Transnationalism and Women of Color Courses: Diversity, Curricula, and New Pedagogies of “Race”

Introduction

This essay argues for new pedagogies of “women of color” courses in light of the “transnational turn”¹ of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGS) departments in the U.S.² I use the transnational turn in WGS to refer to the increased presence of scholarship about/on contexts outside the U.S.—specifically, a narrowly defined “third world”—and, by extension, the hiring of faculty from these contexts.³ These contexts, as they stand in WGS, include South and Southeast Asia, most of Africa, Central America, and parts of the Middle East and of Latin America that are understood as non-Western in their cultural and political ecologies.⁴ Broadly, the transnational turn in academic disciplines can be best understood as methods and theoretical frameworks that introduce new ways of understanding subject formation, cultural production, and political engagement. These revisions challenge the presumption of the West’s centrality in academic research questions by complicating traditional Western comparative methods, models, and theories that produce/d limited West-centric views. Within WGS more specifically, the transnational turn has led directly to interrogations and re-theorizations of what constitutes feminism, who the feminist subject is, whether universal gender oppression and universal patriarchy are viable conceptual models, and whether certain feminist research methods are liberatory, or, in fact, deeply implicated in uneven power relations.

Initially, women of color courses addressed the absence of race as a crucial factor in considerations of gender within WGS (Moallem); since the 1990s, transnational inquiries entered the curriculum to introduce the “non-West” as yet another epistemological corrective to feminist inquiries of race that were, up to then, West-centric, as we see in the case of women of color inquiries. However, just as “women of color” came to be associated with nonwhite women⁵—not a stretch given the identity political history of the term in the U.S.—transnational scholarship, too, has come to be explicitly and implicitly marked as “race” research, and transnational women faculty⁶ as “women of color” faculty. This characterization of transnational research and faculty may be, politically speaking at least, appropriate, but requires further historicization so as to not make the two substitutable. The dehistoricized logic of the simplistic formulation “race equals nonwhite” is an unfortunate outcome of race-based identity political work and action within imperialist history and present. More problematically, the logic of the characterization of the transnational as about “race” in the current academic climate of attenuated or reduced faculty lines at many midlevel institutions leads to the hiring of transnational scholars in many WGS departments as “women of color” faculty lines. The blurring of lines between U.S. minority women faculty and transnational faculty, and the accompanying histories of these self-named identity groups not only seriously undercuts questions of equity and representation, but also reduces “race” to phenotype and/or geography, which has produced egregious deployments of racial identity politics by different cultural groups (as well as by institutions, of course). When transnational faculty teach either women of color courses or transnational feminisms, or both, the assumption is always that these courses are about “race,” which would not be a problem in and of itself were it not for the fact that these types of courses get reduced to being the only spaces where race is addressed.

This essay describes and problematizes the consequences of conflating transnational women faculty and women of color faculty—terms that are not the same as transnational women and women of color, although in the latter case, I do sometimes use the terms interchangeably with the understanding that we are talking about the academic context and faculty. This essay makes a case for why and how revising women of color courses addresses the progressive de-historicization of the identity politics of women of color. As the political theorist Wendy Brown argues, the de-historicization of political movements is exactly the reason for the unmooring of political from intellectual life today. Brown attributes this unmooring to the skepticism of certitudes within the deconstructive ethos of consumer capitalist liberal societies that disavows...