Transnational Feminism

"Globalized Philomels: State Patriarchy, Transnational Capital, and the Femicides on the US-Mexican Border in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666" South Atlantic Review: The Journal of the Modern Language Association 75.4 (Fall 2010): 51-72.

by Laura Barberan Reinares

South Atlantic Review: The Journal of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association 75.4 (Fall 2010): 51-72.

Moving Feminism: How to 'trans' the national?

by Humaira Saeed

Introduction to 'Transnational Feminisms' Special Issue of 'Women: A Cultural Review'

Tracing Women's Routes in a Transnational Scenario The video-cartographies of Ursula Biemann

by Federica Timeto

Feminist Media Studies, Volume 9, Issue 4, 2009, special issue: Transcultural Mediations and Transnational Politics of Difference (pp. Pages 447 – 460)

This essay analyzes the video essays of Ursula Biemann, which focus on the relations between globalized production... more This essay analyzes the video essays of Ursula Biemann, which focus on the relations between globalized production processes, the exploitation of women's bodies, and the sexualization of female labor. Showing the interrelation of the flows of transnational economies and information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the performances of gender and space, these video essays work as feminist cartographies. Deploying the video essay format, Biemann creates figurations to delineate an alternative system of navigation. Visual language and visualization technologies become a political instrument to counter women's invisibility behind the displacing and abstracting effects of technoscapes.


Keywords: Ursula Biemann; video essay; ICTs; transnational feminism; feminist cartography; visualization technologies

Circling the globe: International feminism reconsidered, 1920 to 1975

by Katie Oliviero

Co-authored with Ellen Dubois

The Social Life of Bangladeshi Fatwas

by Dina Siddiqi

"Fuck the Border"? Music, Gender and Globalisation

by Samuel Dwinell

Encounters on the Border

by zoran poposki

Poposki, Zoran. “Encounters on the Border”, in Book of Proceedings from the 5th International Interdisciplinary Symposium Encounters of Cultures, Vol. I., edited by Ljiljana Subotic and Ivana Zivancevic-Sekerus, 437-442.. Novi Sad: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, 2010. ISBN 978-86-6065-040-7

Feminism vs Multiculturalism Teresa Eder

by Teresa Eder

final paper for "Managing Moral Diversity" class (spring 2011) - held by Chad Ceyrenne

Feminism vs. Multiculturalism: Are cultural group rights enforcing patriarchy and foreclosing equal rights for men and... more Feminism vs. Multiculturalism: Are cultural group rights enforcing patriarchy and foreclosing equal rights for men and women?
This paper wants to examine if the two concepts of feminism and multiculturalism in a liberal society are contradicting. Referring to Susan Moller Okins and Brian Barrys work I want to make a point why it may in fact be dangerous to favour minority group rights that might harm weak people (women) within the group.

Recasting 'Black Venus' in the new African Diaspora

by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe

Transnationalizing Desire: Sexualizing Culture and Commodifying Sexualities

by Cymene Howe

Disabled women and transnational feminisms: shifting boundaries and frontiers

by Miriam Arenas Conejo

Disability and Society. Special Issue. Volume 26, Number 5, August 2011

From the standpoint of a non-disabled feminist, the paper explores the transnational activism of disabled women. Under... more From the standpoint of a non-disabled feminist, the paper explores the transnational activism of disabled women. Under the light of shifting boundaries between women and frontiers among cultures and nations, the possible tensions between disability rights and feminist movements are also considered. Thus, disabled women’s concerns are reviewed in the discourse of their organizations and in their achievements within the United Nations. As a result, a defensive strategy for the protection of disabled women’s human rights is identified as intertwined with a proactive engagement in radical democracy practices. This strategy is considered as furthering coalitions with other oppressed groups, and therefore as an outstanding example of the potentialities of transnational human rights discourse in alliance-building.

"On the Ground: Media in Conflict Zones" in Space (Re)Solutions

by Krista Geneviève Lynes

Peter Mortenbock & Helge Mooshammer, Eds. Space (Re)Solutions: Interventions and Research in Visual Culture. Transcript Verlag, 2011.

