Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

1. Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis

23 ❰ 1 ❱ Cartographies of Knowledge and Power Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis M. JACQUI ALEXANDER AND CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY This essay is one moment in the process of almost two decades of thinking, struggling, writing, and working together in friendship and solidarity as immigrant women of color living in North America. Each of us has been involved in collaborative work in and outside the academy in different racial, cultural, and national sites—and we have worked together in scholarly, curricular, institutional, and organizing contexts. For us, this collaboration, over many years and in these many sites, has been marked by struggle, joy, and the ongoing possibility of new understandings and illumination that only collective work makes possible. More than a decade ago, we embarked on a feminist collaborative project that resulted in the collection Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Routledge 997). Its main purpose was to take account of some of the most egregious effects of the political economic impact of globalization , what we called then capitalist recolonization—the racialized and gendered relations of rule of the state—both its neocolonial and advanced capitalist incarnations, and to foreground a set of collective political practices that women in different parts of the world had undertaken as a way of understanding genealogies of feminist political struggles and organizing. Our methodological task here was quite steep for the inheritance of the “international” within women’s studies, particularly its U.S. variant, provided little analytic room to map the specific deployment of transnational that we intended Feminist Genealogies to encapsulate, especially since we saw that the term international had come to be collapsed into the cultures and values of capitalism and into notions of global sisterhood. How, then, could we conceptualize transnational to take globalization seriously while at the same time not succumb to the pitfalls of either free market capitalism or free market feminism? 24 M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty Feminist Genealogies drew attention to three important elements in our definition of the transnational: ) a way of thinking about women in similar contexts across the world, in different geographical spaces, rather than as all women across the world; 2) an understanding of a set of unequal relationships among and between peoples, rather than as a set of traits embodied in all non-U.S. citizens (particularly because U.S. citizenship continues to be premised within a white, Eurocentric, masculinist, heterosexist regime); and 3) a consideration of the term international in relation to an analysis of economic, political, and ideological processes that would therefore require taking critical antiracist, anticapitalist positions that would make feminist solidarity work possible (997: xix). In the decade since the publication of Feminist Genealogies, there has been a proliferation of discourses about transnational feminism, as well as the rise of transnational feminist networks.2 Within the academy, particular imperatives like study abroad programs in different countries, the effects of Structural Adjustment Programs on public education globally, the (now lopsided) focus on area studies in geographical spaces seen as crucial to knowledge production post 9/, and the rise of new disciplines like terrorism studies and security studies can all be read as responses to globalization that have concrete transnational contours. Transnational studies in the academy often dovetail with more radical impulses in social movements, and given the place of transnational feminist studies in the academy at this moment, we have embarked on another large collaborative project, this time seeking to map a genealogy or archeology of the transnational in feminist and LGBTT/queer studies in the United States and Canada. To this end we pose a set of questions that can probe the definitions of transnational feminism in relation to globalization (local/global/regional) and the operation of the categories of gender, race, nation, sexuality, and capitalism. We want to explore what the category of the transnational illuminates—the work it does in particular feminist contexts—the relation of the transnational to colonial, neocolonial, and imperial histories and practices on different geographical scales, and finally we want to analyze the specific material and ideological practices that constitute the transnational at this historical juncture and in the U.S. and Canadian sites we ourselves occupy. When is the transnational a normativizing gesture—and when does it perform a radical, decolonizing function? Are cultural relativist claims smuggled into the transnational in ways that reinforce binary notions of tradition and modernity? Cartographies of Knowledge and Power 25 A number...