The Perils and Possibilities of Transnational Feminism

GLOBAL FEMINISM: TRANSNATIONAL WOMEN'S ACTIVISM, ORGANIIING, AND HUMAN RIGHTS, EDITED BY MYRA MARX FERREE AND AIlI MARI TRIPP, NEW YORK: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006 FEMIHIST POLITICS, ACTIVISM, AND VISION: LOCAL AND GLOBAL CHALLENGES, EDITED BY IUCIANA RICCIUTELLI, ANGELA MILES, AND MARGARET MCFADDEN, TORONTO: INANNA EDUCATION, 2004 DEFENDING OUR DREAMS: GLOBAL FEMINIST VOICES FOR A NEW GENERATION, EDITED BY SHAMILLAH WILSON, ANASUYA SENGUPTA, AND KRISTY EVANS, LONDON: ZED BOOKS, 2005 Like the celebrations around the world on March 8, these three books remind us that long before the global justice movements, often called the antiglobalization movements, there were the global movements and the global feminist movements. Like the movements that the books try to illuminate, the books themselves are products of transnational linkages. Two of them are based on papers presented at transnational conferences, and the third is a reprint of essays that have appeared in the journals that constitute the transnational Feminist Journals Network. Thus, like feminist activism, academic feminism is increasingly transnational. But what does being transnational mean? How does transnational feminism differ from local feminism? What are some of the challenges of transnational feminism? These are some of the questions that the three books address, and they do so in a rich and thoughtful manner. Given the richness of the books, I cannot do justice to each chapter in each book but hope to highlight how the books contribute to the field and the questions that still remain. As descriptors of movements, global, feminist, transnational, and are contested terms and Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp's collection begins with that definitional issue. In her introduction, Ferree differentiates between feminist and movements: Organizing women explicitly as women to make social change is what makes a women's movement; feminism, by contrast, is activism for the purpose of challenging and changing subordination to men (6). Thus feminism is a goal not a strategy or a constituency. I think this is a useful distinction to make and with some variation most of the authors in the books share this understanding. Most authors also share the definition of as the presence of activists, organizations, and issues from more than one country. This term is preferable to global, as, unlike that word, it does not claim the presence of all nations. But it remains a descriptive as opposed to a theoretical concept. For example, is there such a thing as a transnational perspective? If so, does adopting a transnational perspective enable us to see the same issues differently? Does transnationalism reveal power dynamics more clearly? None of the authors in the three books addresses such questions and hence transnationalism remains a descriptive term rather than a theoretical perspective, which is one of the limitations of the three books. The emergence and domination of transnational feminism today is assumed to be a result of contemporary globalization, with its attendant information and communication technology revolutions that have made it possible and easier to communicate across borders. In particular, the recent resurgence of transnational feminism is attributed to the United Nations' International Women's Decade, with its four world conferences, the regional preparatory conferences, and the resources made available for building such networks. As Margaret Snyder argues in Global Feminism, the United Nations was the unlikely godmother of transnational movements, given the stepmotherly roles of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Furthermore, as Myra Marx Ferree notes in the same book, policy machinery within the state, transnational advocacy networks outside formal institutions, and movement practices of knowledge creating-which were partly a byproduct of the UN decade-form the opportunity structure for transnational feminism. …

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