Transnational Feminist Praxis Research Articles

Examining meaning-making and decolonial resistance in Pakistani women's stories of navigating coloniality and gender

Although Pakistan attained independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, the effects of colonial violence endure in the psychosocial realities of Pakistani people. Centering the stories about coloniality of two women leaders working in nongovernmental organizations, this article examines how psychological processes of meaning-making and decolonial resistance manifest in women's engagement with (de)coloniality in Lahore, Pakistan. I draw from transnational and decolonial feminisms and critical psychologies to highlight how two women's contextually shaped realities reflect colonial legacies interlaced with local and global inequities, and to document the ways women construe and resist coloniality-driven gender injustices. Using thematic narrative analysis, findings show that these women make sense of and resist coloniality through an intersectional approach, historical counter-narratives, and reimagination. The article discusses how context-specific decolonial strategies demonstrate women's agency and resistance within transnational feminist praxis, contributing to pluralistic and justice-enhancing approaches. The findings contribute to decolonizing psychological research by documenting Pakistani women's psychological processes and advancing non-Eurocentric knowledge and practices.

A Phenomenological Account of the Conditions of Transnational Feminism

In Sites of Exposure, John Russon draws on the resources of phenomenology to describe how human life, while not having a “given” form specified in advance, nonetheless takes speci􀏔ic shape through practices by which we become committed to certain ways of living. This means that our lives are simultaneously a matter of living with a speci􀏔ic reality—what Russon calls “home”—and having to respond to an outside to which we are “exposed.” I argue here that Russon’s analysis is especially useful for feminist philosophy and its attempt to grapple with the possibility of universal principles of justice across cultural contexts, developing this philosophical framework in conversation with Serene Khader’s efforts to furnish a set of core values for transnational feminist praxis that, while universal in their opposition to sexist oppression, are not imperialist, and with Saba Mahmood’s critique of the parochial character of Western conceptions of freedom.

From tourism to solidarity: transnational feminism and world music in the UK

Transnational feminism has become a prevalent paradigm in feminist theory, but its connection with creative practices such as music remains unclear. This article addresses the relationship between music, culture and feminism and considers the extent to which world music creates spaces for transnational feminist praxis. Applying Chandra Mohanty’s ‘tourism’, ‘exploration’ and ‘solidarity’ models for internationalising feminism, I question whose feminism is performed and negotiated at WOMAD, one of the most influential international music festivals in Europe. I argue that world music encounters have the potential to both help and hinder the cause of feminism across borders as music can reinforce and resist power inequalities between women from different places and cultures and intercultural music encounters can create the conditions for locating transnational feminist discourse within specific struggles and working through the mutualities and tensions between different feminisms. In doing so, I seek to show the value of bridging feminist geography and musicology, as the former can be used to critically analyse the plurality of feminisms at play in musical contexts, while the latter can illustrate how transnational feminist work is being undertaken outside the explicitly political realm and how expressive means of communication may disrupt assumptions about empowering/disempowering feminisms and exemplify the complex intersections between feminism, place and culture.

Between the Posts, Into the Void: Making Sense of Feminism and Decolonization in Bishkek and Almaty

Abstract The specificity and variety of the experiences of feminist organizing in the former “second world” is rarely explored in the studies of transnational feminist praxis. This paper explores the (queer) feminist discourses of the region, described as the most “distant Other” of the former USSR – Central Asia. I look at the ways artists, activists, and academics from two cities in the region, Bishkek and Almaty, articulate their understandings of feminism from an intersectional and decolonial perspectives. I argue that local (queer) feminist activists are producers of unique knowledge(s), bound neither to a “return to tradition” nor to accept ready-made solutions from the “West,” which positions itself as an “origin” of contemporary debates on gender. By engaging with the inner coloniality of the feminist movements in the former USSR, the article contributes to the transnational debates on the inclusivity of feminism(s).

The Drama of Chinese Feminism: Neoliberal Agency, Post-Socialist Coloniality, and Post-Cold War Transnational Feminist Praxis

The Drama of Chinese Feminism: Neoliberal Agency, Post-Socialist Coloniality, and Post-Cold War Transnational Feminist Praxis

Transnational Feminist Practices against War

Abstract This piece was written collaboratively as a response to the bombing of sites in Afghanistan in September 2001 as the United States began to retaliate for Al-Queda attacks on U.S. targets. Anticipating the invasion and occupation of Iraq and a broader, globalized “War on Terror,” the authors wanted to offer an antiracist, antinationalist feminist analysis that insisted recognizing the importance of histories of colonialism and empire in the structuring of state and interstate violence.