What constitutes the image culture of conflict and war in the contemporary moment? What role do new media play in... more What constitutes the image culture of conflict and war in the contemporary moment? What role do new media play in negotiating the proliferating perspectives of embedded journalists, soldiers, civilians and spectators around the world? What becomes visible through these new mediations and what remains or becomes newly invisible through them? Current representations of the wars inherit a great deal from the first Gulf War’s 24-hour visual culture, but have been supplemented with images taken with video cell phones, embedded journalists, and soldiers creating their own videos of battle scenes. Such new visions—relying on more grainy amateur production equipment, as well as alternative channels of distribution and reception—have shifted the vantage points on the war from the spectacular heights of smart bombs and aerial campaigns to the more grounded perspective of the desert road, the city street, the inside of an advancing tank, or the inside of a family’s home.
This paper examines how artists, journalists, civilians and soldiers offer visions that negotiate the poles of visibility/ invisibility, and how the grounded perspective of new media affects the expanded field of visual culture. Such a grounded perspective initially suggests a kind of democratizing of images of the war, not only because the number of actors recording their experiences has multiplied, but because these videos are channeled through traditional news media as well as blogs, email campaigns, YouTube and other viral avenues. However, the immediacy of these new media forms also render certain subjects and modes of seeing impossible, even as they cloak themselves in the guises of a new form of objectivity. Through an examination of different videographic forms in the current conflicts (experimental film, personal video, and journalistic accounts) in Iraq and Afghanistan, this paper sheds light on the rhetoric of conflict in the expanded field of new media.

Visual Currencies: Documenting India's Red Light Districts

by Krista Geneviève Lynes

published in Signs

This paper explores how artists and documentarists wrestle with representing the conditions and causes of sexual... more This paper explores how artists and documentarists wrestle with representing the conditions and causes of sexual exploitation in India’s red light districts. It compares three works: Ross Kauffman & Zana Briski’s popular documentary Born into Brothels (2004) with the artist Elahe Massumi’s multi-channel video installations, The Hijras (2000) and A Kiss is not a Kiss (2000). The analysis examines how each work defines a specific site and scale where the problem of sexual exploitation is located, and articulates how the representation of women’s bodies (as sex workers) locates them in particular economies of value (loans, indenture and exchange) on a national and transnational level. The question of scale addresses both the chains of responsibility and relationality that produce the red light district’s activity and exploitation, as well as the position of the intended audience, calling for charity, empathy or accountability. Representations of prostitution specifically wrestle with the production of images that may reinforce the looks by which sex workers are eroticized and exploited. They also contend with visual regimes that (directly or indirectly) pass moral judgment on sex work generally. The paper finds that Kauffman & Briski’s practice of bringing the children’s experiences to light mimics the heroic rescue narratives within the documentary, that the children will be safe so long as they enter into the structures of liberal citizenship, and thus imagines the documentary’s role as enfranchising. It thus uses international rights-based languages and institutions to rescue children from ‘joining the line’. Massumi’s multi-channel videos, on the other hand, formally address the differential position of sex workers, both within the structures of transnational capitalism (exploitation) and violently shut out from them (subaltern oppression). The videos’ formal experimentation acts as a device to produce response and responsibility between its subject and viewers, and comes closer to rendering the life of sex workers in India than does the documentary Born into Brothels. The subjects are not simply victims, and yet they are still violently excluded from the privileges of citizenship and subjectivity. Massumi’s art works thus belie the neat insides and outsides proposed by a project like Born into Brothels. They call to account the interconnected structures (in which we as viewers also participate) that produce both the conditions of the subjects’ exploitation as well as the international community’s demand for redress.

Transnational Feminism and the Microfinance (R)evolution: Excavating Microlending from Neoliberalism

by Heather Montes Ireland

Thesis submitted to Oregon State University, presented publicly on June 16, 2011. Brief abstract: To make transnational feminist sense of the microfinance phenomenon, we must first excavate microfinance from neoliberalism. Seeking to unveil inequalities of power that perpetuate economic injustice against women of color worldwide, I conducted an analysis of the ontology of microfinance and neoliberalism itself, using the economic justice framework I designed as my analytical tool. Furthermore, I chart the promise of transnational feminist analysis to (re)configure oppressive structures (including neoliberal microfinance) into more just possibilities of our social world.

