Transnational/Postcolonial Feminist Theorizing

Conceptual Overview

Transnational/postcolonial feminist theorizing, while not monolithic, includes several critics who challenge Western feminist theories of gender and gender relations as furthering the images and social experiences of mostly privileged women (and men) in the First World. These arguments, which have acquired theoretical strength since the 1990s, go beyond those raised by race theorists who questioned the white, middle class, heterosexist representations of gender in feminist theorizing, and interrogate the function of the nation in gendering and racializing “others” through specific, patriarchal, heterosexist, political, and economic projects between and within different countries. They also promote notions such as transversal politics instead of identity politics to address both the heterogeneity of citizenship in its current global dimensions, within and between nations, and the possibility of feminist projects cutting across differences without assimilation.

Transnational feminist theorizing stresses a materialist interest in globalization processes but also reiterates an interest in the formation of subjectivities and in concerns with language and representation that are more typical in postcolonial theorizations. Chandra Talpade Mohanty's contributions to transnational feminist theorizing offer a classic example: Calling for a rewriting of history based on the specific locations and histories of struggle of (post)colonial peoples, Mohanty reaffirms the need to voice “other knowledges” to illuminate the simultaneity of oppressions as grounding for a feminist politics based on the histories of racism and imperialism; the significance of memory and writing in the creation of oppositional agency; and the differences, conflicts, and contradictions internal to Third World women's organizations and communities. At the same time, her work emphasizes the interconnectedness of different people's exploitation at present—no matter where they are located—as produced within the political economy of globalization, reiterating that the boundaries between the haves and the have nots exist as much within nations as between nations, which situates communities of people as social majorities/minorities in disparate forms.

Works such as Mohanty's articulate the existence of complex subjectivities and heterogeneous subject positions and relations, produced by intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexualities, and so on in the context of specific First World/Third World historical and contemporary relationships. These more complex conceptualizations defy Western humanist, homogenizing, and apparently benign subjectivities represented in notions such as “global sisterhood.” The latter, as well as many other First World feminist notions, have contributed to constructing “Third World peoples” (not just women) as backward, ignorant, and passive recipients of Western “knowledge,” obliterating other possible representations that would articulate their agency, capabilities, involvement in struggles, and strategies for survival.

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