists’ stories in relation to prevailing

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 893

narratives of the national women’s movement. In each site, the gap be-
tween narratives conducted for the GFP archive and extant histories of
feminism promised to open up productive ways of (re)theorizing fem-
inism.
The project began with our effort to identify collaborators who already
had close ties with faculty associated with the Women’s Studies Program
(now a department) and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender
at the University of Michigan. Our colleague Wang Zheng had been
working to develop a network of women’s studies scholars in China.
Sławomira Walczewska, founder of a women’s studies institute in Kraków,
had participated in a cross-national project with Kristin McGuire and
Abigail Stewart. C. S. Lakshmi had visited the University of Michigan,
and when we subsequently met with her at the Sound and Picture Archives
for Research on Women (SPARROW) in Mumbai, we discovered our
overlapping interest in documenting feminist scholar-activists’ lives. Thus,
all our partnerships were organic and idiosyncratic; we did not begin with
preconceived ideas about which countries we would include or with a
typology of feminisms, and we did not aim to cover the globe or all
important regions. Instead, we built on existing relationships, under the
assumption that no set of collaborations would be complete and that any
transnational collaboration would yield productive insights. We knew it
was critical for the United States to be on an equally local footing with
the other sites and not merely an observer or recorder of these histories,
so we established a site focused on U.S. feminism, headed by Elizabeth
Cole, in our own Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Addi-
tionally, in the United States we took advantage of campus visits by two
important feminists of Indian origin, one now living in the United States
(Ruth Vanita) and one living in India (Urvashi Butalia). These two in-
dividuals were interviewed by the University of Michigan team, but of
course they provided additional perspectives on Indian feminism, so we
think of these as cross-site interviews.
In the project as a whole, we defined the central focus of our interest
as the complex relationship between scholarship and activism on women’s
issues within the histories of these four countries. In articulating our
central assumptions explicitly at the outset of the project, we rejected the
conventional notion of the internationalization of the women’s movement
or the transfer eastward of Western feminist ideals. We believed that by
documenting specific activists’ life stories and considering them in their
historical and cultural context, we could learn about how specific events,
issues, and ideas were critical to women’s activism and scholarship in

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894 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

different settings. Furthermore, and no less importantly, we understood

that analyses enabled by this archive would localize U.S. feminisms in a
comparative framework.
Some of the methodological issues that arose in this international effort,
which included interdisciplinary teams within and across sites, among
them psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, philoso-
phers, and artists, eventually became important in the overall goal of
moving away from universalizing narratives. As the coordinating team and
the organization dispersing the funds to each site, we tried to pay careful
attention to our relationships with the sites. We were strongly committed
to a project that emphasized and made possible autonomy for each site
within a collective vision of goals and outcomes. Significant challenges
came with this ideal, some grounded in disciplinary difference and others
in differing points of view coming from the diverse experiences and pri-
orities of site directors and their colleagues. The issue of editing the in-
terviews, for example, had the potential to become a subject of contention.
The SPARROW team, which included experienced filmmakers, sought to
produce films that were artistic representations of the interviewees’ lives.
They thus filmed over the course of several days and edited the films to
tell a particular story. This approach differed significantly from that taken
by the U.S. team, which avoided editing, believing that the historic value
of the archive was in complete transcripts of the interviews. The Polish
team, with a strong belief in the power of representing the interviewee’s
stream of consciousness, was even more committed to an uninterrupted
and unedited narrative; they sought to ask as few questions as possible.
The members of the Chinese site experimented with different approaches;
at one point they hired an editor to produce polished biographies, but
later in the process the films were simpler, filmed interviews. In the course
of the project, through animated debate during three conferences that
brought the site leaders together, it became possible to accept these dif-
ferences as representing different approaches to the common goal of doc-
umenting the lives of feminist activist-scholars. Indeed, these methodo-
logical differences in modes of representation and narrative forms provide
rich material for comparisons across sites. Use of the archive can trouble
an easy understanding of the films and transcripts as life histories, testi-
monials, interviews, or biographies. This ambiguous relation of the archive
to some categories of common feminist methodologies and scholarship is
a product of differences in feminist modes of representation used by the
project’s teams and in the forms of activism represented rather than a
result of a priori methodological choices, and it has implications for dif-
ferent uses and analyses of the material.

