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1. Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity: Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World in a Globalized World
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1 Va n da n a s h i Va a n d t h e R h e to R i c s o F b i o d i V e R s i t y Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World Eileen E. Schell In “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Wendy Hesford examines how “scholars in rhetoric and composition studies are meaningfully contributing to conversations about the pressures of globalization and the consequences of the new US nationalism.” Hesford’s examination of the “global turns” in rhetoric and composition —the turn to “global studies and transnational cultural studies”—is an important one as she surveys a wide swath of recent scholarship in the field: “nearly forty books nominated for the 2005 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and a number of other sources.” As Hesford argues, we need to pay “particular attention to the methodological challenges we face as we turn toward the global.” She urges scholars to consider how we engage in “an imagined global geography in rhetoric and composition studies,” and how we “imperil or safeguard disciplinary identities and methods that take for granted the nation-state and citizen-subject as units of analysis and ignore the global forces that shape individual lives and literate practices” (788). Hesford’s thoughtful assessment of the “global turn” in rhetoric and composition studies brings with it important insights to feminist rhetorical studies as well. How are feminist rhetorics being practiced to reflect a geopolitical feminist orientation? How can we factor transnational feminist rhetorics and rhetoricians into our discussions of difference in a US context? How can we affirm and engage in difference in a transnational rhetorical context? Living in a globalized context means we interact and transact across the borders of the nation-state. We engage in what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan call “transnational cultural flows” of bodies, goods, labor, knowledge, and capital (17). Therefore, our definitions and enactments Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity 31 of rhetorics and feminisms must begin to account for transnational contexts , the ways in which “any local formation is shaped in part by the presence of global forces within it” (Friedman 26). In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Mohanty comments on “the kinds of feminist methodology and analytic strategy” that are needed to create a “transnational anticapitalist feminist critique.” Mohanty speaks of the position and perspective that a transnational feminist analytic provides. First, it foregrounds “historical materialism and centralizes racialized gender.” Secondly, it “begins from and is anchored in the place [and the rhetorical situation] of the most marginalized communities of women—poor women of all colors in affluent and neocolonial nations; women of the Third world /South or the Two-Thirds World.” A transnational feminist rhetorical analytic involves a process of “reading up” rather than down the ladder of privilege, thus making “the politics of knowledge and the power investments that go along with it visible so that [feminists] can then engage in work to transform the use and abuse of power” (231). Finally, those practicing a transnational feminist analytic engage in cross-border organizing work, building linkages and “feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, and belief” (250). Thus, transnational feminisms involve significant attention to rhetorical advocacy work. Building linkages and solidarities, however, requires an understanding of transnational cultural flows, the ways in which bodies, labor, and capital move (or not) across borders and the ways in which gender is part of that equation (Grewal and Kaplan 17). Grewal and Kaplan warn, however, that if Western feminists wish to understand transnational linkages and build solidarity, they must “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations.” Without a strong understanding of those material conditions, feminists will not know how “to construct an effective opposition to current economic and cultural hegemonies that are taking new global forms. Without an analysis of transnational scattered hegemonies that reveal themselves in gender relations, feminist movements will remain isolated and prone to reproducing the universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures” (17). Grewal and Kaplan’s eloquent call to consider the politics of transnational cultural flows pushes those of us who do feminist rhetorical analysis to consider our understandings of the “transnational scattered hegemonies ” at work across the globe, but also in feminist rhetorical studies, which has taken as its focus American and European rhetorical contexts, [54.242.220.142] Project MUSE (2024-04-10 22:08 GMT) 32...