Transnational Feminism Quotes

Radical feminist work around the world daily strengthens political solidarity between women beyond the boundaries of race/ethnicity and nationality. Mainstream mass media rarely calls attention to these positive interventions. In Hatreds: Radicalized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Zillah Eisenstein shares the insight: Feminism(s) as transnational - imagined as the rejection of false race/gender borders and falsely constructed 'other' - is a major challenge to masculinist nationalism, the distortions of statist communism and 'free'-market globalism. It is a feminism that recognizes individual diversity, and freedom, and equality, defined through and beyond north/west and south/east dialogues. No one who has studied the growth of global feminism can deny the important work women are doing to ensure our freedom. No one can deny that Western women, particularly women in the United States, have contributed much that is needed to this struggle and need to contribute more. The goal of global feminism is to reach out and join global struggles to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

Chinese men refer to their wives as neiren, “person of the inner chamber,” or neizi, “the inner one.” The word nei is opposed to the word wai, or “outer.” By keeping woman as his own property, a man cloisters his wife within the walls and deprives her of her basic freedom

Western interest in “other” women seems highly selective—and, in some cases, only tenuously connected to feminism. George W. Bush notoriously supported the contemporaneous war on US women’s access to abortion and contraception. He rarely used his platform to criticize harmful traditional practices that affect U.S. women.

When issues are addressed in this manner Western imperialism is not reinscribed and feminism cannot be appropriated by transnational capitalism as yet another luxury product from the West women in other cultures must fight to have the right to consume.

Missionary feminism is instead characterized by a brand of universalism that is ethnocentric, justice monist (beholden to the idea that there is one possible set of gender-just cultural forms) and that is beholden to epistemic habits of idealization and moralism (the reduction of political actions to moral statements) that inure Western culture and Western intervention to criticism.

The empowerment of women and girls sounds good to political donors and ordinary voters alike. Yet these sorts of allegedly empowering interventions conveniently de-link the current condition of women from colonial histories, global capital expansion, transnational investment, and the continued exploitation of feminine labor. Women, it is assumed, are poor because of their culture or the lack of agency or even feminist consciousness, not ever because colonial plunder depleted resources or because current capitalist investment interests calculate their value based on the lowest wage they can be paid to make t-shirts or jeans. The fact that poor countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh cannot compete at the global level without capitulating to these corporate demands, Investors will simply turn elsewhere and exploit the women of some other poor country is not considered. Neither is any attention paid to the fact, that all of these forces direct the women away from rather than to warn a political consciousness.