Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

2. Disavowed Legacies and Honorable Thievery: The Work of the “Transnational” in Feminist and LGBTQ Studies

46 ❰ 2 ❱ Disavowed Legacies and Honorable Thievery The Work of the “Transnational” in Feminist and LGBTQ Studies JIGNA DESAI, DANIELLE BOUCHARD, AND DIANE DETOURNAY Our aim in this essay is to examine the central debates of transnational feminism, treating it as a contested field of inquiry shot through with disagreements and productive tensions. How has the field congealed around certain keywords and concepts? How is our understanding of it being forged in particular arenas and via certain disciplines? This questioning is critical to the work of transnational feminism, not the least because the question of knowledge production itself has been a central facet (both implicitly and explicitly) of feminist analysis. Multiple feminisms have sought to interrogate the link between power and knowledge as a critical component of their critiques—questions regarding feminist knowledge production, raised by disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars alike, have named the imperial, capitalist, and racist genealogies of feminism itself. This commitment to interrogating the mode, location, meaning, and impact of knowledge has a long legacy within critical race feminism, postcolonial feminism, and transnational feminism. Transnational feminism has revitalized these discussions by focusing primarily on a particular domain of inquiry, namely on intersubjective relations of power as they affect collaborative knowledge production. And in doing so, it has advanced a line of inquiry that emphasizes a specific set of questions, primarily ones regarding ) the social acts of individuals as they negotiate their locations within institutional and state apparatuses and 2) the geopolitics of knowledge production. In order to do this, transnational feminists have sought to map the processes and cartographies of knowledge production most literally. Thus the language of the discipline of geography has come to dominate analyses of knowledge production, as transnational feminists use metaphors of cartography, boundaries, and border crossings to capture Disavowed Legacies and Honorable Thievery 47 the complexities of working through difference and material inequalities. This phenomenon of spatializing relations of power is one that, like all knowledge production, enables significant critiques and imaginaries, and indeed many of the contributors to this volume find this analytic particularly helpful (see in this volume Pratt et al., Barndt, and Silvey). But it also forecloses other possibilities for understanding the work of theory and praxis, the relationship between the two, and what transnational feminism’s commitment to either or both might be. We approach these questions regarding transnational feminist knowledge production from a different perspective and interdisciplinary framework. Our scholarship is primarily located in the humanities and reflects, therefore , a different set of questions. For us, this is not merely about pitting one set of transnational feminist scholars against another, but rather engaging differently with the debates in the field. We do so below by focusing on several concepts that have become “keywords” within transnational feminist discourse. While analysis of the micro-dynamics of specific transnational feminist projects is surely important, we also see the need for an examination of how the transnational and the feminist come to be available to the university as objects of knowledge. It is via such an examination that transnational feminism as a field of inquiry and critical practice might be able to address questions regarding intellectual and political responsibility in a way that looks carefully at the disciplinary languages that make our work possible and that on some level we must rely on, whether or not we are located “inside” or “outside” of the university. Despite the different path we wish to chart, we see our analysis as aligned with questions asked by other contributors to this volume. In “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis,” M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty point to the necessity of tracing a genealogy of the transnational, in both feminism and LGBTQ studies: We want to explore what the category of the transnational illuminates—the work it does in particular feminist contexts—the relation of the transnational to colonial, neocolonial, and imperial histories, and practices on different geographical scales, and finally we want to analyze the specific material and ideological practices that constitute the transnational at this historical juncture and in the U.S. and Canadian sites we ourselves occupy. When is the transnational a normativizing gesture—and when does it perform a radical, decolonizing function? (24) 48 Jigna Desai, Danielle Bouchard, and Diane Detournay This proposal is important for several reasons. Perhaps most crucially, it suggests a shift in emphasis away from the individual scholar’s or feminist...