Rethinking Transnational Feminism

Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power is essential reading for feminist scholars, scholars doing interdisciplinary work, and feminist activists.¹ Leela Fernandes’s complex, nuanced, and detailed work on transnational feminism forces us to critically interrogate the category “transnational feminism” while evaluating the possibility of an international women’s alliance and the notion of universal sisterhood. Moving away from a simplistic critique of universal patriarchy, Fernandes argues for a critical transnational feminism that is located in the intersections of inequality, culture, power, and knowledge. Drawing attention as well to the intersection of local and global inequalities, Fernandes urges us to be mindful of the ways in which women’s locations across the globe are embedded within transnational inequalities, particularly those linked to colonial relationships of power and structures of global capitalism.

Fernandes argues that the nationalist feminist imagination in the United States continues to be preoccupied with stereotypical images of Third World women and issues of cultural difference symbolized by female genital mutilation and veiling, for example. This preoccupation provides the context for her powerful criticism of nationalist-centric feminism and underlines its limits for conceptions of transnational feminist activism and scholarship. Stressing the interdisciplinary nature of transnational feminist scholarship while moving away from the notion of “global feminism,” Fernandes emphasizes the importance of a cautious approach to transnational feminism. Going beyond a rescuer mentality in outsider advocacy, the book raises important questions of whether and when we can speak for others. Must there always be an “authentic voice”? Rather than arguing that one can never speak up for others, Fernandes suggests that it is necessary to interrogate the theoretical and political assumptions of a “rescue” agenda. Fernandes does an excellent job of unsettling the opposition between theory and practice and convincingly argues that knowledge production is itself a form of practice. Interrupting the dichotomy between theory and practice, she suggests that universities and academic sites are closely linked with civil society and counter-hegemonic political projects and struggles.

Fernandes notes that even when transnational feminist scholarship is attentive to complex power relationships, questions of speaking for others and representation invariably arise, leading to the resultant familiar epistemological paralysis. Her book focuses on better understanding how we may move beyond epistemological discussions of the power inequalities of transnational knowledge production. This leads her to a discussion of knowledge production as an ethical practice. Fernandes make the important point that feminists are concerned ultimately with questions of power relations and that the feminist concern with addressing questions of inequality, power, and justice is itself an ethical project. At the same time, she recognizes the necessity of moving beyond the knowledge-epistemology debate to a more concrete examination of these questions through a study of ethics and its relationship to knowledge and power. Thus, she moves out of the purely discursive-epistemological realm and brings a practice-oriented approach to knowledge production. Fernandes’s approach to knowledge production problematizes culture as a category and weakens arguments that seek to deploy culture to suit particular political interests.

Finally, Fernandes challenges the institutionalization of transnational feminism that lies within the academy. Focusing on womens’ studies and transnational feminism, the central concern of this book is with knowledge as practice, with implications for other fields of study as well. This book takes a critical look at transnational feminism and provides a thoughtful and insightful challenge that unsettles any (inter)disciplinary complacency in doing transnational feminist work. An excellent book that contributes significantly to our understanding of the perils and promise of transnational feminism, Leela Fernandes’s Rethinking Transnational Feminism is well worth reading.