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Transnational feminisms in question

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Feminist Theory Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) vol. 3(3): 313332. [1464-7001 (200212) 3:3; 313332; 029162]

Breny Mendoza California State University


Abstract The article interrogates transnational feminisms as a concept and as a practice. It frames its analysis using contemporary theories of globalization and the older concept of global sisterhood as a backdrop to the concept of transnational feminism. To assess the practical dimension of transnational feminisms, the analysis focusses on womens rights as a human rights movement and the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms. The article suggests that, although transnational feminisms (particularly feminist postcolonial theories) envision themselves in a new frame and see themselves as committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics, there are important gaps between the intentions (theory, tactics) and outcomes of their theory and practice. Keywords feminist movements, globalization, human rights, Latin America, postcolonialism

Introduction
In this article, I interrogate the meaning of transnational feminisms in two ways: rst, I ask about their theoretical soundness; and, second, I examine their political effectiveness at the practical level. I propose to do so because I remain preoccupied with deterministic claims of transnational solidarity between women without clarifying the grounds and conditions on which such transnational solidarity stands and occurs. Assuredly, the claim that many feminists make of the existence of an organic transnational solidarity between women underlying diverse systems of power circulates among different thematic and disciplinary domains. Similarly, the concrete struggle of women for a transnational solidarity occurs in different planes and settings, and their outcomes are of a variegated nature which makes my endeavor the more complicated. My own inquiry on the subject matter will focus mainly on determining the distinction between the new buzzword of transnational feminism and the old notion of global sisterhood. Thus, I will concentrate on the most recent theoretical strategies deployed within feminist postcolonial

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criticisms in western academia, as it is within these debates that transnational feminism has emerged as a differentiated notion from global sisterhood. I will also limit my analysis of transnational feminist practices to the debates of womens rights as human rights and to the experience of transnationalization of the feminist movements in Latin America, as they are the ones that are closer to my own transnational experience. Having said this, allow me to set the terms of this interrogation of transnational feminisms by rst laying out its points of departure and theoretical backgrounds. Implicated in the novel notion of transnational feminism is the desirability and possibility of a political solidarity of feminists across the globe that transcends class, race, sexuality and national boundaries. So far, the term transnational feminism would not differ much from its predecessor, global sisterhood, which First World, white, middle-class feminists used in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as we know, enough has been said about the deep divisions that class, race, sexual orientation and nationality produce among women, such that the notion of global sisterhood has been widely abandoned today. So what can the term transnational feminism mean at the beginning of the 21st century? Is transnational feminism a claried notion of global sisterhood? Does the transnational in transnational feminism signify a political form of consciousness and organization more t to negotiate the different positions and interests of women in an era of globalization? In a strictly literal and indexical sense, the term transnational feminism points to the multiplicity of the worlds feminisms and to the increasing tendency of national feminisms to politicize womens issues beyond the borders of the nation state, for instance, in United Nations (UN) womens world conferences or on the Internet. The term points simultaneously to the position feminists worldwide have taken against the processes of globalization of the economy, the demise of the nation state and the development of a global mass culture as well as pointing to the nascent global womens studies research into the ways in which globalization affects women around the globe. In this sense, transnational feminism takes its meaning from the discussions about globalization that have dominated intellectual work since the 1990s. But, foremost, it takes its meaning from Third and First World feminist theorizations on race, class and sexuality, and feminist postcolonial studies that make us aware of the articiality of the idea of nation and of its patriarchal nature. Yet again, transnational feminism also contains a more literal meaning based on the concrete experiences of transnational organizing of women across the globe. Such diverse connotations of the notion of transnational feminism make its meaning unclear to an important degree. For instance, is the transnational of transnational feminism what feminists do in global conferences and in cyberspace? Or should we call this global feminism to differentiate it from transnational feminism? Is it perhaps a shared context of exploitation and domination across the North/South divide that allows for a transnational solidarity? Or is the transnational in transnational feminism pointing to a potential solidarity of women in the North and South that can negotiate class, race, nationality and sexual identities due to specic, but still to be claried, circumstances put forward by the conditions of

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transnational capitalism? For instance, the juxtaposition of interests of women workers in the Third World and women consumers in the First World can be understood as a transversal point for transnational feminist politics. Or is the term transnational in transnational feminism again simply a code word for western feminist dominance in a worldwide feminist movement that is entangled in global networks? Or perhaps even a code word to refer to Third World feminisms? On what terms has the notion of transnational feminism come to replace the concept of global sisterhood and to differentiate itself from, say, global feminism? Does transnational feminist thinking analytically and politically resolve the tensions and contradictions that arise out of the recolonization effects of transnational capitalism? Or does it ignore and displace them or reconstitute them in its own eld of thought and action? Or are feminist transnational practices, as Grewal and Kaplan (1994) prefer to call transnational feminism, forms of alliance, subversion and complicity operating in a privileged inbetween space where asymmetries and inequalities between women can be acknowledged, sustained nevertheless to be critically deconstructed? How are we (Latin American feminists and our allies) to begin unraveling this complex notion of transnational feminism? Can we benet from its subversive potential from our specic locations in spite of its apparent potential to install repetition in rupture, as in previous forms of feminist ethnocentrism? As Edward W. Said has said, every idea or system of ideas exists somewhere and is mixed with historical circumstances. It is part of what one calls reality to the extent that not only do ideas describe a perceived reality, but they also constitute that reality materially (Said, 1997: 15). If we see things this way, we could say that the prex trans- of the transnational, used to denote current forms of feminist thinking and practice, corresponds to the system of ideas that invokes our sense of the contemporary which is embedded in todays globalization theories. In so being, it is pertinent to elucidate the idea of transnational feminism and to examine its political effectiveness by considering its provenance, descent and afliation with ideas of globalization and transnationalism. Of course, at the same time, it is of utmost importance to examine its particular afliations and departures from previous feminist ideas such as that of global sisterhood and the related idea of global feminism. On the other hand, it seems relevant also to examine feminist transnationalism in its practical dimensions. This would further our understanding of its subversive potential, its effects of power and ideological legitimacy, and allow us to determine the displacements it produces in relationship to other ideas, forms of organization and prior legitimacies (Said, 1997: 16). Let me begin by looking into the meanings of the global and transnational within globalization discussions in the West and later see to what extent they have informed the idea of transnational feminism.

