Teaching Note Teaching Intersectional and Transnational Feminisms through Fiction and Film

The terms intersectional and transnational are widely misunderstood and misused by academics. The first—intersectionality—has become a buzzword, not only in feminist courses but also in mainstream disciplines and areas of research. Those of us who have been committed to complicating liberal white feminism and calling for a nuanced feminist praxis premised on a politics of location ought to be celebrating this as a success. After all, following the call of critical black and transnational feminists, we have been insisting on the necessity of such an approach. Some of us find ourselves, however, increasingly reluctant to identify with what the term has come to signify. As sociologist Sirma Bilge has observed, although the concept emerged as a vital lens through which to explore how social inequalities shape one another, the mainstreaming, and indeed whitening, of intersectionality has resulted in its depoliticization. Bilge's much-needed critique resonates for me deeply. In recent years I have noticed that the term gets applied casually to work that pays lip service to race, sexuality, or class in gender-based analyses. More troubling, the term has become a shorthand way for people to signal that they know and "get" antiracist feminist critiques and that this exempts them from interrogating certain works more closely. The result is that people (including undergraduate students) assume they know what intersectionality is long before they have been properly trained in it as a theoretical and methodological framework.

When applied to feminism, the term transnational is also often erroneously used. Too frequently, it is invoked when referring to women elsewhere (especially in developing countries) or to advance some version of the liberal cultural relativism argument. Indeed, these misuses of the term undermine the very premise of the feminist theorists who first advanced a transnational feminist analytic that was intended to disrupt neocolonial feminisms (Alexander and Mohanty; Anzaldúa; Gopinath; Grewal and Kaplan Introduction, Scattered; Puar; Razack; Shohat; Trotz).

In addition to the widespread misunderstandings and oversimplifications of these critical frameworks is the false separation between the two. Indeed, often missing from the discussion of intersectional frameworks are the crucial contributions of transnational feminist thinkers who have insisted that we examine how systems of power are implicated in both the local and global and that our lives and efforts are connected to those of people elsewhere. This aspect is best expressed by Avtar Brah, whose work on the role of gender in diaspora has prompted her to call for what she refers to as "cartographies of intersectionality" (10). More recently, Dawn Rae Davis has promoted a pedagogical approach that intrinsically re-links intersectionality to transnational feminist methods in order to reveal "the combined effects of structural, institutional, and ideological axes intersecting along various trajectories of history, culture, materiality, and practice" (143). Persuaded by these thinkers, rather than see intersectional and transnational feminism as separate approaches, I want to encourage students to see them as mutually informing and as frameworks that can stand in for one another.

My concerns about the common misunderstandings of intersectional and transnational feminism have led me to try new and innovative approaches to teach undergraduate students in ways that capture what I see as the key and overlapping elements of these frameworks. In recent years, I have experimented with two non-academic texts that have facilitated my ability to teach these frameworks in ways that disrupt both superficial understandings and the false division of intersectional and transnational approaches. In what follows, I offer an autoethnographic account of my pedagogical uses of these texts (Coia and Taylor). The texts are a semi-autobiographical documentary film produced in 1998 by the National Film Board of Canada entitled Desperately Seeking Helen and a more recent (2014) young adult novel called Faerie (2014), both by Eisha Marjara. As I will show, they are lucid texts for exploring intersectional transnational feminisms.

Diaspora, Fantasy, and Displacement

The semi-autobiographical docu-drama Desperately Seeking Helen presents an account of a trip that Marjara makes to India as an adult, and as the film title suggests, one dedicated, at least on the surface, to seeking out Helen...