Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power by Leela Fernandes (review)

As an activist and academic, I have had numerous debates around women’s rights and empowerment. For those who prioritize social justice ideals, it becomes our duty to ask important questions about women’s rights, access, and accessibility. Within a predominantly Western realm, this is further complicated when we begin to discuss how these ideas impact women in different countries. My expertise is often called upon to answer and consider matters of “oppressive regimes” on women of color overseas, for example, how veiling, violence, and religion are seen to impact these women. Often these conversations are under the guise of a concerned feminist debate around transnational issues, but these conversations always leave me feeling uncomfortable and searching for a way out. This remains a constant, and as a result it has left me searching for a better way to understand, evaluate, and access arguments that explore the need for women living in the global North and their understandings of the cultural customs of women in the global South.

Leela Fernandes’s Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics and Power provides a solid argument that helps us understand the Western obsession with the exotic “other.” Within the collection of essays in her book, she has the controversial goal of unsettling the nationalism in transnational perspectives by considering the underlying national narrative within feminist critiques, as well as a goal of questioning how this has been institutionalized within the field of women’s studies. In the book, she looks at how transnational feminism is akin to the globalization of feminism. Fernandes notes that it seems as though transnational has simply replaced former buzzwords like “international” or “global” to signify women outside of the United States; however, there is something more complicated to unearth in these definitions. Such an understanding of transnational feminism is an imperative and prevalent theme within the book, as it asks how we produce, consume, and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States (3). What kinds of questions are we asking, and how are we perpetuating this knowledge through a potentially unintentional American lens? Even though the focus has shifted outside of American soil, how are these ideas perpetually centering American ideals? This is clearly demonstrated by the obsessive focus of Western transnational feminists on specific international and cultural issues such as veiling and genital mutilation when addressing global feminist concerns. Fernandes illustrates these ideas through poignant discussions of the war on terror and the American-centric rhetoric in women’s studies, among other examples. Ultimately, she makes a strong argument for how transnational has become a way to discuss the “outsider” and create a marker of difference among international and racialized bodies outside of the United States.

Fernandes has two interrelated objectives within her book. The first is to unsettle the nationalist discourse within the paradigm of transnationalism. The second purpose is to use this discussion of transnationalism to question interdisciplinarity and to find ways to unsettle the institutionalized rhetoric cementing interdisciplinary fields such as Women’s Studies. Fernandes’s primary assumption is that “knowledge matters and that discursive practices that circulate within the academy have real implications and effects” (23). In addressing transnational feminism, she takes up three major themes: 1) visual knowledge and its implications, 2) disciplinary regimes within the academy, and 3) “the relationship and contradictions between power, knowledge and ethics” (24).

Throughout the essays, Fernandes takes up important themes such as the war on terror and how this war has become synonymous with a war for women’s rights. Through this manipulation of language and violence, women’s rights advocates inadvertently became advocates for war. This then calls into question the authentic subaltern figure—who she is and how she is represented within the media. She focuses on transnational cultural production through the films like Slumdog Millionaire and Bandit Queen and the books they were based upon. Using these media, she looks at how...