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The global, the transnational


Ideas of the transnational and the global abound in western depictions and explanations of the contemporary world, but also increasingly outside the

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West. Most seem to be expressing an unprecedented interconnectedness between countries and peoples that has grown out of the spread of capitalism, the fall of socialism, the existence of the Internet and the new information and communications technologies. A set of terms has been created to refer to this so-called new global reality. Thus, people speak of globalization, transnationalism, multiculturalism, neocolonialism, neoimperialism and, most recently, simply empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Some of these terms can be viewed as successors of previous totalizing concepts such as that of the world system of Wallerstein, and others can be associated with old theories of imperialism such as those of Lenin and Luxemburg. But most contemporary global theorists would argue that there is a paradigmatic shift between these previous analyses of capitalism and imperialism and todays global and transnational thinking. In fact, some would afrm that what global thinkers mean today is a perfecting of imperialism (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Imperialism relied in the past on existing congurations of nation states and sovereign entities and on several competing capitalist powers. In todays conditions of globalization, the operations of capital through transnational corporations have unsettled national boundaries to such an extent that capital has transcended the authority of sovereign nation states and recongured their functions. Under the regime of globalization, transnational capital is creating a properly capitalist order whereby a single unitary supranational political power can gain sovereignty over the worlds nations and overdetermine the distinct centers of power of capitalism in a way it could not do previously. Hardt and Negri (2000) refer to this as imperial sovereignty, a form of sovereignty that functions not by force, but by the capacity to present itself as representative of right and order and of superior ethical principles that can be applied to all societies. This new form of sovereignty constitutes its own norms and legal instruments as well as an administrative apparatus and new hierarchies that pregure an imperial command over the entire world space. In Hardt and Negris view, the UN and its afliate organizations, but also certain transnational organizations of western civil societies, can be seen as the building blocks of this new supranational jurisdiction. For these reasons alone, they say, it would be most appropriate to think of globalization as a new form of empire instead of a continuation of imperialism. Others refer to this process as a form of recolonization or neocolonialism (see Jameson and Miyoshi, 1998). The talk of globalization, transnationalism and empire is not applied solely to the global reach of transnational capital; transnationalism is also used by many authors to refer to the new ows of culture (in all directions) that result from the current intensied mobility of people and ideas across national boundaries (Appadurai, 1996). In particular, postmodern and postcolonial thinkers base their analyses on diasporic populations that destabilize traditional notions of national identity and nationalism (Bhabha, 1994). Marxists using aspects of poststructuralism also believe that the deterritorialization of surplus value extraction in the industrial sector and the centrality that immaterial labor (communicative, intellectual) in the service sector has gained over material labor render traditional forms of internationalism and identities tied to a national territory obsolete (for example,

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Hardt and Negri, 2000). Thus, according to them, the growing miscegenation of individuals and populations and the social metamorphoses that increased migration and the Internet allow in cyberspace have created hybrid cultural elds that call into question dominant models of sex, race and gender. Although it is generally admitted that all these processes have complicated class structures and have intensied racism and heterosexism, many poststructuralists and Marxists alike believe that these global processes have also created the basis of a transnational solidarity that is unprecedented in the history of modernity and, as such, has a potential to undermine not only capitalism, but also racism and (hetero)sexism. In effect, globalization talk denotes as well the new forms of resistance that spring from the conditions of the globalization of capital and labor, such that it is inferred that a globalization from below is also taking place. Terms such as global civil society, transnational social movements, cosmopolitan democracy and global citizenship serve to emphasize the notion of overlapping, shared economic and political interests across national boundaries that have the potential to undo the asymmetries and contradictions that were previously insurmountable. These neologisms imply the need to create transnational forms of politicization from below to counter transnational capitals new forms of surplus extraction and supranational governance.3 The objective of constructing a virtual, imagined transnational community of diverse social movements is indicative of this sort of utopia of a globalized unied world of resistance where nations and national identities lose their symbolic and material force, and multiple hybrid identities pregure the postglobalization era of the future (Escobar, 1999). With the destabilization of the nation state as a xed territory of capital accumulation, of identity formation and as a place of struggle of peoples, an opposition between the local and the global is constituted whereby the global (or transnational) appears to gain precedence over the local.4 The global or transnational (these terms are used interchangeably here) becomes a privileged space to inect political meanings and strategies. Locations and places evaporate as inessential contexts of political struggle and economic surplus production. In this sense, only territorial points that are saturated by global forces such as zones with intense trafc of migrants, global assembly lines, nance capital ows, global media production, cyberspace, global institutions, conferences and so forth acquire a real social, political and economic signicance.5 Global cities like Los Angeles and New York or border spaces such as the border between Mexico and US could be seen as such territorial points and, of course, the Internet that place which is, par excellence, the non-place of all. In this form, politics becomes evanescent, dense and often a virtual activity. It appears to occur through ows, linkages, scapes and circuits and less through vertical lines. UN world conferences can be seen as prototypes of these global political interactions as well as the political networks on the Internet. Only when indigenous peoples or Third World women and feminists take their struggles to the Internet or the UN do they become politically signicant, but not in their local political manifestations of