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 895

Another example of differences in vision and the challenges of working

internationally was the attempt to develop some common questions that
would be asked across sites. The project coordinators in the United States
assumed this would provide the basis for the comparative aspect of the
project. We sought to initiate discussion among the four sites via e-mail
about interview questions, but this type of virtual communication did not
develop into an ongoing exchange. Perhaps for reasons of language, per-
haps because of differing ideas about collaborating internationally, perhaps
because each team was engrossed in moving forward on arranging the
interviews, the attempt to work collaboratively in this way was not fruitful.
Even when site leaders met in person, there was disagreement about the
usefulness of common questions. Instead, we all agreed on a few broad
issues to be covered in the interviews. Complete autonomy was extremely
important to each site, and each interview was ultimately tailored ac-
cording to the vision of the site leaders and often to the specific inter-
viewees.
In ways that we could not anticipate, the balance between autonomy
and collective vision among the sites was sustained by the common com-
mitment to investigate the relationship between feminist scholarship and
activism. The various interviewers always included some discussion about
what interviewees understood by the term “feminist” and whether and
how they identified with it. Most interviewees also addressed feminist
scholarship and how this may have influenced their activism. Through
conversations about these and other issues, we hoped we could work at
the intersections of local and global and thereby achieve a richer under-
standing of the mutual influence of women’s movements in different coun-
tries and regions, as well as the mutual influence of scholarship and ac-
tivism. In this article, we seek to illustrate the potential of the archive by
considering two questions that were central to the GFP: How do inter-
viewees conceptualize feminism? How do they conceptualize activism?
Because these definitions were left open and interviewees were not chosen
to reflect narrowly prescribed understandings of these terms, there is rich
material in the interviews, including details of historical, social, and po-
litical contexts, that illustrates how the GFP archive can catalyze discus-
sions of feminism, activism, and the global.

Mapping the contours of feminist activism

What is feminism?
Although the project was defined by a shared commitment among par-
ticipants from all four sites to “document women’s movement scholarship

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896 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

and activism” or feminisms, we deliberately chose not to develop a detailed

definition of what we meant by those terms.3 Each site made its own
decisions about how to select individual scholar-activists. In fact, none of
the sites required that participants self-identify as feminists. As a result,
the part of every interview devoted to an interviewee’s understanding of
feminism and of herself in relation to feminism is informative both about
that individual’s political consciousness and (even more importantly per-
haps) about the range of ways in which feminism and women’s movement
strategies and approaches are defined and understood within the national
context. Many interviewees from Poland and China were deeply occupied
with a period of postsocialist national reflection. In both of these sites,
although manifested in different ways, feminism was strongly identified
with an earlier oppressive socialist government that had promoted state
feminism. In contrast, many feminist activists in India identified strongly
with socialist politics within a postcolonial and profoundly multicultural
context. The U.S. interviewees were specifically chosen for their inter-
secting identities and commitments on behalf of women, and some were
ambivalent about the term “feminism,” which they viewed as linked with
past movement politics that were white and middle class. In sum, the
interviewees’ discussions of their relationship to feminism inform us both
about individual women’s political understandings and about the historical
and cultural context for those understandings.
In all the sites, some interviewees connected their feminism with other
politicized identities, including national identities for the Chinese, Indian,
and Polish feminists. For example, Wang Zheng and Ying Zhang (2010)
have shown that Chinese feminists use language to challenge Maoist-era
ideas about gender and feminism. The Chinese Communist Party un-
derstood feminism as “equality between men and women” (nannü ping-
deng; 41) whereas many Chinese feminists currently use the term “gender
equality” (shehui xingbie pingdeng; 46). Although the differences between
these terms may be either obvious or obscure to different observers, they
reflect “a crucial discursive negotiation between Chinese state feminism
institutionalized in the Mao era and the post-Mao feminism stimulated
by contemporary transnational feminisms” (46). Many of the Chinese
interviewees referred to a parallel distinction in their discussions about
feminism. There are two terms that can be translated as “feminism”:
nuxing zhuyi and nuquan zhuyi. The former is literally “female-ism” or
“feminine-ism.” Some believe that this term has more biological but less

3
See “About the Global Feminisms Project at the University of Michigan,” http://
www.umich.edu/∼glblfem/en/about.html.

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 897

political connotation than nuquan zhuyi, which is literally “woman-rights-

ism.” Historically, the Communist Party has defined nuquan zhuyi as
bourgeois because of the potential conflicts between gender struggles and
class struggles. Interviewers often asked women which term they would
use to describe their own feminist views. Zhang Li Xi, president of the
China Women’s University, argued that the two terms pointed to very
different commitments, noting that the choice “reflects the degree of
identification that [one] has with this concept. . . . The term nuquan
zhuyi . . . impels questioning and challenging the unequal social structure
and culture. Women advocate gender equality. This is not merely a kind
of desire or belief. More importantly it is a kind of movement” (Zhang
2003, 12).
The Indian national political context is equally relevant to feminist ac-
tivists’ discussions of their political commitments. For example, a number
of the Indian interviewees talked about the influence of Mohandas Gandhi
and of the independence movement of the 1940s on their activism. Neera
Desai described her “political involvement and political awareness” and
commitment to feminism in the context of the nationalist struggle that
dominated leftist discourse in her young adulthood.4 She emphasized the
atmosphere of the historical moment that fostered a certain social aware-
ness: “The consciousness . . . not yet of feminism, but of concern for
others, and concern for women, I think was built up because of this
complex intermingling of factors.”5 In a very different and more contem-
porary discussion of the meaning of feminism in India, women’s rights
lawyer and writer Flavia Agnes voiced her antipathy toward the secular
bias in the Indian women’s movement, which has existed from its incep-
tion but which took on new meaning after brutal ethnic violence swept
the country in the 1990s. Against this backdrop of a visible and majori-
tarian Hindu nationalism, Agnes, who was raised Christian in a predom-
inantly Hindu culture, felt that feminism required that she give up her
religious convictions: “When I became a feminist, it was essential that I
give up that to embrace feminism. I became secular—I gave up religion,
I gave up culture, I gave up belief, I gave up dress code.”6 This felt cost
of becoming feminist eventually led Agnes to publicly challenge the actual

