Transnational Feminism and Medieval Futures: The Cartographic Imaginary in Christine de Pizan’s Chemin de long estude

If the logic of imperialism and the logic of modernity share a notion of time, they also share a notion of space as territory.… Witness especially, the “war against terrorism” after the events of 11 September 2001. The borders and autonomy of nation-states, the geographies of nationhood are irrelevant in this war, which can justify imperialist aggression in the name of “homeland security” of the United States. Even the boundaries between space and outer space are not binding any more. In this expansive and expanding continent, how do I locate myself?

—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders

In 1938, Virginia Woolf published a small collection of essays entitled Three Guineas. In the third essay, she hypothesizes the response a woman might make if requested to donate money to help preserve “culture and intellectual liberty” in the face of the impending world war. This hypothetical woman—the daughter of an educated man who has been denied education herself—replies: “‘Our country’…throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. ‘Our’ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner.” She proceeds to declare: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”¹ As an elite subject residing in the metropole, Woolf certainly enjoyed all the privileges of empire, yet she insists that gender trumps nation in this formulation that sounds almost treasonous in a wartime context. In another empire, on another continent four decades later, Gloria Anzaldúa echoes Woolf when she locates the mestiza:

As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it.²

Both Woolf and Anzaldúa start from the assumption that gendered identity negates national identity, and both thereby set the stage for Chandra Mohanty’s resonant question, “How do I locate myself?”

With their origins in two distinct colonial/imperial peripheries—India and Mexico—Mohanty and Anzaldúa argue for a transnational feminism that would incorporate a critique of postcoloniality as well as an analysis of the economic effects of globalization on the constructions of genders and the performances of sexualities. As Anzaldúa suggests, nonnormative sexualities often gain legibility as identifications beyond the space of the nation and the category maintenance work performed by race.³ If transnational feminism challenges the modern reader to look beyond national boundaries, it does not posit a universal sameness for gender but insists instead that gender be seen in relation to a cross-cultural network of economic, religious, linguistic, and social exchange. To that end, the discourses of transnational feminism have sought “a shift from a focus on identity as category to a focus on identification-with,” in the words of Alison Weir.⁴ Weir argues that “we need to imagine and practice identifications with others that are not about establishing sameness (and do not involve projection or incorporation) but that are about creating connection.”⁵ While such an approach addresses the interrelations of the present, any consideration of the past usually extends back only to the period of decolonization; the historical textures of gender and desire are consequently overlooked. But if we juxtapose the discourses of transnational feminism to the textual traditions of the Middle Ages—the period before the formation of the modern nation-state but in the shadow of an ancient imperium—we find transregional as well as transtemporal negotiations of gendered...