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resistance. When the Zapatistas in Chiapas make their demands in cyberspace, their cause becomes transnational. What happens at the local level lacks in substance unless it hits cyberia or is hypermediatized and becomes a global spectacle. Consequently, it is not place per se, but the non-place of networks, ows, circuits the transcendence of geographical, social, economic, cultural and political locations that builds transnational politics and history. In this view, inevitably, those who operate at the global level must constitute the historical subjects of transnationalism or the process of globalization from below. The Third World immigrant in global cities, the global worker in free trade zones, the global activist, cyborg, queer migrant, transnational environmentalist or feminist represents the revolutionary and subversive agent of the era of globalization.

Transnational feminisms
Although many feminists adhere to what is postulated in contemporary globalization theories and transnationalism, as described above, some would see this overarching way of understanding globalization as a masculinist recuperation of Marxism and poststructuralism (Kaplan and Grewal, 1999: 352). Foremost, what this male transnational thinking leaves out, postcolonial feminists would say, is the gendered and patriarchal nature of the moribund nation state and nationalist politics and the reliance on the exploitation of Third World female labor of the global economy. And still others would add that the masculinist nature of the technoculture of the Internet is also overlooked. If globalizationist male thinkers obliterate the gendered nature of globalization, then feminists need to develop their own transnational theories to ll in the gaps that their thinking leaves open. However, feminists have always given their own coinage and history to terms such as globalism and transnationalism. Robin Morgans concept of global sisterhood, as we know, is frequently seen as a founding element of global feminism (Morgan, 1984; for a critique, see Mohanty, 1992). Assuming a universal patriarchy and a common experience of oppression of women around the globe, early feminists of the second wave believed that women could build a unied front against patriarchy by disregarding divisions of class, race, sexuality and national origin between women. And, more recently, Charlotte Bunch has reconstituted the notion of global feminism in an add and stir formula whereby diverse, local, and particularized womens movements (2001: 132) conglomerate into a global rainbow coalition against male discrimination and violence. But older concepts such as the housewization of work, developed by German socialist feminists (see Mies et al., 1988), also articulated a certain kind of feminist globalism. For instance, the idea that the conditions of womens housework were becoming a generalized form of labor exploitation under late capitalism and that this created a common context of exploitation and domination among women of the First and Third Worlds (and Third World peasants subsistence producers as well as marginalized urban dwellers) implicated a nexus that in many ways transcended national boundaries and

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even gender and class standpoints. Nevertheless, this nexus was encoded in an internationalist and Marxist framework rather than a global feminist one, and the context of imperialism was taken into consideration and not fully ignored as in a global feminism. Other Marxist feminist concepts such as capitalist patriarchy and dual system theories are also remnants of an imagined unied context of domination and exploitation of First and Third World women. These concepts presumably also build upon the potential of a political solidarity among women across the First/Third World divide because of the assumed universality of patriarchy and the gendered international division of labor as well as the salience given to the value of womens housework in the process of capitalist accumulation. Western feminist approaches to development present us with an interesting case of global feminism.6 Operating within the development paradigm that irrefutably attributes economic, cultural and political superiority to the West, development global feminists are not misled by illusory notions of equality, sameness and automatic solidarity between women of the First and Third Worlds based on a presumably shared gender oppression. On the contrary, western feminist development approaches rely on the notion of inherent inequality between women of the First and Third Worlds which produces a global feminism whereby First World feminists are positioned as saviors of their poor Third World sisters. To secure this position, they must rely, according to Mohanty (1991), on a homogenized version of women wherein no distinctions of class, race, ethnicity or sexuality exist on either side of the divide. So, in the end, what we have is a binary distinction between First and Third World women. Interestingly enough, global feminist solidarity becomes here an orchestrated process of gender planning conceived, directed (and even funded) by First World women in which Third World women learn to develop the capabilities they are missing to lead less oppressive and exploited lives. Thus, development becomes the grand equalizer between women in a world divided into developed, developing and less developed nations. In this manner, development becomes the substance of global feminist solidarity. It is important to note that this form of global feminist politics also shapes middle-class Third World feminisms that condone gender development approaches. Instead of resisting the imperializing effects of the development paradigm, Third World feminist developmentalists also repeat them in their own planning and mobilizing interventions in their respective countries. More recently, transnational feminist theorists who work within a postcolonial theoretical framework have rejected both the universalizing tendencies of these earlier feminist formulations of globalism and the reliance on binary myths such as the strict division of Third and First Worlds, the global and the local. Many also distance themselves from a Marxist analysis that grants capitalism an overdetermining role in the structuring of social reality and emphasize instead the cultural formations that underlie the global economy. According to them, the essentialism, Eurocentrism and exclusion of histories outside of capitalism as well as the discursive and cultural dimensions of power make many of these earlier

