In February 2014, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) held its annual conference, Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXIX – “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices.” As organizers of the conference, we sought to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies was field-forming, inaugurating transnational frameworks and methods as central to feminist scholarship across many disciplines, including gender and sexuality studies, anthropology, and American studies. The genealogies of feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, and critical scholarship the book developed and inspired were – and continue to be – crucial to our work. Grewal and Kaplan provided both an incisive critique and a supple and comprehensive framework to analyze the fraught interrelation of ideas, people, capital, goods, and socio-political movements across different spatial and temporal fields. Their trailblazing work has challenged us to scrutinize the locations of our research and theorizing. This includes analyzing how relations of gender, race, class, and sexuality shape our sites of research; attending to how situated differences complicate and challenge universalizing theories and globalizing processes without reifying or fetishizing these differences; and interrogating how global-local, center-periphery, and other spatializing binaries implicitly center the West and elide the myriad forms of interrelations through which these binaries are produced.
This issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online comes out of our 2014 conference, capturing its dynamism and major themes, and reanimating the provocations of Scattered Hegemonies within some of the key forms, contexts, and topics of transnational feminisms at the conference and in the years that have followed. In this issue we attempt to locate the importance of this genealogy of feminist thought and elaborate some of what it has enabled. The works featured here are demonstrative of the rippling effects of transnational feminist frameworks on scholarship across time.
In the first plenary session, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Lydia Liu, Jennifer Terry, Tina Campt, and Deborah Thomas reflect on the circumstances leading to the emergence of transnational feminisms and the ongoing legacies of these projects. The second plenary panel consists of Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, Tamura Lomax, Laura Hale, and Maria-Belén Ordóñez, scholars, writers, and activists whose wide-ranging discussions inspire us to think anew, and at different levels of specificity, about the relationship between media, representation, power, social movements, and community. Following from this, Shayoni Mitra’s film, focusing on the effervescent survival and resistance strategies of sex workers in India, ones undertaken in collaboration with the VAMP (Vashiya Anyay Mukti Parishad, translated as Collective of Sex Workers for Freedom from Exploitation), provides a wonderful example of the power of transnational activist collaborations.
Shayoni Mitra, her scholarship and transnational work, were integral to the BCRW Transnational Feminisms collaborative course in Mumbai. We are also honored to reprint a remembrance of Alison Bernstein, the late director of the Rutgers Institute for Women’s Leadership. Bernstein devoted her life to transnational feminist scholarship and activism, and was a key collaborator in BCRW’s inaugural trip to South Africa.
While “context,” “topics” and “forms” are overlapping and co-constitutive categories, we heuristically disentangle them in an attempt to draw out points of resonance and specificity among the works featured in this issue of Scholar and Feminist. Recent transnational transformations – including ongoing processes of neoliberalization and the collapse of numerous economic sectors and national economies, the ongoing War on Terror, permanent states of emergency, the expansion of surveillance and drone-armed states, as well as emergent and mutating forms of authoritarianism and fascism – are not simply objects of our scholarship, but reshape the places, phenomena, and experiences of people we research among. These transnational transformations and forces of neoliberalization and securitization are also reshaping the very processes through which we produce our scholarship, most notably our teaching and research.
In some disciplines, scholars are hired today not just because of the strength of their research, but because of their ability to attract external funding. Some of us are asked to design classes driven not just by critical or pedagogical aims, but by the drumbeat of increasing student enrollment. Across different contexts, universities are increasingly tied to the logics of global capitalism. Abbie Boggs and Simten Coşar, scholars from the United States and Turkey respectively, bring a transnational feminist analysis to elaborate the different contexts and connected neoliberal operations within higher education in the United States and Turkey. Attentive to the particular experiences of their respective locales, Boggs and Coşar also consider how the free-marketization of relations within institutions of higher learning connects specific sites through transnational processes that prioritize flexible and contingent employment and accounting metrics. Boggs and Coşar explore the university as a space of peril and possibility. As critical university studies scholars, they draw attention to the university’s role in perpetuating racial capitalism, while looking for opportunities to dismantle such systems of oppression.
Like Boggs and Coşar, Liz Montegary considers the university as a vexed site, particularly for marginalized fields such as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS). Montegary explores the ways in which the processes for securing institutional credibility and material resources reinforce the very logics and structures of neoliberalism. As critical fields such as WGSS are granted institutional legitimacy, they are compelled to defend this legitimacy through the very accounting and financialization rhetoric the field so strongly critiques. Montegary asks if we might see the university as a site of struggle for “non-reformist reforms,” a place to push for radical openings and build abolitionist knowledges in the service of more broad-based social transformation in the world.