This study employs interdisciplinary methods to make transnational feminist sense of the microfinance phenomenon.... more This study employs interdisciplinary methods to make transnational feminist sense of the microfinance phenomenon. Drawing upon a combination of discourse approach, textual analysis, political economics and critical theory construction, I fused a feminist critical discourse approach to excavate microfinance from neoliberalism. I designed an economic justice framework and executed an in-depth study of Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank publications. Seeking to unveil inequalities of power that perpetuate economic injustice against women of color worldwide, I further conducted an analysis of the ontology of microfinance and neoliberalism itself, using the economic justice framework I designed as my analytical tool. I chart the promise of transnational feminist analysis to (re)configure oppressive structures into more just possibilities of our social world. Specifically, while other feminist scholars have begun to critique microfinance from various entry points, I (re)imagine microfinance as an element of an economics of promise. Acknowledging the structural dimensions that create poverty and applying that framework to our understandings of the practices of microcredit, I posit an economics of promise through which microfinance can be deployed strategically as a political act for economic justice.

Universal Human Rights and Non-Western Normative Systems: A comparative analysis of violence against women in Mexico and Pakistan

by Silvie Bovarnick

Published in the Review of International Studies. (33): 59-74.

Abstract:

How universally useful are human rights in addressing violence against women? This paper... more Abstract:

How universally useful are human rights in addressing violence against women? This paper addresses this question by looking at the link between gender, ethnicity and human rights to uncover the complexities that underpin current debates about universal justice and multiculturalism. While my discussion of rape in Mexico and Pakistan illustrates significant particularities with respect to how violence against women is constituted in these different cultural contexts, it also shows that culturally specific manifestations of violence against women often share striking similarities in the way that they are allowed to persist, justified and made invisible. As such, they are part of a global mechanism that reproduces gender subordination in a predominantly patriachial world.

Edwidge Danticatis Kitchen History

by Valérie Loichot

Reconstruire dans l'exil: la nourriture créatrice chez Gisèle Pineau

by Valérie Loichot

Positioned in/by the State: Incorporation, Exclusion, and Appropriation of Women’s Gender-Based Claims to Political Asylum in the United States.

by Sara McKinnon

Women writing: what do women writers want?

by Alev Adil

commisioned by Zaman

Organising EU non-discrimination law around the nodes of 'race', gender and disability

by Dagmar Schiek

This is published in Schiek & Lawson (eds) EU Non-Discrimination Law and Intersectionality - exploring the triangle of race, gender and disability (Farnham: Ashgate 2011). It is an awfully large file - you are advised to buy the book after all!

EU non-discrimination law has seen a proliferation of discrimination grounds from 2000. Dis-crimination on grounds of... more EU non-discrimination law has seen a proliferation of discrimination grounds from 2000. Dis-crimination on grounds of gender (in the field of equal pay) and on grounds of nationality (generally within the scope of application of EU law) were the only prohibited forms of discrimination in EU law, until the Treaty of Amsterdam empowered the Community to legislate in order to combat discrimination on grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation (Article 13 EC). Proliferation of non-discrimination grounds is also characteristic for international and national non-discrimination law. As such, proliferation of grounds results in an increase in potential cases of “multiple discrimination” and the danger of diluting the demands of equality law by ever more multiplication of grounds. The hierarchy of equality, which has been so widely criticised in EU law, is a signifier of the latter danger.
This chapter proposes to structure the confusing field of non-discrimination grounds by organis-ing them around nodes of discrimination fields. It will first reflect different ways of establishing hierarchies between grounds. This will be followed by a recount of different (narrow and wide) reading of grounds. A comprehensive reading of the grounds gender, ‘race’ and disability as es-tablishing overlapping fields of discrimination grounds will be mapped out, with some examples for practical uses.