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theories inadequate to understand the historical and political congurations of the colonial and postcolonial worlds. On the other hand, they hold that the gender monotony, particularly of globalist feminist theories, constrains the analysis to power relationships between men and women and pre-empts a fuller understanding of the relationships between women from different races, classes, cultures and nations. These theorists tend to focus less on political economic issues and more on issues related to travel, immigration, forced removals, diasporas and asylum as well as travel for educational needs which then become privileged sites from which to analyze the encounters between women that were ignored in previous feminist global theories. To be sure, this revision of global sisterhood has produced a vast and rich literature that allows an intersectional analysis and a transversal politics not possible within a global sisterhood framework (see Basu, 1995; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Kaplan et al., 1999; Narayan, 1997). The major contributions that transnationalist postcolonial feminists have made to both masculinist versions of transnationalism and previous feminist globalism can be seen in their unveiling of the gendered, patriarchal, racialized and (hetero)sexualized character of nationalism. The use of the iconography of the family and blood ties to construct the national imaginary and the metaphoric use of woman as nation (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994: 22) stands in the middle of this feminist transnational postcolonial critique which demysties and dismantles anti-colonial and nationalist liberation struggles as male heterosexist constructs and as reconstitutions of male national power in the aftermath of colonialism. Interestingly, what this kind of analysis has enabled, at the same time, is the uncovering of the complicity of white women in the history of colonialism and imperialism.7 In sum, feminist transnational postcolonial studies have been able to call into question and destabilize the boundaries of nation, race, gender and sexuality that were built into earlier feminist internationalist and globalist theories and have revealed the complex relationship of national feminisms. They have made possible the analysis of gender, race and sexuality beyond the connement of national borders and generated the necessary spaces to establish the connections between women of different nations and cultures, but also of different feminisms. Moreover, they have enabled a notion of feminisms that take root outside of the West and that are not co-dependent on western feminisms. They have thereby exposed the asymmetries and inequities between women and the particularities of feminist movements that result from transnational postcoloniality and raised serious questions about the possibilities for feminist alliances across discrepant and distinct social conditions and historical axes (see Kaplan et al., 1999: 16). Instead of ignoring differences between women, romanticizing feminist global relationships (as global feminists would do) or assuming essential distinctions between First and Third World women, feminist transnationalists depart and theorize from these differences. While enabling these important insights and perspectives, the kinship of feminist postcolonial and transnational studies with male postcolonial

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theorists continues to perpetuate some of the problems of postcolonial theory. One of these is the refusal to include aspects of a Marxist framework in the construction of their texts. For example, they fail to develop the connection between gender, nation state and mobile transnational capital in political economic terms. How exactly do their theories address questions of economic inequity and redistribution and/or how is their politics of culture intertwined with the politics of economic redistribution? Even Spivaks eccentric use of classical Marxism or of terms such as the international division of labor, although extremely useful to connect political economic issues to cultural questions, leaves us in the end clueless about how transnational capitalism will be brought to bear on economic injustices at a local or global scale and how Third and First World feminists will strategize and coalesce against transnational capitalism. 8 Another related problem of transnational feminist postcolonial theorists is their attachment to poststructuralist analyses of cultural systems of representation. Their entrenchment in a postmodern critique of modernity and nationalism often leads them to instantiate their critique of the history of the nation in merely cultural terms.9 The notion of the nation as a gendered, racialized and sexualized imagined community is explained almost exclusively through its representational politics and performativity, overlooking the conguration of the nation state as a necessary territorialization of capitalist relations of production and class formation in specic moments in history. By setting up their argument in mainly cultural terms, such theorists occlude the processes of surplus value production, extraction and capital expanded reproduction in the formation of classes and reduce the concept of class to general notions such as inequalities and asymmetries instead of a category of economic exploitation. The erasure of the role of capitalism in the structuring of the nation state makes it very difcult to analyze class exploitation in conjunction with its transversality with gender, race and sexual formations across national boundaries and therefore impossible to envision the obstacles that prevent feminist alliances across these and other divides. Some feminist transnational postcolonial scholars advocate an integration of methodologies that bring together colonial discourse analysis, gender, political economy and the international division of labor analysis by making Marxism and poststructuralism compatible and not merely cohabiting in a palimpsest (see Kaplan and Grewal, 1999); Mohantys article Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts (1997) is a case in point. In her analysis of case studies of Third World women workers in three distinct geographical spaces (India, the USA and Britain), she demonstrates how ideological constructs such as domesticity, femininity and race contribute in all areas to dene Third World womens work as less valuable and thus more exploitable than mens, but also less valuable than western white womens work. In many places, we see how local, traditional and external capitalist patriarchal idiosyncrasies combine, transform each other and redene the meanings of womens work. We can follow the intricate dynamics of class, gender, race and sexual power systems in the process of surplus production and also in its transnational linkages to global capital;