4
Neera Desai, interviewed by C. S. Lakshmi for the Global Feminisms Comparative
Case Studies of Women’s Activism and Scholarship, June 13–15, 2003, 9. Interview tran-
scripts from the Global Feminisms Project that are accessible only by log-in are cited in
footnotes throughout this article. Other transcripts are included in the reference list and
cited by the interviewee’s name and date.
5
Ibid., 7.
6
Flavia Agnes, interviewed by Madhushree Dutta, August 16–17, 2003, 18.

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898 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

hegemony of Hinduism within the apparently secular realm of Indian

feminism.
Polish interviewees discussed their personal identification with feminism
or avoidance of it against the backdrop of the communist period and the
collapse of communism; they frequently viewed their interventions as be-
ing in direct conflict with a dominant patriotic ideology. Barbara Labuda,
who participated in the anticommunist campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s
and became a member of the first postcommunist parliament in 1989,
traced her activist commitment to the student revolts in Poland and France
in the 1960s. A student of French literature, Labuda spent four years in
France, where she was involved in feminist circles and in activist groups
opposing communism. When Labuda returned to Poland in 1974, she
found her friends and colleagues in the Polish opposition to be conser-
vative: “I loved them like a family. . . . There was this great warmth among
us, and we gave each other a lot of support. . . . On the other hand, very
often, I had different views on a lot of issues. . . . These were views about
social norms, and particularly about feminist issues” (Labuda 2003, 13).
Labuda’s feminist politics, for example her strong stand in favor of le-
galized abortion, eventually put her at odds with her colleagues from the
Solidarity Party (17–18). At the time of the interview, Labuda was sec-
retary of state for President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a former communist
not at all associated with the Solidarity Party.
For U.S. feminists, politicized identities were sometimes associated with
national protest movements, but they were often also associated with
identities other than gender. For example, Loretta Ross, national coor-
dinator of SisterSong, a network of more than seventy organizations of
women of color working on reproductive health issues, described her
exposure to theorizing and activism on issues of war, civil rights, and
feminism in the early 1970s in college: “We were protesting the Vietnam
War, but we were also protesting racism, and it certainly was my first
encounter with anything called radical politics. . . . I remember my fresh-
man year in college, people put the Autobiography of Malcolm X and The
Black Woman, by . . . Toni Cade Bambara in my hand, and it was like a
universe had opened up for me. And I quickly decided that I was a Black
feminist. . . . Actually, we used to call it Black Pan-Africanist Feminism.
[I] was trying to indicate this global consciousness that I was getting”
(Ross 2006, 8).
In addition to locating different sites for and moments of feminist
origins, some interviewees who were committed to working on behalf of
women viewed feminism as irrelevant and remote. For example, Verónica
Giménez, a member of the Brooklyn-based Sista II Sista collective, which

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 899

works with young working-class Latina and black women to foster social
and political change, rejected the labels “feminist” and “activist” to de-
scribe herself, noting that “what those two words conjure up for me are
middle to upper class white people and, when it comes to feminists,
women, . . . you know, throwing off the shackles of . . . patriarchy here
in the United States and rising up and saying, ‘I want to vote.’ . . . And
I don’t relate to that history and, and so I don’t use either of those terms”
(Sista II Sista 2004, 18). Other feminists invoked the same history to
make a different choice about terms. For example, Cathy Cohen, a pro-
fessor of political science who has been an active organizer around gay
rights across communities of color, said, “For me it’s about reclaiming.
It’s about kind of the numerous Black women that engage in what I
would argue are feminist politics. And claiming their histories” (Cohen
2004, 19). Finally, other interviewees redefined the term feminism. U.S.
community activists Maureen Taylor and Marian Kramer identify their
work on welfare rights as feminist and see it in an international context.
For them “feminism is a narrow point of view. We’re much bigger than
that. We’re internationalist. . . . We want to try to figure out how every-
body who is struggling to eat, [to find] housing, all these kinds of issues,
that they all have a way out. . . . Let us make no mistake—we hate
capitalism. Hate it” (Taylor and Kramer 2004, 47).
The GFP interviews permit teachers and researchers to document and
challenge stereotypes and misunderstandings about who feminists are and
what they are concerned about in the four countries represented in the
archive. The accounts illuminate the national, cultural, and social move-
ment contexts for these women’s feminist political development. As these
examples indicate, each interview must be situated within the sociopolitical
histories of its intranational context.

