Transnational feminism refers to both a contemporary feminist paradigm and the corresponding activist movement. Both the theories and activist practices are concerned with how globalization and capitalism affect people across nations, races, genders, classes, and sexualities. This movement asks to critique the ideologies of traditional white, classist, western models of feminist practices from an intersectional approach and how these connect with labor, theoretical applications, and analytical practice on a geopolitical scale.
The term "transnational" is reaction and the rejection of terms like "international" and "global" feminism. Transnational feminists believe that the term "international" puts more emphasis on nation-states as distinct entities, and that "global" speaks to liberal feminist theories on "global sisterhood" that ignore Global Majority women and women of color's perspectives on gender inequality and other problems globalization inherently brings.
The transnational feminist academic paradigm draws from postcolonial feminist theories, which emphasize how colonialist legacies have shaped and continue to shape the social, economic, and political oppression of people across the globe. It rejects the idea that people from different regions have the same subjectivities and experiences with gender inequality, it further recognizes that global capitalism has created similar relations of exploitation and inequality, this core concept creates dialogue which feminists around the world can find solidarity and seek collaboration. Transnational feminism further complicates global capitalism and neoliberalism.
Transnational feminist practice is involved in activist movements across the globe that work together to understand the role of gender, the state, race, class, and sexuality in critiquing and resisting structures of patriarchal, capitalist power. It is attentive to feminism as both a liberatory formation and a practice that has been oppressed by and sometimes been complicit with colonialism, racism, and imperialism. As such, it resists utopian ideas about "global sisterhood" while simultaneously working to lay the groundwork for more productive and equitable social relations among women across borders and cultural contexts.
Usage
Transnational feminist theorists and practitioners vary in how they phrase "transnational feminism". Variations include "transnational feminisms", or "transnational feminist praxis" and "transnational practices"
Amanda Swarr and Richa Nagar, in their book Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, give a list of the now outdated terms that describe transnational feminist practices. They emphasize that, like these "rejects", the term "transnational" feminisms is merely a product of its time in the U.S. and Canadian academic institutions. Before, the terms were " "women of color" feminisms (Combahee River Collective 1982), "third world" feminisms (Mohanty et al. 1991), "Multicultural feminisms (e.g. Shohat 1998)", "international (Enloe 1990)" and "global" feminisms (e.g., Morgan 1984)." Currently, "transnational feminism" is the term that feminists like Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan claim has political power and can discard essentialist binaries like First World/Third World, or heteronormative gender constructs. These feminist theorists believed that "international" put more emphasis on nation-states as distinct entities, and that "global" speaks to liberal feminist theories, like Robin Morgan's concept of "global sisterhood", without taking into consideration race, class, culture, or colonialist and imperialist histories.
In Women's studies on its own: a next wave reader in institutional change, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan claim they do not think the term "transnational" is better than either "international" or "global", but that it is useful inasmuch as it is free from the implications that other terms may have:
Criticisms against the term "transnational" claim that because it de-emphasizes the borders between nations and emphasizes the similar concept of global capital flows, it deceptively smooths over large inequalities between nations.
Transnational Feminism in practice can be noted as a means of studying the "other", a western concept of people not strictly related to the global north. This is the attempt to understand what factors make up their identities and struggles and a way of acknowledging that these experiences have their own complex natures, unique geographically and how this is interpolated by those examining and theorizing.
History
Globalization
Globalization is a process marked by greater political, economic, and social interdependence between all the nations of the world. It arose in the 1970s with greater market expansion.
As neoliberal ideologies and policies spread in the 1980s and 1990s, more governments started deregulating their markets. In the Third World, governments implemented Structural Adjustment Programs, which espoused the neoliberal ideologies of free trade, increased government deregulation, and reduced welfare and social protection. These practices feminized the labor force.