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something Nancy Fraser attempted to do in her Justice Interruptus (1997), but could not succeed in because of the parochial nature of her analysis, the lack of attention to transnational economic structures or the EuroAmerican bias of her schema of economic redistribution and cultural recognition. Indeed, Mohanty (1997) not only recuperates the centrality of Third World womens work to transnational capital accumulation that masculinist globalization theories leave out, but also situates culture in terms of a global capitalism that many feminist postcolonialists leave untheorized. While masculinist transnational theorists emphasize the diminished importance of manufacturing work and give prominence to communicative, intellectual immaterial labor in the service sector, Mohanty stresses the importance of female labor in the manufacturing sector for transnational capital and the ways in which distinct local patriarchal cultures converse to facilitate Third World female labors economic exploitation. This allows her to reveal the transnational linkages between Third World women across national boundaries and conclude that potential for a transnational solidarity exists between them. However, because Mohanty uses an extended denition of Third World women by including Third World immigrant women in the West, transnationality and class alliances are limited to these women and the places they inhabit. Thus cross-class alliances between them and non-Third World women workers and/or class alliances between women workers in other sectors of the global economy or cross-class alliances between First World women consumers and Third World women workers do not t into this theoretical scheme of transnational solidarity. This may be in part because she wants to convey that what makes the citizen consumer idea possible in transnational capitalism is largely the work of Third World women, but also because she leaves untheorized the contradictions of class, race, ethnicity and sexuality between women within and beyond the connes of national borders. So what would be the basis of a feminist transnationalism that transcends class, race and national boundaries in Mohantys terms? Clearly, such a basis cannot exist within transnational capitalism under her terms. This is where Mohanty draws the line between her view of feminist transnational solidarity and previous understandings of global sisterhood that ignored differences between women. This may be reasonable not only because it de-essentializes women and takes away the demagogic overtones of global sisterhood politics, but also because it recuperates capitalism as a structuring force in the world and enables transnational postcolonial feminism to entertain political economic issues within their theories. Yet we are still left with a theoretical and political void to understand the transnational linkages between Third and First World women and to develop a feminist transnational solidarity that takes into account what divides women.

Transnational feminist practices


The difculty of building a feminist transnational solidarity across class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and nations becomes more evident if we move to

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the terrain of transnational feminist practices in the global political arena. For instance, western feminists working within the womens rights as human rights movement accuse feminists that emphasize womens differences of obstructing the recognition of womens rights as human rights in the global arena. Feminists like Susan Moller Okin argue that, while Third World feminists were busy negotiating with the UN for the inclusion of rape, domestic violence, reproductive rights violations, unequal opportunities for girls and women in education, employment, housing, credit and health care in the human rights charter, First World academics and also Third World feminist academics working in western universities were absorbed in obtuse theorizations of womens class, racial, sexual and national differences (Okin, 1998).10 Interestingly, she chooses Mohantys work to characterize this form of theorization as a blockade between western feminist scholars and Third World activists and to prove her point that, at the practical level, Third World feminists nd nothing but commonalities between women around the world. So, from this point of view, it appears that the real divisions between women are those that run between western feminist scholars and Third World feminist activists and not class, race, sexuality or nationality. Okins view implies a division of intellectual and practical manual labor that assigns intellectual work to western and alienated non-western feminists scholars working in western academia and manual practical activity to Third World global activists, which fails to recognize feminist theoretical production in the Third World. That aside, Okins stand-in for Third World activists and her assessment of the womens rights as human rights movement are awed on several counts. First, she frames Third World feminist activism for human rights within a global sisterhood in a way that is a decontextualization, depoliticization and misrepresentation of the actual way in which human and womens rights issues are raised and negotiated within the countries concerned and in the global arena. Second, her contention that Third World feminist NGOs active in the global arena are direct representatives of Third World women ignores and simplies the internal contradictions that plague the political processes behind this representation and, once again, obscures the differences and conicts of class, race, sexuality and nationality between women.11 Third and perhaps one of the most difcult issues to address in the womens rights as human rights movement and in Okins application of global sisterhood is the question of the advantages of erasing cultural diversity in the conceptualization of human rights. But perhaps the question is wrongly formulated. It is no doubt an ethical and political (and, for that matter, social and economic) necessity to do away with cultural justications that legitimate womens rights violations and to expand the human rights denition to include violations that concern particularly women.12 To pose the matter rst in culturalist terms, should the question perhaps be whose cultural justications will be eliminated in this process and through what channels can they be put forward as cultural justications of womens rights violations? In other words, who sets the agenda? Can African, Asian or Latin American women elevate the issue of anorexia and other eating disorders that western women suffer to a human