What is activism?
In addition to documenting what feminism meant to the interviewees,
the GFP also includes accounts of women’s understandings of the term
“activism.” The forty-two women interviewed practiced activism in a wide
range of ways, addressing many issues. The archive includes interviews
with women working in politics, arts, academia, publishing, law, not-for-
profit organizations, and informal coalitions. Their work focuses on
women’s issues: immigrant rights, domestic violence, trafficking, dowry,
health, disability rights, the environment, sexuality, reproductive and
worker rights, the rights of tribal and Dalit women, poverty laws, marriage
laws, and more. The interviews make obvious that a range of influences,
including local, national, and international dynamics as well as personal

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900 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

ones, contribute to practices of activism in a specific location. Women

often described their activist identities as evolving from a convergence
between deliberate choices, unforeseeable circumstances, and historical
conjunctures. To various extents in different interviews, women spoke
about national history and the history of feminism, political systems, or-
ganizational and financial infrastructures, and the specific cultures of gen-
der in their country as influencing their activism. A number of women
also spoke about the complex relationship of social movements to national
and international feminisms. The interviews provide concrete examples of
how ideas and strategies circulate through texts, personal exchanges, and
collective plans and how women make these ideas and strategies locally
and personally relevant. Finally, many interviewees discussed the relation-
ship between scholarship and activism; a clear ideal emerged among many
that women’s studies should be intimately connected with feminist activ-
ism, defined as some kind of work on behalf of women.
The GFP interviews contain rich material about institutions, practices,
and traditions that enabled—or sometimes prevented—certain forms of
activism in each country. The Chinese team focused on women involved
in feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs are a relatively
new and significant development in China, reflecting a distinct change in
how individuals view organizational possibilities and social issues. Activists
for women’s issues are often simultaneously involved with the govern-
ment-based All-China Women’s Federation and with grassroots NGOs.
The activism of many of the interviewees was anchored in the actual
founding and structuring of an NGO, when theory crystallized into action.
Chen Mingxia, a legal scholar at the China Academy of Social Sciences,
was a cofounder in 2000 of the Anti–Domestic Violence Network, one
of China’s first NGOs. Although her participation in the 1995 Beijing
conference was a transformative moment in her thinking about activism,
Chen pointed to the creation of the network as catalyzing concrete
changes in her work. “Only after becoming involved in our project did I
truly use a gender approach,” she recalled in the interview (Chen 2005,
7). Chen uses the term “gender approach” to mean feminist perspective;
for example, she points to cooperating with other initiatives, working
directly with women (as opposed to maintaining an observer’s distance),
and incorporating the ideals of “transparency, democracy, and equality”
as specific changes in her priorities (13). Chen’s experiences suggest that
the exploration and experimentation in creating an institution that brings
people together in new ways was an important part of activism.
In Poland, the site team sought to interview women who were willing
to talk not only about their feminist intellectual commitments and activist

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 901

work but also specifically about how these related to their private lives.
As a result, most of the interviewees discuss the impact of their early family
lives on their activism, as well as their academic and political commitments
to a range of issues including abortion rights, violence against women,
trafficking, and the creation of women’s networks. One important theme
in the Polish accounts is activism that makes new claims on public space.
As we have noted above, Labuda participated in formal political leadership
as well as in protest politics; in her interview she describes how frustrated
she was with other women’s willingness to accept backstage roles rather
than insisting on—or even simply accepting—positions in public political
spaces. Equally important, new kinds of activist projects made political
claims in the public domain in creative ways. For example, after partici-
pating in a relatively unsuccessful leaflet campaign titled How Gay Men
and Lesbians Spend Their Christmas, Anna Gruszczyńska helped develop
another public education campaign called Let Them See Us, which de-
picted fifteen lesbian couples and fifteen gay couples on billboards in four
Polish cities. She noted that this project was “the first initiative to evoke
such a . . . strong reaction in Kraków . . . the pictures did touch and upset
people” (Gruszczyńska 2004, 8).
In India, SPARROW sought to cover the large range of issues that
women activists have addressed over more than forty years, including
dowry, marriage rights, domestic violence, rape, female infanticide, eco-
nomic rights, and the environment. As in Poland, many of the Indian
interviewees discussed the importance of claiming public space for
women—from making it possible for women to engage with men outside
the house to organizing public protests and performing street theater
about women’s issues. A number of the Indian interviewees also spoke
about a strong sense of community among women activists that made
their own participation in a movement possible. Shahjehan Aapa, who
became an activist in the dowry movement after her own daughter was
burned to death, turned to political activism as a way to deal with her
grief. Aapa quickly joined with twenty-five other women to organize a
local women’s group against dowry and began to work on dowry cases
throughout her region: “In the eighties when the women’s movement
came as a storm, we joined it. We met many mothers, whose daughters
were burnt, some were killed through accidents and some were killed in
other ways, these mothers also came together. And we gained a lot of
what we had lost from this women’s movement.”7
The U.S. site team interviewed women who work at the intersections