Introduction: Symposium on Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

ABSTRACT This symposium brings together commentaries on Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic from Linda Martín Alcoff, Sunaina Arya, and Olúfẹ'mi O. Táíwò with a reply from Khader. Khader’s book aims to develop a conception of feminism that is both universalist and anti-imperialist. Central to this feminism are (a) the idea that the normative core of feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and (b) the idea that the role of normative concepts in transnational feminist praxis is a justice-enhancing, or nonideal theoretical, one. Khader resists the universalism/relativism framing of debates in global feminisms and argues that opposition to sexist oppression can be detached from the values and social ontology of what she calls ‘Enlightenment liberalism’. She asks whether the values that are most often accused of being vehicles for Western imperialism, namely autonomy, individualism, and gender role eliminativism, are necessary for feminism at all.

An Application of Transnational Feminist Practice with Latinas across Different Life Cycles

This article offers a perspective and an application of transnational feminist therapy with Latinas that affirm the value of testimonio as a theoretical framework. Political, social, and interpersonal levels are addressed and linked to clear roots in oral tradition and resistance movements. The goal is to share a clinical approach that applies the tenets of transnational feminism that differ from the definition of “global sisterhood” and recognizes the effects of interactive connections that apply to different levels of identity, adaptation, and wellbeing of Latinas living in the United States. Clinical vignettes shared by many Latinas living in the United States and at different points in their life cycles illustrate the relevance and negative effects caused by the intersectional components of gender, class, ethnicity, race, nation, age, and language that can lead to feelings of shame connected to societal rejections on the basis of being “the other.” An application of theory in the flesh illustrates the need to move from talking in a disembodied manner to an embodied conversation during the therapy process.

Transnational Feminist Theory and Practice: An Introduction

This article introduces central features of transnational feminism and discusses how these characteristics provide a foundation for transnational feminist practice in psychology. These core themes emphasize: (a) reflexivity and positionality; (b) intersectionality in transnational perspective; (c) inclusive definitions of global and transnational feminisms; (d) transnational border-crossing practices; (e) agency and resistance in global perspective; (f) decolonization of theory, knowledge, and practice; (g) egalitarian collaboration and alliance building; and (h) theories and practices that support critical consciousness and social change. Examples of how these features are highlighted by this special issue’s authors are integrated with summaries of themes.

Transnational Feminist Therapy: Recommendations and Illustrations

This article summarizes the contributions of authors to a special issue on transnational feminist practice and integrates their recommendations. The three-part outline for organizing transnational feminist practice themes focuses on self-awareness and cultural humility, knowledge foundations, and interventions and skills. This article also summarizes case material that illustrates the basic guidance of authors who work in many types of educational and practice settings, offers insights relevant to many world regions, and portrays the diversity of worldviews and values that need to be considered in contemporary transnational feminist practice.

Toward Grounding Transnational Feminism in Borderland Spaces

This article discusses our efforts to ground transnational feminist practice locally in borderland spaces and to detach this practice, to the extent possible, from the overall structure of Euro-centered knowledge in mental health. We recognize that transnational training and research in psychology has the potential to offer scholar-practitioners the opportunity to engage in transformative intercultural learning processes. However, these processes can become forms of colonization in which dominant knowledge systems originating in the United States are positioned to exert undue influence on vulnerable communities whose members sometimes unwittingly give consent to participate. We situate ourselves and discuss our conceptual framework. We present how we co-constructed a borderland learning space in a particular training program and analyze challenges we encountered in this process. We discuss our research collaboration, highlighting our efforts to ground aspects of the research process also in a borderland space. Finally, we offer recommendations for transnational feminist training and research.

Only in the Philippines? Postcolonial exceptionalisms and Filipina feminisms

ABSTRACTExceptionalism as a framing discourse reveals socio-historical insights on postcolonialism and postnationalism, providing fertile ground for articulating and investigating the multiplicities and historical vicissitudes constituting Filipina feminist articulations of social identities and engagements with multi-scalar politics. Historical and contemporary Philippine/Filipino exceptionalism claims have inspired and galvanized transnational feminist spaces, processes, and practices, creating ideoloscapes (ideologies and discourses) and practiscapes (actions). Using framing theory to compare exceptionalisms’ discursive practices and their entanglements with feminisms, this paper analyzes episodic historical accounts, documents, and interviews with feminist leaders to demonstrate how Filipina feminists mobilize exceptionalisms as reference frames in different logics, spaces, and political opportunities. It examines three framing episodes of Filipina feminist politics – suffragist frames during the American colonial period, nationalist feminists’ frames from the Marcos to the Duterte presidencies, and transnationalist (state) feminists’ frames within multi-scalar spaces and the context of imperial and other exceptionalism variants. These episodic framing practices demonstrate the formation and reproduction of dominant feminist politics and publics that have yet to acknowledge their shared traumatic histories and fully decolonize their narratives and engagements.