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rights issue in the same manner that genital mutilation has been framed by western feminists? Can veiled Muslim women elevate the issue of the sexual objectication of women in the West in the same manner the veil has been understood in the West, that is, as solely a cultural oppression of women? Can we reduce these questions to matters of the individual choices that western women enjoy as members of advanced societies versus the limited choices of Third World women as members of traditional, patriarchal and poor societies (as many argue in the West)? What, in the end, is to be counted as cultural? This way of putting the cultural question reveals its inaccuracy, as we suspect that womens rights violations are not simply a matter of culture. Evidently, dening the cultural in this global discussion of womens rights as human rights cannot merely be seen as a transaction or negotiation between diverse cultures. In fact, what we see is a transaction or a negotiated process that takes place along the divides determined by the structures of transnational capitalism (and the legacies of colonialism and empire), and which is performed and reiterated in the global arena. Surely the cultural/economic distinction is not very helpful at this point. This I believe should be taken into account in transnational feminist thinking and politics. I will end with one last example of the troubled terrain of feminist transnational practice by considering the Latin American feminist experience. As we know, the 1990s signied a shift from local activism to transnational activism in Latin American feminisms. The concentration of their activities in UN megaconferences, particularly in the Beijing process, is emblematic of this shift.13 To understand this, we must remind ourselves that Latin American feminisms throughout the region rst went through a constitutive phase marked by a delinking from male left-wing organizations, an institutional building process that concluded with the formation of autonomous feminist organizations, and a conguration of feminist politics that was dened by its critical distance from the state. Feminist activism in this early phase correlated with community-based womens movements, and the major concerns of feminists of this time (gender consciousness raising) conjugated well with community-based struggles (struggles for local provision of public services). One can say that the original feminist project was the construction of a popular feminism rooted in local community struggles, to be led by feminist organic intellectuals of the urban middle classes. We see expressed here a sort of vanguardism that invokes Gramscian and Leninist inuences and a political horizon still rooted in nation state imagery. Nevertheless, politicization and mobilization were set out more in terms of redening politics by a critical stance towards public discourse, the practice of direct democracy and the creation of a counterculture. The subversion of the private sphere and the revolutionizing of everyday life were at stake in feminist politics. Micropolitics, the changing of ideas about gender, sexuality and the sense of self, the building of womens organizations and leadership within the popular sectors were also at issue. All these issues underscored the local in an unmediated sense, that is, the local was territorialized in the local spaces of the organizations and communities involved, and the here and now was crucial to feminist

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politics. From this perspective, it is understandable that it was the local local conditions, the local experience per se that divided the North and the South, which we saw mirrored in the North/South feminist conicts during the series of UN womens conferences in the decades before the 1990s, and which made transnational coalitions more difcult to build. However, during the 1990s, this type of localism came to a gradual halt. In fact, by 1995 (the year of the Beijing international womens conference), the locus of feminist activism in many Latin American countries had moved extensively into the transnational arena. Politicization in this sort of exteriorization of the local is characterized by a turn to public politics, an intensication of lobbying practices, a jet-setting or increased mobility of globetrotting feminists mainly urban, middle-class, white mestiza now acting primarily in international conferences and coalescing with international feminist movements and less at home building an alternative public sphere along with community-based womens groups. Feminist issues became increasingly dened in correspondence with international development agendas, in negotiated processes with other national feminist movements and international organizations. Local feminist issues were, in short, translated in terms of a new globalization discourse that emerged conspicuously in the transnational contexts created mainly by the UN megaconferences of the 1990s, but also by a deeper enmeshing within the state and development apparatus. What allowed this shift to take place? What factors underlay this shift from localism to transnationalism? Before I turn to these questions, let me say that this shift from localism to transnationalism was traversed and characterized by what I have elsewhere called a series of paradoxes. For instance, the constitution of a feminist statism precisely at a moment when the nation state entered a deep crisis of legitimacy and sovereignty; a partial abandonment of local cultural politics when new information and communication technologies aggressively reshaped womens daily lives and cultural understandings; entrapment in development discourse and policy-oriented issues at a point when the paradigm of development was deeply questioned and distrust against state institutions became generalized among the public;14 a retreat of feminist groups in NGOs precisely at a juncture of diversication of the womens movement along the lines of class, race and sexuality (i.e. lesbian, indigenous, class-based womens movements proliferated); a deeply entrenched involvement in UN conferences and issues when a substantial deterioration in local conditions and mobilization of poor women was taking place. It is impossible for me to expand here upon the factors that help explain this shift and the series of paradoxes that characterize it (not all of which can be explained by external forces or transnational transactions), however, I do want to mention some of the factors that can help us understand the shift. First, the return of electoral democracy opened up real opportunities to advance the feminist agenda.15 In an attempt to take advantage of these new spaces of power, feminists pushed for more participation in policy-making decisions, changes in legislation and the setting of quotas in political parties. Nevertheless, the limited nature of this conciliatory move by the