7
Shahjehan Aapa, interviewed by Urvashi Butalia, April 30, May 1–2, 2004, 10.

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902 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

of feminist activism and movements that address forms of oppression based

on race, sexual orientation, social class, and disability. While individual
women describe these parts of their work as inseparable, many of the
movements have not worked together. Palestinian activist Rabab Abdul-
hadi explained that when she and her colleagues tried to participate in
feminist activities, they were often turned away because they were seen
as uniting with men for the Palestinian cause. Because they were not heard
in feminist circles when they wanted to speak about the Israeli occupation
of Palestine, she and other members of her group were questioned about
whether they were feminists or nationalists. “We sat around the table in
Brooklyn, kitchen table, and we said, ‘We’re going to . . . [found] a
Palestinian women’s association’” (Abdulhadi 2004, 15). The Union of
Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America, which Abdulhadi
helped found, created a feminist space that brought together issues of
women’s rights and Palestinians’ rights. Bringing together these two issues
created a place where it was paramount to recognize and tolerate difference
within the Arab community. This example illuminates, as do others, the
complexity of multiple identities and how activism at the intersection of
identities can result in strong coalitions and organizations (Cole and Luna
2010).
In all four sites the interviews document the complex coming together
of circumstance, deliberate decisions, and connections that led individuals
to turn their ideas of feminism into action. The interviews are replete with
stories about the crucial significance of meeting women with similar ex-
periences, of creating something with others to turn anger into action,
and of realizing that individual experiences often are part of broader pat-
terns and cultural systems. Li Huiying, a Chinese professor of sociology
and gender, talked about meeting other students at the university and
realizing through conversation that her personal experiences of inequality
as a single woman reflected broader patterns (Li 2004, 8–10). The Indian
activist D. Sharifa recalled her first exposure to a feminist conference:
“The feeling I can also talk openly like others came to me only there, at
the all India women’s conference. At that time the women’s behaviour,
their interactions; women sitting together, talking, discussing, eating, min-
gling, affected me. If I had not gone to that conference, I would not
have become an activist.”8
Another important theme is the complexity and importance of cross-
national contacts. In all the sites, women talked about the national and
international exchanges that shaped their ideas and practices of activism,

8
D. Sharifa, interviewed by C. S. Lakshmi, July 9–12, 2004, 8.

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 903

including the 1995 conference in Beijing, trips abroad, reading groups,

interactions with international colleagues, and collaborations with national
and international funding agencies. Ai Xiaoming, a professor of literary
studies and director of the Women’s Studies Center at Zhongshan Uni-
versity in Guangzhou, talked about the ideas she developed during a
sabbatical in the United States (Ai 2005, 5–7). When Ai was a visiting
scholar in the United States in 2000, she saw the Vagina Monologues
performed at a college campus. She described her fascination with the
play itself, the diverse reactions to the play on the campus and in the
media, and the informational practices on college campuses (e.g., flyers
taped to bathroom stalls about hotlines or support groups). Far from
simply adopting this Western performance, Ai used her experience to raise
issues of sexuality with her students in China on their own terms. She
developed the Sex/Gender Education Forum and worked with her stu-
dents to adapt and produce a new and different version of the Vagina
Monologues—one that was fully Chinese. Moreover, she and her students
then participated in V-Day, a worldwide campaign that, in that year, sup-
ported Mexican women who had suffered from violence. While examples
such as these may be mistaken as proof of a U.S.-centricity, Ai’s account
helps to differentiate Western feminists’ imperialist efforts to bring gender
knowledge to others from Chinese feminists’ appropriation of Western
materials for their own purposes. In other words, close readings of such
moments of exchange work against seeing non-Western feminists as passive
recipients importing ready-made U.S. feminist ideas. Through Ai’s ac-
count we see a critical reflexivity at work in the active remaking of cultural
texts to create new meanings in different cultural and historical contexts.
Polish activist Barbara Limanowska became involved in the feminist
movement when she moved away from Poland in the early 1980s. Orig-
inally in the Netherlands for a two-week vacation, Limanowska stayed for
almost ten years and from there sought to work for Polish women’s rights.
Reflecting on her return to Poland in 1993, Limanowska described a
feeling of great possibility: “There was this sense that it was a real chance
to popularize feminism and turn it into a piece of this new social order”
(2005, 10). Disappointed with the conservative turn in postsocialist Po-
land, Limanowska currently works internationally on trafficking and hu-
man rights issues, collaborating with activists from both the East and West.
Jarjum Ete, the chair of the Arunachal Pradesh State Commission on
Women in Northeast India, talked about her experience at the NGO forum
during the Beijing conference: “In small places like Arunachal you feel at
times you are the only one who is so concerned but when you realise
there are other friends, other like-minded people all over the world, it

