Abstract
The book Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice is a volume edited by Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer that aims to demonstrate the importance of transnational feminist theory in today’s political climate for challenging neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms. The editors argue in their introduction that transnational feminism complements the theoretical work within intersectional feminist and decolonial feminist frameworks, even though these three theoretical approaches are often portrayed as in opposition to one another. It is transnational feminist practices of solidarity based on differences versus similarities that allow for collaborations across geographical, social, and ideological boundaries. The empirical chapters are broken down into five sections: Provocations, Scale, Interrogating Corporate Power, Intractable Dilemmas, and Nationalisms and Plurinationalisms. These subsections highlight the role that transnational feminism can play in challenging current systems of globalization.
The first section, “Provocations,” contains Tambe and Thayer’s introduction to the volume, which examines the advantages of taking a transnational feminist perspective for creating transnational solidarities built on acknowledging differences across various boundaries. In addition, Tambe and Thayer challenge the divisions that scholars have often created between transnational feminism and intersectional and decolonial feminisms by arguing that all three theoretical frameworks aim to challenge systems of oppression such as settler colonialism, neoliberal globalization, and capitalism. Jennifer C. Nash’s chapter focuses on the relationships between how people conceive of transnational versus intersectional feminisms by examining women’s studies job advertisements within the academic job market. Nash finds that intersectionality serves as a lens within job advertisements while transnationalism serves as an area of intellectual inquiry, typically focused on non-U.S. populations. Inderpal Grewal’s chapter “Rethinking Patriarchy and Corruption” shows how to conduct comparative work between the global North and South without viewing them as separate, bounded entities and denying the linkages and connections between nations and empires.
The second section, “Scale,” recasts the conceptual idea of scale in the analysis of social movements. Srila Roy explores the role of scale in understanding the transnational protest assemblage that developed in response to sexual violence and rape in India during 2012 in the chapter “Transnational Feminism and the Politics of Scale: The 2012 Antirape Protests in Delhi.” The chapter reminds us that women’s movements have always been both national and global, constituted through interconnected histories of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. Carmen Díaz Alba’s chapter “Transnational Shifts: The World March of Women in Mexico” examines how scale and space explain the changing dynamics of the social movement of the World March of Women. This chapter highlights the challenges of maintaining interscalar activism over time. The final chapter in the scale subsection, Rafael de la Dehesa’s “Network Ecologies and the Feminist Politics of ‘Mass Sterilization’ in Brazil,” uses the history of mass sterilization in Brazil to introduce the theoretical concept of network ecology. Network ecology expands the analytic lens of transnational feminist ideas regarding the transnational circulation of ideas, knowledge, sources, and the like by including the dynamics among multiple stakeholders engaged in debates.
The third section engages with the topic of interrogating corporate power through critiquing empirical examples of corporate attempts to construct various forms of gendered subjectivities. Laura L. Lovett examines the transnational circulation of children’s toys in the chapter “Transnational Childhoods: Linking Global Production, Local Consumption, and Feminist Resistance” to show ways in which the globalization of children’s material culture shapes childhood and constitutes children as transnational subjects of global corporations without their ever having to leave their home countries. Kathryn Moeller’s chapter “Nike’s Search for Third World Potential: The Tensions between Corporate Funding and Feminist Futures” examines how Nike constructed adolescent girls in the global South as a development category with the “unique” potential to end poverty in their communities. Moeller uses the case of an NGO aimed at recruiting adolescent girls for a program to empower them in the labor market as potential entrepreneurs and highlights the program’s targeting of certain populations. They did not allow pregnant women into the program, nor women deemed too poor, as these women did not fit the NGO conception of an empowered girl.
The fourth section focuses on intractable dilemmas, and both its chapters concern the commercial surrogacy industry. Nancy A. Naples and Mary Bernstein’s “Reproductive Justice and the Contradictions of International Surrogacy Claims by Gay Men in Australia” examines the international commercial surrogacy industry, state regulation of reproduction, and reproductive rights discourses in gay men’s claims for the legal right to use commercial surrogates. At the same time, they analyze how gay Australian men’s claims for legalization of international commercial surrogacy can conflict with the reproductive rights of the surrogates they hire. Amrita Pande’s chapter “Wombs in India: Revisiting Commercial Surrogacy” argues that previous scholarship on commercial surrogacy has paid little attention to the role of race, caste, and religion in shaping the global surrogacy market. While these structures of inequality shape India as an “ideal” market for surrogacy by providing mechanisms for disciplining surrogates, they also shape the everyday resistance behaviors employed by surrogates.
The final section examines nationalisms and plurinationalisms. Cara K. Snyder’s “Sporting Transnational Feminisms: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Athletic Migrations between Brazil and the United States” examines athletes as transmigrants in order to study how ideas of nations operate at different scales and the complicated relationship that exists between the national and transnational. Isabel Maria Cortesão Casimiro and Catarina Casimiro Trindade’s “Mozambican Feminisms: Between the Local and the Global” highlights the tensions between national and transnational ideas in women’s daily lives. The involvement of the Mozambican state in regulating women’s bodies through various laws is contrasted with the resilience and transnational connections that various feminist movements maintain. The final chapter, “Plural Sovereignty and la Familia Diversa in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution” by Christine “Cricket” Keating and Amy Lind, highlights the importance of Ecuador’s 2008 constitution in declaring the nation a “plurination” and recognizing “la familia diversa,” or diverse family forms. The authors argue that these constitutional changes are aspects of linguistic and institutional resistance to hegemonic colonial ideas in Ecuador.
This book serves as a good introduction to the debates surrounding decolonial, transnational, and intersectional theories of feminism by showing the various ways all three are aimed at dismantling systems of oppression. It will be useful for a new generation of transnational feminist scholars, by reintroducing the importance of transnational feminist theories in understanding the current rise of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberal globalization. The book also provides important analyses of creating international solidarities based on recognizing differences across a variety of empirical cases. Ultimately, the book achieves its aim of linking transnational, decolonial, and intersectional feminisms through various empirical cases and themes. My one critique is that the book covers so many things at a high theoretical level that it may not be as digestible for some undergraduate audiences.