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state and the political system at the local level quickly prompted feminists to negotiate their issues in an international arena where governments nd themselves forced to protect their political images in the international community. This political opportunity allowed feminists to force compromises from their governments which would otherwise have been more difcult to obtain at the local level. At the same time, however, economic restructuring and neoliberal policies reduced state intervention in the social sphere. Structural adjustment programs were put in place, major welfare programs cut and a profound social sector restructuring took place that relied on selective provisioning and targeted programs to the poorest (mainly women and children), to be channeled through the private instead of the public sector (see Benera and Mendoza, 1995). Feminist organizations, which in the rst phase had had close ties with community-based womens organizations and had undergone an NGOization process, became the perfect sites to channel international funds now seeking alternatives to the state. Feminist organizations wittingly or unwittingly became entangled with the development apparatus and neoliberal policies, and even became nancially dependent on them for their subsistence. On the other hand, feminist politics are not shaped nor do they operate in a political void, as we have seen. They respond to local and international political and economic structures and forces. So it is not too far removed to understand feminist political cultures in Latin America as also tainted by local political cultures. Thus, the political dynamics of feminist organizations such as internal power struggles, intergenerational conicts, leftovers of authoritarianism, favoritism and clientelism, as well as reminiscences of Marxist politics directed mainly at overcoming (or becoming) state powers, which permeate local, traditional but also progressive political cultures, often determine feminist political life. This type of political culture, I believe, also contributes to the shift from localism to transnationalism.16 In addition, Latin American feminist policy makers emerge out of local class, race, ethnic and sexual formations. The intersection of these different subordinations and the imbalances that they create in their interplay also determine who is at the front of the transnationalization of feminisms in the subcontinent and what are the contradictions that criss-cross the transnationalization process. Not surprisingly, it is again urban middle-class, educated, heterosexual and mainly mestiza feminists who are the ones leading the process. Consider some of the political consequences of the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms that could be observed during the 1990s. Besides the most evident ones the deradicalization of the feminist agenda, the professionalization and developmentalization of feminism, its depoliticization, the deep division of feminist movements between so-called institucionalizadas/autonomas and, of course, the decontextualization of feminist struggles from the local to the global has been the fragmentation of feminism along the lines of class, race, ethnicity and sexuality. In the Latin American context, a fragmentation of this nature can be viewed as a healthy move towards the feminist discussion of race, ethnicity and sexuality that has largely been missing. Nonetheless, this fragmentation has also

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created a division of political labor whereby the professional feminist the gender expert has arrogated the global terrain to themselves without a clear basis of legitimation from local constituencies. This internal division of global and local feminists interestingly often runs along divisions of class, race and sexuality, but also along national ones. Given this, Latin American feminist global interventions often reect the power imbalances of the nations of origin of the distinct national feminisms that operate in the global arena. In this sense, to speak of Latin American feminisms as a whole must also be seen mainly as an analytical construct, an ideal type that does not reect in any manner an empirical reality. All these issues need to be taken into account in debates on transnational feminisms. What do transnational feminisms mean today? Perhaps a preliminary summary of transnational feminisms is that they represent a serious attempt to overcome the shortcomings of global sisterhood politics and that there are clear distinctions between them. Transnational feminist theorizations depart from the differences between women and largely appropriate contemporary analysis of transnational capitalism to formulate theory and practice and to understand themselves as generated by a novel transnational condition. This differentiates transnational feminisms from global feminism. However, this same form of theorization of transnational feminisms leaves unquestioned (and therefore unanswered) the ways in which the feminist political project will solve the tensions and divisions between women across the divides of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and national borders. On what grounds will transnational solidarity be built under transnational capitalist conditions, if it is at all possible? Paradoxically, it also appears that some strands of transnational feminism, particularly in that blurry space between global feminism and transnational theory and practice, still tend to be attached to ideas that come close to a liberal multicultural stance or a sort of new-found cosmopolitanism with a subtextual parochialism, rather than being clear about the investments of transnational capital that lie behind the ideology of multiculturalism. On the other hand, because transnational feminism is a term that, as with global feminism before, is mainly circulated within western feminist academia and is associated with Third World theoretical production in western academia, it runs the risk of becoming a code word for Third World feminism. There are already some signs of this in the romanticization of Third World activism in the global arena and in the limitation of transnational solidarity to Third World women workers across the First/Third World divide. This means that transnational feminism could sooner or later stand in as the other of western white feminism. At another analytical level, we can contend that transnational feminisms may have exacerbated inequalities between women at the local level, as an analysis of the Latin American feminist transnational experience shows us. Also, at the transnational level itself, transnational feminist practices demonstrate their shortcomings, as the cultural and political debates surrounding the womens rights as human rights movement make us aware. At the pragmatic, but also the theoretical, level, transnational feminisms have not been able to solve the contradictions and ambiguities that lie at

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the heart of global capitalism and the specters of colonialism. It seems that the accusation of ethnocentrism that feminism in the West faced in the 1980s and earlier has not been totally excised from transnational feminist debates and practices. In short, transnational feminisms have not been able to deliver the bases for political solidarity between women across class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and national borders. In spite of the different frame in which transnational feminisms envision themselves in relationship to the theory and politics of global sisterhood, the notion of transnational feminisms still does not signify a political form of consciousness and organization more t to negotiate the different positions and interests of women in the globalization context. Although admittedly committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics and keenly aware of the accusation of ethnocentrism that contaminated the previous concept of global sisterhood, as well as dedicated to praxis rooted in postcolonial critiques of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism and heteronormativity and committed to the subversion of multiple oppressions, transnational feminist debates still reveal important gaps between the intentions in terms of its theory and tactics and outcomes of transnational feminist mobilizations. Many of these gaps derive from an undertheorization or an inadequate treatment of political economic issues within feminist postcolonial criticism and their entrapment in cultural debates. Yet something similar occurs at the practical level when the interconnectedness of class, race, ethnicity and sexuality is obfuscated, as in Latin America. We can conclude by saying that the problematic accounts of transnational feminisms discussed in this article cannot be seen as a panacea to the issues raised by global sisterhood in any denitive way. Thus, building transnational solidarity remains a task for the future. Feminists around the globe from their specic locations still need to work on our theories and practices to produce a world worthy of our allegiance (M. Hawkesworth, personal communication, 22 March 2002).17

Acknowledgements
I want to thank Mary Hawkesworth, Jane Bayes, Kathryn Sorrells and Savitri Bisnath for their patient reviewing of the original version of this article.