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904 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

gives you that kind of energy, the strength to go on, to move on. . . .
And Beijing especially gave me the exposure to, you know, the best part
that I learned from my Beijing experience, about the sexuality of women.”9
Liu Bohong, an important figure in the government-supported All-China
Women’s Federation, described her participation in international meetings
in the Philippines, Egypt, and Denmark and the “tremendous influence”
that these encounters had on her work (Liu 2002, 11). Abdulhadi de-
scribed her experience as a girl in Palestine when she saw an article about
Angela Y. Davis, a radical African American activist. Her mother referred
to Davis as a friend of Palestinians, and Abdulhadi began to understand
the importance of making such connections: “Because in Palestine you’re
not interacting with a whole lot of other people from other countries.
Little by little you start connecting, and you start seeing the intersections”
(Abdulhadi 2004, 12). The GFP interviews document many ways that
ideas about feminist activism travel within and between countries, some-
times in circuits that bypass the West and the United States.
The different organizational and financial structures available and the
different traditions of organizing also influenced how women developed
activist strategies in the four sites. The China site specifically explored the
development of NGOs, but infrastructure issues emerged in other coun-
tries as well. Joanna Regulska, a Polish interviewee who is a professor of
geography and was at the time director of the Department of Women’s
and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in the United States, described
her efforts to activate people in community politics and development
through the Local Democracy Development Foundation. Regulska found
it relatively easy to raise sufficient funds from international agencies for
development in Eastern Europe, but she encountered cultural barriers
that made her work difficult. She noticed, for example, that by the third
or fourth meeting of local development groups women stopped coming,
and she realized this was because women weren’t supported in this work.
Regulska recalled her response: “I said . . . : Enough is enough! If that’s
the case, I’m going to organize seminars just for women. Democracy is
great but that’s enough” (Regulska 2005, 9).
In India, despite strong state efforts to foster women’s participation at
every level of government, various forms of inequality hinder efforts at
women’s empowerment. Caste has been a formidable barrier to the im-
plementation of reserved quotas for women, especially at the village level.
Ete talked about cultural barriers to including women as well. Describing

9
Jarjum Ete, interviewed by C. S. Lakshmi, November 29–30, 2005, 23.

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 905

local programs through the District Rural Development Agencies, Ete

explained the limitations of those administering the programs. “The agen-
cies are not sensitised, in terms of their own personal orientations about
how to organise the women, how to teach them, how to help them, you
know, the hand holding techniques they also don’t seem to know. And
then also they themselves are perhaps not capacitated to . . . execute these
programmes.”10
Cultural barriers sometimes went hand-in-hand with financial struggles.
Ross of SisterSong talked about the important fight to get capacity-build-
ing grants for organizations composed of and devoted to women of color.
Many of the groups in the SisterSong network are predominantly vol-
unteer organizations, with few resources for infrastructure. Granting agen-
cies, however, often refuse to fund organizational needs. Ross told of a
$4 million grant from the Ford Foundation that SisterSong had threatened
to turn down if organizations could not use it for expenses such as staffing,
computer purchase, and so on. “We won that fight,” Ross recalled. “And
so the ability of a grantee to say, ‘Hell, no,’ was experienced by SisterSong”
(Ross 2006, 18).

Other aspects of feminist activism

The GFP documents the wide range of activities and goals of the women
interviewed, and the archive offers material to examine how particular
themes or issues are differently, and sometimes similarly, articulated in
these four contexts. For example, issues associated with control of
women’s bodies—particularly contraception and abortion—are discussed
in the interviews in terms of state policies in China and Poland and mostly
in terms of individual rights in the United States. The power of the human
rights frame for these issues arose in many interviews across all four sites—a
framing that also recasts the issue in much broader terms that include
women’s ability to determine the course and nature of their lives.
Another prominent theme among the interviews is political strategy.
The archive includes eloquent discussions of the use of law to secure
women’s rights as well as the inadequacy of legal change to create cultural
change. Interviewees in different sites also discussed the use of art to
explore political ideas and provoke political development. For example,
in India, Mahasweta Devi is a noted fiction writer who addresses the
suffering arising from gender, class, and other oppressions; she also