“World”-Travelling and Transnational Feminist Praxis in <em>Women Who Blow on Knots</em>

“World”-Travelling and Transnational Feminist Praxis in <em>Women Who Blow on Knots</em>

"World"-Travelling and Transnational Feminist Praxis in Women Who Blow on Knots

In this paper I propose a transnational feminist reading of Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran's 2013 novel Women Who Blow on Knots through Lugones's "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception." First of all, I argue that the concept of "world"-travelling Lugones recommended to women of color in the US continues to offer valuable insights to women across the world, especially within the frame of contemporary transnational feminist practices. Increasing geographical mobility, enormous circulation of ideas across cultures, and intriguing encounters of local and global paradigms continue to generate complex and nuanced "worlds," while also bringing new forms of oppression, assimilation, and stereotyping, hence new guises of "arrogant perception." Accordingly, travelling to "worlds" of ours and other women's and recognizing differences, plurality, and historical specificity becomes truly indispensable in creating feminist coalitions. Within this frame I argue that the trope of travel in Women Who Blow on Knots underlines the "world"-travelling of four women whose encounter with one another brings forward a transnational understanding of solidarity—one that is not a pernicious totalizing unity but a coalition constructed with a deep understanding of the nuanced plurality of different locations and histories. While the content presents a pluralistic context of a loving attitude, the playful narrative strategies constantly allow space for creative plurality and offer possibilities for a transnational, decolonial feminist writing.

Peace and the Barrel of the Gun in the Internationalist Women’s Movement, 1945–49

Abstract In 1949, at a conference instigated by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) held in Beijing, China, the Asian Women’s Conference solidified an anticolonial, antifascist, and antiracist theory for organizing women transnationally. This transnational feminist praxis drew its movement demands and strategies from the masses of women in anticolonial movements, both rural and urban poor women. It also framed a two-fold theory of women’s organizing: it delineated one platform for women fighting imperialism within colonized countries, and another platform for women fighting imperialism within aggressor nations. This transnational feminism supported an explicitly pro-socialist vision for the future.

Student meets author: accessibility and transnational feminist praxis

This special Conversations section, “Student Meets Author,” is a twist on the “Author Meets Critic” concept. The idea is that my undergraduate college students at Pace University, New York City, re...

Building Transnational Feminist Alliances: Reflections on the Post-2015 Development Agenda

Abstract This article reflects on transnational feminist organising by drawing on the experiences of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) during the consultations leading up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. First, we re-examine some of the debates that have shaped the field of women’s rights, feminist activism and gender justice in Africa, and the enduring legacies of these discourses for policy advocacy. Second, we analyse the politics of movement-building and the influence of development funding, and how they shape policy discourses and praxis in respect of women’s rights and gender justice. Third, we problematise the nature of transnational feminist solidarity. Finally, drawing on scholarship about transnational feminist praxis as well as activism, we distil some lessons for feminist policy advocacy across geo-political divides.

Is Universalism the Cause of Feminist Complicity in Imperialism?

Global and transnational feminist praxis has long faced a seemingly inexorable dilemma. Universalism is often charged with causing feminist complicity in imperialism. In spite of this, it seems clear that feminists should not embrace relativism; feminism is, after all, a view about how certain types of treatment based on gender are wrong. This article clears the path for an anti-imperialist feminist universalism by showing how feminist complicity in imperialism is not caused by the fact of having universalist normative commitments. What I call “missionary feminism” stems more from ethnocentrism, justice monism, and idealizing and moralizing ways of seeing that associate Western culture with morality (and thus prevent Western culture and Western intervention from becoming objects of normative scrutiny) than from universalism about the value of gender justice.