Notes
1. Charlotte Bunch (2001) denes global feminism as the spread of feminism around the globe, the feminist global networking that takes place around UN agendas and what she perceives as the universality of the feminist struggle around the world in the commonality of our opposition (to male discrimination and violence) that presumably enshrines this global networking. 2. For a discussion of the notion of a common context of struggle, see Mohanty (1991, 1997). 3. According to Habermas (2001), globalization confronts western states with the compulsory need to develop cosmopolitan solidarity and a cosmopolitan democracy that can take over the redistributive functions of the dismantled welfare state. Without cosmopolitan democracy, Western Europe will necessarily succumb to the destructive forces of capitalism

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that were domesticated by Keynesian economics. Note however that, in Habermass terms, cosmopolitanism is reduced to the West, thus revealing not only its ethnocentric character, but also the function of European cosmopolitanism as a defense of the West from the rest. The Palestinian/Israeli struggle is considered by many globalists as the last national liberation struggle in the postnational era. All other resurgences of old nationalisms that we are witnessing are from this perspective to be viewed as reactionary or regressive movements from a pre-globalization era. Anti-globalization and anti-capitalist street protests, like the ones that began in Seattle and later spread to other global cities of the First World (Quebec and Genoa), can be seen also as territorial points that present high concentrations of global forces. They also received global media attention. Note that previous anti-globalization and anti-capitalist street protests in the Third World (Venezuela, Dominican Republic) denouncing structural adjustment programs in the previous decade went down in history as IMF riots perhaps connoting irrationality and a lack of global substance and, despite the number of casualties, these earlier street protests did not receive as much media attention as those that have taken place in the First World (Porto Alegre is a more recent case in point). Could it be that First World anti-globalization protests acquire a universal meaning whereas Third World protests are entrapped in a notion of particularity and localism? To be sure, what will count as global or local can be as contentious as the concept of universalism in other discussions. For more on anti-globalization movements across the world, see Starr (2000). For an overview of feminist development approaches, see Viswanathan et al. (1997) and Jackson and Pearson (1998). See McClintock (1995) for an interesting account of the role of gender in conquest, colonialism and nationalism. I may not be doing complete justice to Spivaks work. To be sure, Spivak, like no other postcolonial feminist, has done the most to integrate Marxism and postructuralism. Her unorthodox use of Marxism still causes much confusion and has cost her non-exclusion as a Marxist theorists such as Kaplan and Grewal make us aware (see Kaplan and Grewal, 1999). However, the point here is not whether or not she is an acceptable Marxist, but how her theory can be translated into transnational feminist political terms, that is, if that is altogether possible. And of course, we could not make her responsible for such a state of affairs. Here I am alluding to Judith Butlers (1997) defense against Marxist attacks on poststructuralism as a form of culturalism. For masculinist Marxist critiques of postcolonial theories, see Dirlik (1997) and Ahmad (1992). Interestingly, Okin fails to mention the crucial role western governments, particularly the US government, had in the promotion and funding of activities directed at recognizing womens rights as human rights and thus the role that First World feminists had in mainstreaming womens rights in UN agendas. She leaves unmentioned the instrumental role of First World feminist activism, such as that of Charlotte Bunch in her role

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

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as director of the Center for Womens Global Leadership, but also her role as a theorist of womens rights as human rights in her well-known article (2001). Instead, Okin gives all the credit to Third World feminists that enter into alliances with First World feminists. For an interesting discussion of the process of mainstreaming the issue of violence against women in the UN human rights agenda, see Joachim (2001). For a discussion of the political consequences of the NGOization process of feminist organizations and the specic case of Latin American feminisms, see Alvarez (1998) and Mendoza (2000). Global feminists working in the realm of womens rights as human rights also fail to emphasize the inseparability of social, economic and political rights. This is a result of the encapsulation of the discussion of human rights in terms of the liberal doctrine that emphasizes individual rights which First World feminists usually espouse. For a detailed discussion of Latin American feminist involvement in the Beijing process and its impact on the movement, see Maulen (1998), Mendoza (1996, 2000) and Valente (1992, 1996, 1998, 2000). Nstor Garcia Canclini (2000) speaks of the impact that neoliberal policies have had on popular sectors in terms of a growing individualism and political apathy. Notably, redemocratization processes are accompanied by a growth of skepticism towards the public sphere by the general public. Political deliberation has been reduced to farcical gossip or a media spectacle. For a detailed account of the impact of democratization processes on Latin American feminisms, see Alvarez (1998). For insights into internal feminist power struggles within feminist organizations, see Mendoza (1996). I am indebted to Mary Hawkesworth for this and many other thoughts through personal conversations and her commentaries to this article.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

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