10
Ibid., 19.

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906 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

founded a magazine in which marginalized people write directly about

their problems and experiences rather than having them articulated by
others.11
The theater as a site of political activism was described in different ways
in each site. Perhaps more than in any other site, the Indian team inter-
viewed writers and artists who use art to engage political issues. Theater
director and English professor Mangai, for example, started a theater
group called Voicing Silence, which brings topics related to women’s rights
to street theater.12 As already noted, Ai used her adaptation of the Vagina
Monologues in Beijing to create new discussions about sexuality. Among
U.S. interviewees, Holly Hughes, a lesbian performance artist, uses the
stage to challenge conventional views about gender. Other modes of po-
litical theater address a public that is not open to feminist ideas in novel
ways. For example, in Poland, Agnieszka Graff described participating in
a “feminist terrorist attack” when a small group of women changed a
sexist ad campaign for Mobil Oil on billboards all over Warsaw by painting
over the “s” in the word “she,” shifting the derogatory connotation of
crazy women drivers in the advertisement onto men. Such “surrealist
jokes,” she noted, “bring . . . about some element of amazement and
amusement, so that people come to your side” (Graff 2005, 10–11). This
experience made her realize the importance of finding imaginative ways
to protest patriarchy (11).
Thematic analyses like these depend on the presence of archival material
addressing a particular topic. Just as salient, however, are issues that are
absent from the interviews. For example, issues of abortion and contra-
ception were rarely discussed in the Indian interviews, but issues of dowry,
harassment of women, and arranged marriages came up often. It would
be a mistake for users of the archive to conclude that reproductive rights
are not important to Indian feminists. Since the state actively promotes
contraception and since abortions are legal in India, feminist activists have
been fighting issues of reproductive rights on other fronts, such as the
use of ultrasounds for the purpose of sex selection, the selective abortion
of girl fetuses and female infanticide, and the dumping of inadequately
tested contraceptives on the Indian market by foreign multinationals. In-
dian feminists have sought to restrict the misuse of abortions and the
supply of such contraceptives through legal reforms, an approach that can
be understood only in this historically specific context. Many of these
issues, though important to a full understanding of feminist activism in

11
Mahasweta Devi, interviewed by Anjum Katyal, March 23–25, 2003.
12
Mangai, interviewed by C. S. Lakshmi, March 10–11, 2003.

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 907

a particular location, are not represented in the archived interviews; in

contrast, feminist activism by creative artists, efforts at legal reforms, and
developments in women’s studies are well represented.
It is possible for students and scholars to think about where and how
issues are framed within each of the sites, and what it may mean when
an issue does not appear to be present. Such silences sometimes reflect
the taken-for-granted salience of issues and successful movement outcomes
rather than a disregard for them. In some cases, the group of individuals
selecting interviewees may be drawing on an explicit or implicit set of
goals. In other cases, cultural norms may dictate narrative practices in the
interviews themselves. For example, U.S. and Polish interviewees were
mostly quite willing to engage in autobiographical narratives, but the
Chinese interviewees rarely did. Some topics that do not appear much in
the narratives, for example, discussions of class relations in Chinese in-
terviews (Wang and Ying 2010), may reflect cultural and political sensi-
tivities. Interpreting the meaning of what is present and absent, spoken
and unspoken, requires substantial historical and cultural knowledge.
Finally, it is important to note that the GFP interviews are not only
textual narratives but also visual documents. Each site adopted some con-
ventions that mark the site’s productions, and in addition there is variation
within each site. For example, the Polish site used a single, handheld
camera and created an extremely intimate setting for one-on-one con-
versations. The Indian site produced beautiful documentaries, filmed over
several days, with changes of location and dress. The U.S. site filmed in
a student-staffed film studio, with multiple cameras and a small live au-
dience that asked questions after the interview was completed. The Chi-
nese site’s films are more varied in style and approach, partly reflecting
the lack of a strong institutional stamp on the films. The GFP offers an
opportunity to analyze and consider how these different representational
choices and conventions reflect consequential cultural characteristics and
how these may have significant consequences for the viewers of the video
interviews. This archive invites reflections on how visual texts function as
a form of testimony in feminism, on what their appeal is in feminist ped-
agogy, and on the historically contingent nature of visual cultures. The
ways in which this audiovisual archive will be put to use in the classroom,
and its reception by students and wider audiences, will differ by location.
The representational conventions of Western popular culture, the cor-
porate media, national governments, and even feminist activists have often
converged on the figure of the third world woman as victim, exotic, not
free (Alloula 1986; Lutz and Collins 1993). They rely on visual rhetorics
and logics that are embedded in larger cultural fields of signification (Hes-

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908 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

ford and Kozol 2005), such that, for example, the image of the veil in
Western visual culture can be adequate in and of itself to symbolize this
“average third world woman” (Mohanty 1991, 56). Just as there is the
danger that these video interviews may reproduce such hegemonic rep-
resentations if they are read against a fixed register of freedom and yard-
stick of modernity (Ong 1988), there is also the danger that they may
reify what Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol describe as “a feminist
visual poetics about women’s resistance, strength and courage” (2005,
11). Despite the parallel and intersecting logic of the visual medium with
spoken and written text, the complexity and range of individual circum-
stance and paths to activism recounted in the oral narratives of activists’
life histories work against tendencies to romanticize feminist resistance
(Abu-Lughod 1990). Finally, the image of U.S. feminism is also enriched
by the interviews in this archive. We observed with delight that students
in India and Poland, who were shown some of the interviews with U.S.
participants, were surprised that some U.S. feminists were women of color
and that others expressed negative views about capitalism.

