Introduction

Our Intellectual Coming Together

This special issue began as a set of overlapping conversations among an interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars whose work centered political economy and performance; postcoloniality and empire; racialization and indigeneity; as well as traversed borders of nation, ideology, space, and time. Our intellectual praxis unfolded at the intersections of transnationalism and feminisms, yet the field of "transnational feminism" as it has been defined and institutionalized in the academy in the 1990s conjured frameworks and definitions that were ill-suited to contain the scope of our inquiries. Many of the questions we asked individually and collectively—How did transnational feminism relate to women of color and black feminist genealogies? Could transnational feminism decenter the Global North as a touchstone or default comparative for women's experiences worldwide and include geographies that were Pacific, African, Latin American, and Caribbean? What was the potential of transnational feminism to shed light on ongoing settler colonialism in North America?—stretched the boundaries of transnational feminism. Our conversations grew as new people from graduate students to activists to senior scholars from a multiplicity of places and fields brought new questions from different sites of engagement.

We came together in multiple configurations, trying to engage multiple networks of scholars and pull in new people at every turn, yet ever conscious of all the intellectuals inside and especially outside the United States who were missing, to think together about how to productively destabilize transnational feminist frameworks. At the Ohio State University, some of us worked to put together a "Thinking Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute" in 2014, defining transnational feminism as a "quickly growing but contested field" fraught with "potentialities and continued erasures." Eighty participants collaborated and engaged in dialogue for a week in this feminist summer camp.¹ A special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies grew out of this initiative.² Some of us worked to establish a Transnational Feminisms Caucus at the National Women's Studies Association Conference. At the University of Michigan, some of us crafted a collaborative research seminar on Radical Transnational Feminisms, sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Under the umbrella of the University of California Research Institute some of us designed a research cluster called Rethinking Transnational Feminism with the goal of attending to labor, centering Africa and the Americas, borderlands and indigeneity, as well as examining the "transformative impact of activism on transnational feminist scholarship." The effort has included a symposium and will potentially result in an edited volume.³ These burgeoning networks have coalesced publicly on social media in the Thinking Transnational Feminisms Facebook group, a robust and international space where hundreds of scholars and activists share calls for papers, articles on contemporary politics, and publication announcements.⁴ This special issue is part of this intellectual ecosystem.

The work in this volume adopts a critical stance in relation to the "nation" in transnational feminism. From the outset, we have sought to center Indigenous Studies and Native feminisms as crucial to the solidarities and politics we are interested in, and that inevitably makes the whole Westphalian "nations" framework that grounds "transnationalisms" deeply problematic. Whether we are thinking about the Americas or a great many other places, starting with Native feminism reminds us that the violence of the settler colonial project is at the heart of the nation. Thinking of "transnationalism" as kinds of solidarity across tribal nations, or conceiving of the United States as a nation of nations only uneasily resolves this problem. Further, for those of us interested in the island-territories that make up regions in the Pacific or the Caribbean, places whose legal status has names like Department, Commonwealth, Land, Territory, Municipality—anything but colony, even when they are under the administration of sovereign nations, often far away—speaking of the "transnational" makes only the most limited kind of sense.

Our understanding of transnational feminism rejects imperial feminisms and neoliberal constructs, and remains attuned to the nuances of power and privilege that shape political exchanges and can obscure non-EuroAmerican axes of knowledge. We see the potential of a radical transnational feminist framework...