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4. Regimes of Visibility and Transnational Feminist Knowledge
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
102 4 Regimes of Visibility and Transnational Feminist Knowledge T H E ST U DY O F transnational feminism is a historically specific paradigm that has emerged in response to the intensification of transnational flows associated with the contemporary epoch of globalization. The study of transnational feminism specifically arose in response to a growing emphasis on the limits of territorially bound nation-states in a range of studies and theories that sought to make sense of the impact of globalization. The limits of the nation-state were apparent in a number of realms. In economic terms, the movement of capital across borders (and the growing scale and power of transnational corporations), the dependence of a growing number of nation-states on economic support from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the growth of economic linkages through rapid movements of finance capital all seemed to point to a growing set of limits on the power of nation-states. The expansion of new technologies of communication has meant that the idea of the “imagined community” was no longer confined to the territorial borders of the modern nation-state.1 Meanwhile, social movements responding to global economic and political changes have used new technologies and transnational spaces of communication to develop new forms of transnational activism that built on but also exceeded local and national histories and practices of organizing. In the context of feminist research and practice, for instance, feminist activists crossed national borders to produce transnational forms of women’s organizing, and feminist researchers produced a rich scholarship on gender, globalization, and transnationalism.2 Such scholarship has not ignored or displaced the study of the nationstate . On the contrary, transnational feminist research has sought to develop critical analyses of the nation and has sought to explore the linkages between the local, national, and transnational realms of analysis. Transnational feminist studies of the nation-state seek to address how these new and distinctive spaces are reconfiguring and being shaped by local and Regimes of Visibility 103 national forces. The analytical cut embodied in this kind of transnational perspective is framed by a critical engagement with the nation-state. This approach to feminism is distinctive in the perspective that it has brought to the study of such questions and the way it has begun to displace existing approaches to the study of international and comparative feminist issues . The dominant paradigm of transnational feminism that has emerged in the U.S. academy is thus associated with a more specific set of analytical , theoretical, and political concerns.3 Comparative and international approaches to feminist research generally sought either to examine feminist questions within different national and cultural contexts or to address the relationships and interaction between women from various local and national backgrounds. In contrast, transnational feminist approaches rest on an assumption that there are new and distinctive spaces, sites, practices, and discourses that cannot or should not be grasped within the analytical lens of nations and states. Whether the analytical lens is framed in terms of the perspectives of local agents negotiating, resisting, or shaping such broader transnational forces, or in terms of an analysis of the transnational sites themselves (and their effects on local communities of women), what is consistent in such approaches is the identification of a distinctive transnational space or site around which such agencies unfold.4 The question that I address in this chapter asks, what have been the implications of this paradigm of transnational feminism for the nature and direction of feminist knowledge production? This question is particularly significant given the increasingly dominant status of transnational feminist perspectives. In interdisciplinary spaces such as women’s studies, feminist intellectual norms generally rest on the assumption that transnational approaches to the study of cross-national, cross-cultural questions represent a new, cutting-edge approach to interdisciplinary work. The result, as I argue in this chapter, is that the paradigm of transnational feminism has begun to serve as a framing device that orients feminist research within a particular set of methodological, substantive, and conceptual narratives. The analytical impetus of transnational feminist approaches to delineate new spaces that have moved beyond older formations associated with the territoriality of the nation-state has begun to discipline this paradigm in particular ways. First, the production of transnational feminism has become entrenched in a regime of visibility that shapes its terms and conceptions. More often than not, the new spaces that transnational feminist approaches identify are associated with specific...