Conclusions
It is our hope that these interviews interrupt the perception of Western
and non-Western feminisms’ essential difference in the social imaginaries
of the various sites of their production and reception. The range of issues
that the ten interviews with U.S. feminist activists in our archive rep-
resent challenges received assumptions about the exclusiveness of U.S.
feminism’s focus on gender or on white middle-class women. While it
is certainly true that the concerns of white middle-class feminists have
historically dominated prominent Western feminists’ encounters with
non-Western feminists, it is equally true that this representation of
Anglo-American feminism has occluded and marginalized the multi-
plicity of concerns of activists and groups that have not been considered
part of the feminist pantheon (Sandoval 1991). In these activists’ bi-
ographies, we find the influences of Marxism, Black Nationalism, and
anticolonialism, among other ideologies. The interviews invite us to
uncover these influences hidden within the so-called hegemonic liberal
feminist space of U.S. feminism, exposing the degree to which U.S.
feminism is, and has been, influenced by global political movements.
These processes of “transculturation” (Cerwonka 2008) are evident in,
and may be uncovered through, the oral histories of the GFP interviewees,
enabling us to dislodge the evolutionary history of feminisms’ origins and
the privileged place that Western feminism has sometimes held in that

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 S I G N S Summer 2011 ❙ 909

narrative. For example, it is widely agreed that the foundational text of

post-1940s Indian feminism is a report that was produced by a govern-
ment-appointed Committee on the Status of Women in the mid-1970s,
titled “Towards Equality,” which exposed the failure of the new post-
colonial state in achieving women’s equality and documented the declining
status of women in the postindependence years (Committee on the Status
of Women in India 1974). Even though the authors of the report (in-
cluding GFP interviewee Vina Mazumdar) disavowed reading Western
feminist texts while writing the report in an effort to avoid the imposition
of paradigms from the West, feminist scholars have subsequently likened
its influence in India to that of Betty Friedan’s book in the United States
(e.g., Lal n.d.). Whether by unspoken design or proclaimed intent, each
iconic text in its own way was constructed or received in dialogue with
some “other” feminist politics on the horizon of its locution.
Another goal of our project was to provide opportunities for reflection
on the changing relationships between feminisms and women’s studies.
There has been much angst in the U.S. academic community over the
loss of a synergetic intimacy between movement politics and academic
feminism that existed in the early years of establishing women’s studies
in universities (Wiegman 2002). More recently, this distance between
academics and activists has been exacerbated by the chasm between (high)
theory and (grassroots) practice. The abandonment of movement politics
by institutionalized academic feminism is seen as a failure of women’s
studies, a failure that carries with it the implication that we should aim
to recover this lost historical relationship in the present (Wiegman 1999–
2000). It is our belief that the GFP archive provides a necessary com-
parative historical perspective for this dilemma and that it illuminates al-
ternative interpretations of and solutions to it. In each site we see vibrant
connections between activist organizations and academic feminism that
were documented and instantiated by our collaborators’ practices: from
Zadra, the feminist magazine published by our Polish collaborators at
eFKa (Fundacja Kobieca, or Women’s Foundation and Women’s Center)
in Kraków, to the audiovisual archives of the Indian feminist movement
maintained by our collaborators at SPARROW in Mumbai, to the mem-
bership of our collaborators at the Chinese Women’s University in Beijing
in the All-China Women’s Federation and many new NGOs that spearhead
nonstate feminism in China, to the activist academics and other movement
activist interviewees who were often personally known to members of the
U.S. site community at the University of Michigan.
We are pleased that this global multimedia feminist archive, a thor-
oughly collaborative and collective endeavor from the start, is available

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910 ❙ Stewart, Lal, and McGuire

on the World Wide Web in the public domain. Because of this easy mode
of access and circulation, we note, as we have stressed throughout this
article, that the interviews are rooted in place and require an understanding
of history and an appreciation of cultural difference. We hope that the
archive will provoke a scrupulously self-conscious, critical, and reflexive
use of these materials in developing transnational feminist perspectives on
women’s studies and movements. We also hope that the open access of
the archive to scholars and activists on the Web will enable its expansion,
as others build on and contribute to it, extending this collaborative work
across universities and nations. We are pleased that materials from the
archive are being used as teaching resources in women’s studies courses
at several universities in the United States and in other countries. Cir-
culating not only the interviews but also various uses of them promises
to engender a global feminist counterpublic (Mackie 2001, 188–89; see
also Stivens 2000, 9) in our classrooms and beyond, a counterpublic that
we see as an important aspect of the project. It is our hope that these
shared materials make it easier for feminist activists and women’s studies
academics to address fundamental issues of cultural difference as we seek
to “teach appreciation without apology and criticism without ethnocen-
trism” (Abu-Lughod 1998, 26).

Departments of Psychology and Women’s Studies

University of Michigan (Stewart)

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

University of Michigan (Lal)

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

University of Michigan (McGuire)

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