Is the Transnational Female? Revisiting the Gender Metaphors of Global Connection

Abstract

This essay takes up a rhetorical leitmotif in feminist studies of global political economy: theorizing the gender of geopolitical forms. Gender metaphors have revealed the systematic devaluation of scholarship deemed “too local” to constitute globalization theory, unveiled the bourgeois family romance animating modern nationalisms, and exposed the futility of depending on the modern state to adjudicate in women’s favor. Following in this tradition, I ask “Is the transnational female?” in order to illuminate both the sociological feminization of actors and institutions that move across national borders as well as the symbolic feminization of the qualities associated with transnationalism, namely flexibility, adaptability, and connectivity. These qualities make transnationalism subject to what Anna Tsing describes as the frictions of other trans-processes, notably translation, transgression, and transformation. Using an empirical case study from Uganda, I will argue that because the transnational circulation of women’s and sexual minority rights concepts depends on their translation by locally situated actors, they are fundamentally constrained by the national political contexts within which these actors work. In theorizing this case, this essay expands contemporary feminist analyses of the rise of the global Right to show how sexism and homophobia cross not only national borders but political ones as well, emerging, at times, under the very banner of women’s rights.