As part of that broader social transformation, feminist scholars are confronting Islamophobia as an episteme in the WGSS classroom. Azza Basarudin, Sherine Hafez, Catherine Sameh, and Khanum Shaikh consider the enormous task of holding together the complex issues that emerge when teaching about gender in the Muslim world. They discuss the various strategies for addressing multiple issues simultaneously: Muslim women’s lives and agencies, histories of colonialism, the global Islamophobia industry, and Muslim women’s everyday experiences with and contestations of local and transnational patriarchies. It is not easy to do all of this within the temporal and structural constraints of the university. Yet emerging scholarship points to opportunities to explore such vexed issues in innovative ways.
Ferhan Güloğlu’s ethnographic work on Muslim women’s practices of self and sisterhood during hajj is one such example. Güloğlu explores the role of technology in creating gendered agencies and subjectivities and new affective bonds between women within patriarchal and gender segregated spaces. As women livestream their hajj experiences, they create networks of interrelation that allow them to temporarily transcend differences among them, as well as their own gendered differentiation. In this space of “technopiety,” women develop collective ethics and practices, as well as new affective modes of joy and fun.
Shweta Krishnan’s ethnographic account of the Mising, a tribal group in Majuli, Assam, India, also takes up the question of transnational gendered piety, examining how embodied everyday practices such as the sindoor (the vermillion that married women wear in the parting of their hair), become sites through which the Mising grapple with the complex historic interrelation between nav-Vaishnavism and an emergent reformist discourse of Donyipolo, a form of religiosity that has developed through the confluence of their transnational ancestral practices with streams of religious practice of the Brahmaputra Valley. Krishnan underscores the significance of transnational gendered subjectivities, particularly “ethical unlearning” to the processes through which the Mising seek to identify and practice what they deem to be a proper form of Donyipolo.
Neetu Khanna’s contribution also pushes us to consider the question of the complex imbrication of seemingly distinctive traditions, in this case scholarly and activist. Khanna’s article focuses on Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, both of whom were part of a prominent generation of young Muslim Marxist intellectuals and anti-colonial activist authors writing in India from the 1930s through the 1950s. As Khanna’s article demonstrates, their works not only constitute an important genealogical strand of transnational feminist thought, but they are also notable for their phenomenological approaches to internationalist imaginaries of decolonization, ones underscoring gendered and racialized affect that develop, as Khanna importantly notes, through the historical materialities that produce them.
Harjant Gill’s article focuses on another realm in need of decolonization: the field of visual anthropology. Building on his previous work advocating for an ontological shift towards “multimodality,” Gill foregrounds the sensorial filmmaking of Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Richard Fung. The work of these filmmakers not only interrogates our understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and power, they also anticipate contemporary discussions of affect and autoethnography that animate contemporary anthropology. Gill’s article powerfully demonstrates the ongoing workings of colonial frameworks and white supremacy that leads to the exclusion of these filmmakers’ works from conventional visual anthropological canons.
In her multimodal contribution “Future to be Rewritten,” Azra Aksamija also underscores the erasures of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in ongoing processes of memorialization and monument building, particularly with respect to public art commissions. Aksamija reflects on her own design team’s experience of winning and then withdrawing from a prestigious art competition run by the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts to commission an art installation commemorating the work and advocacy of the suffragette movement, due to the lack of BIPOC representation in the competition.
Wide-ranging, overlapping, distinctive, and powerful, the different contributions of this Scholar and Feminist Online issue demonstrate the ongoing importance of transnational feminist scholarship. Through their examination of how different forms of knowledge production, social activism, and expressive culture are inextricably interwoven and interrogative of their socio-historical conditions of possibility – ones that continue to be suffused and riven with gendered hierarchies, heteronormativity, white supremacy, colonial relations, neoliberalism, securitization, and authoritarianism – these works underscore how transnational feminisms remain striking relevant for renewing long-standing concerns and generating new approaches to enduring and persistent problems and questions.
Importantly, this issue focuses not only on our identification and analysis of these processes, but also on our responses and suggestions for intervention. While it has been a long time in the making, slowed by the contingencies of life as well as pandemic time, it remains strikingly relevant for renewing long-standing concerns and generating new approaches to enduring and persistent problems and questions.
