Transnational and Global Feminisms

Abstract

Transnational feminism refers both to the practices of women's movements around the world and to a theoretical perspective in which women theorize and strategize for women's rights and gender justice across national boundaries, work in collaboration with women from other countries, and frame their activism in terms that are both local and global. Thus, transnational feminism refers to the flow of ideas, issues, strategies, organizations, and activists across national boundaries. As practice it dates back to the mid‐ and late nineteenth century when women activists from the US and Europe worked in collaboration around the abolitionist and suffrage movements in those countries, when women from colonizing countries such as England worked together with women in India and other colonies to advance women's rights, particularly suffrage and education, as well as when European women in the communist and socialist parties worked to develop women's organizations around the world on issues of women's economic rights (Rupp 1997). This earlier practice of transnational feminism was limited in several ways: the issues addressed were restricted to suffrage, education, and workers’ rights; the nation‐state was still the center of activism; the flow of ideas, strategies, and activists was primarily, though not exclusively, from the North to the South; there were few international organizations, all of which were hierarchical in nature; and the practice was neither widespread nor the dominant mode of feminism. While this practice continued, primarily in its communist and socialist manifestations, it was not until the 1970s when the United Nations declared 1975 as International Women's Year and 1975–85 as International Women's Decade and organized women's world conferences – in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and Beijing in 1995 – that the practice took off and has now become a dominant strategy of women's movements around the world.