Confronting Public Health Imperialism: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Critical Nurse Responses to the National Smallpox Vaccination Program of 2002

Confronting Public Health ImperialismA Transnational Feminist Analysis of Critical Nurse Responses to the National Smallpox Vaccination Program of 2002 Gwen D'Arcangelis (bio) small acts of resistance: gender and imperialism The juggernaut of US empire known as the "War on Terror" is by now a familiar, ubiquitous part of the twenty-first century. Less familiar to most is one of its early missteps, namely, the National Smallpox Vaccination Program (NSVP), a biodefense program that the Bush Administration devised to protect the US from a bioterror attack. From late 2002 to mid-2003, the federal government, arguing that a potential attack might occur from the likes of Al Qaeda or Iraq, attempted to recruit the health care field into a preemptive vaccination program against smallpox. Nurses were among the prominent occupational categories targeted, and more important, among the leading groups who challenged the program on the grounds of its health risks and role in the Iraq war. In this article I chronicle the multilayered intervention that US nurses made in the NSVP, specifically their reworking of hegemonic scientific and national security discourses. Nurse intervention into the NSVP is significant for two reasons. First, nurses reclaimed their centrality as decision makers in the NSVP, a prominent public health campaign that, as I show, exploited their labor and marginalized their medical expertise. Feminist scholars have analyzed nursing as a feminized labor domain long beset with the historical character of "women's work"—for example, low wages and devalued expertise.1 I demonstrate that nurses' defiance of the NSVP contributes significantly to a legacy of resistance to these conditions. Second, nurses challenged the NSVP based on its connection to the US program of aggression in Iraq and the War on Terror during a period of extreme "patriotism," when it was difficult to wage criticism of the US national security apparatus. Remarkably, US nurses linked their struggles for better safety and protections to a broader critique of US imperialism. In doing so, I argue, they enacted a model of transnational feminist praxis [End Page 95] wherein women in global north and imperial nations hold their governments accountable for perpetrating oppressive practices of imperialism and other forms of structural violence against less powerful nations in the global south. Transnational feminist theory builds on the intersectional analysis forwarded by feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw2 and Patricia Hill Collins,3 who analyze women's struggles through a gendered lens that considers how race, class, nation, and other socio-structural positions determine gender relations and social power. Transnational feminist theorists focus on the intersection between gender and nation, noting that women across the globe are not only connected by their commonalities but also severely divided, particularly along the axis of colonialism and imperialism. They have noted that many feminist movements in imperial countries have been insufficiently critical of their government's expansionist foreign policy and imperialist practices globally, at times even joining forces to further them. Transnational feminist scholars have criticized the US-based Feminist Majority Foundation, for instance, for aligning itself with the US government's war on Afghanistan and its paternalistic rescue mission to save Afghani women, in the process marginalizing Afghani feminists' work and leadership.4 Transnational feminist theorists espouse that women in imperial nations should attend to their complicity in the actions of their governments. In the context of the most recent bouts of US imperialism targeting Afghanistan and Iraq, transnational feminist scholars such as Chandra Mohanty have challenged global north feminists to be self-reflexive about their political praxis (politically informed theory and action): What role have US feminists who supported the Bush administration's war in the name of "rescuing" Afghan and Iraqi women played in [the] narrative of empire and imperialism? This is one of the questions we need to pose to address the politics of complicity and dissent within contemporary feminist projects.5 In addition to calling for feminists in imperial and global north nations to reexamine their role in US imperial violence, she also highlights US imperialism as a key site for transnational feminist engagement: The militarized US State and its imperial projects are thus a crucial site of feminist struggle both in terms of the violence...

The Ethics of Transnational Feminist Research and Activism: An Argument for a More Comprehensive View

Feminist activism undertaken by global Northerners operating in the global South must contend with dilemmas around the ethics of imposing alien values and of ethnocentrically assuming that the cultures of the global North are superior to those of the global South. Such ethnocentric bias has frequently affected transnational feminist activism and commentary, as well as Northern governments’ immigration and international relations policies. To counteract this problem of ethnocentric bias, feminist scholars have proposed various methods by which to ethically undertake transnational feminist practice. Subaltern feminist activists have also undertaken particular measures to respond to the marginalization, sensitivities, and social pressures they face. In this essay, I argue that in order to ethically engage in transnational feminist research and activism, the Northern activist should adhere to five principles: namely, distancing oneself from problematic values and from feminism used as a cover for ulterior motives, discovering common viewpoints and then building upon these, engaging in advocacy that is fully absent of coercion, counteracting discourses that could further stigmatize underprivileged communities, and operating in a spirit of acceptance that both oneself and the other may be transformed through the process of transnational dialogue, a dialogue that is itself a matter in which no one party is completely right or wrong.