Problematics of Transnational Feminism for Asian American Women

WITNESSING THE TRAJECTORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THESE DAYS confirms my belief in the necessity of psychic transformation, especially after the U.S. declaration of a "war on terrorism" in response to 9/11. The intensification of U.S. imperialist efforts to eliminate any geopolitical influence that would get in the way of its campaign to achieve global dominance demonstrates the failure of military force to attain world peace. If we are to create international relations based on mutual cooperation, then Americans need to move beyond jingoism and self-serving protectionism and embrace a consciousness about global interconnections, between nations, within nations, and between people and the natural environment. The shock of "9/11" represented for so many Americans the bursting of their "national security" bubble, supported by a general ignorance of U.S. foreign policy, as well as providing a rationale for throwing uncritical support behind U.S. military aggression abroad in order to punish those foreign "evil-doers." Moreover, many patriotic Americans turned a blind eye to the way the U.S. government eventually bullied its way into Iraq, in spite of a lack of United Nations (UN) support, in order to further its oil and other economic and geopolitical interests in that part of the world (Mathis 2003), all justified in the name of an "international coalition" to more easily hide their government's rogue tactics. The fact that most Americans did not respond to this wake-up call by demanding instead that the U.S. government change how it relates to other nations means that we first need to have honest dialogues about the issues within this nation's own backyard that lead to such different visions of international community, if we are ever to bring about true transformation of global consciousness.

My essay attempts to contribute to a dialogue about the meaning of international community by examining efforts to create solidarities based on gender across national boundaries, particularly postmodernist trends in transnational feminism, from the critical perspectives of Asian American women, whose dual experiences of racialization and gendering necessarily problematize easy unions. I would like to begin by explaining my own positioning within this dialogue as an Asian American woman scholar of critical race theory and gender, whose formal education in women's studies allowed me to experience first-hand what Audre Lorde (1983) called "racist feminism" (100). But reading texts like This BridgeCalled My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983) reinforced my faith in the affinities among women of colorand Third-World women outside those legitimized by Anglo feminism, as well as our ability to think beyond any paradigm that attempts to limit our visions by invalidating our experiences. ¹ During the 1980s, remarkable statements like Chrystos's (1983), "I no longer believe that feminism is a tool which can eliminate racism—or even promote better understanding between different races and kinds of women" (69), encouraged me to look beyond conventional gender frameworks by drawing from the experiences and perspectives of Third-World women. ² Now, I write as one who understands the value of mobilizing solidarities aimed at transforming, at once, sexual, racial, socioeconomic, and colonial hierarchies, and as one who has also witnessed the conflicts and huge perspectival diversity within U.S. women's and feminist studies. I learned that women of all backgrounds and affiliations may do "feminist" work, but we do not all agree about issues of gender. I assume those ruptures cannot (nor should they) be easily transcended for the sake of "sisterhood." Consequently, I am somewhat surprised at how a certain postmodernist ³ trend in academic feminist discourse called "transnational feminism" seems so quickly to have replaced critiques of feminism by women of color, which argued for an intellectual and political incorporation of racial-gender diversity and its significance in shaping our respective communities. In other words, I learned that even as the labor and subjectivities...