Because women in Third world countries are now more involved in the professional workforce, many outsource care work to women in developing countries. This provides more job opportunities for the Third World women but also detracts from the migrants' ability to care for their own children and increases the gap in human capital between the two spheres. Because of this global demand for outsourced labor, women in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia who would otherwise not have a job now do, and studies have shown that this improves their sense of empowerment and reduces likelihood of domestic abuse.
Globalization also allows resistances against the spread of neoliberal ideologies. Transnational feminist networks, in which women from all over the world can organize together against gender inequity, would not be possible without the information and travel networks created by globalization.
Feminism
In the Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, Valentine Moghadam says that "women have worked together across borders since at least the mid-1800s. (55)" What is now called first wave feminism started in the early twentieth century in the West with a focus on women's suffrage. During World War II, the United States government gave women jobs because the war had caused a national shortage of labor. After the war ended, Irene Tinker says (oxford transnational), these jobs were taken away but women were no longer satisfied going back to their previous gender roles. Starting in the 1960s in the United States, second wave feminism emerged, defined by women's organization around "equal right to education, employment, and equal pay for equal work, and on sexual and reproductive rights."
The UN Decade for Women of 1976–1985, and the following four UN conferences on women between 1975 and 1995 were essential in creating transnational feminist networks and putting feminism on a global agenda. However starting in the 1980s there was a separation between Western feminists and Third World feminists. This occurred largely because Western feminists largely subscribed to liberal feminist perspectives, which focused on the common patriarchal oppressor of women, defined by its confining women to the household and traditional work. Liberal feminists propose that women break this oppression by leaving their traditional roles in the household, becoming educated, and entering the labor force. Women in developing countries often felt that Western feminism did not represent them and align with their struggles. They felt that Western feminism was ethnocentric and assumed all women had similar situations. Scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty plays an integral role in articulating concerns about Western feminism's failure to account for non-Western subjects. She critiques feminism during this time period to be more inclusive of intersectional struggles, identifying that feminism and inequalities are not linear, and the idea of female being a basis of shared oppression invisibilized the individual within their specific context and time. Upon realizing that the common phenomena of capitalist globalization was causing women all over the world to be disproportionately affected (CITE), transnational feminist movements allied together and helped to consolidate the field of transnational feminism.
Transnational feminism
The theory termed "transnational feminism" was first used by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan in 1994 in their germinal text Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, which situated transnational feminism among other theories of feminism, modernity, and postmodernity. Soon after, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty published Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures in 1997, a book important in formulating transnational feminist canon. This text, building on Grewal and Kaplan's, focused more on the ways in which a new theory of transnational feminism could help foreground feminist activist practices in global contexts. They talk about "feminist democracies" as ways for activists to imagine nonhegemonic futures.
The practice of transnational feminism networks, in which feminists started exchanging ideas and collaborating across nation-state borders, originated from the United Nations conferences in the 1970s. In 1975 the United Nations Decade of Women began with the United Nations declaration of an International Women's Year. This ushered in a decade of conferences that would continue to the present. Important events during this period included conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing in 1995.
These conferences and others facilitated the contact of feminists from all over the globe, allowing for discussions to occur that transcended borders. While so called "western feminists", a term for feminists that were "US-based white, class-privileged women" had dominated the women's rights movement, when women from other parts of the globe were brought in, they began criticizing this type of women's rights for assuming all women had the same experiences, and not considering the impact of factors such as race, state, economic status had on their lives.
The theories of WID and GAD also helped to highlight gender related issues that pertained to women worldwide. The establishment of transnational feminist networks did many things, one such thing was creating numerous NGOs. The United Nations conferences were not the only factors leading to the transnationalization of feminism as mentioned, WID and GAD played important roles and so did other global events. As more women globally were gaining greater access to education, obtaining jobs, and becoming more mobile, it allowed for women to more easily meet and communicate. The spread of neoliberalism, poor working conditions, and declining welfare conditions in many countries led many women to find common ground and to subsequently form transnational feminist groups and organizations.