Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization

367 Pages·2017·3.06 MB·English

Decolonizing Feminism
Decolonizing Feminism
Transnational Feminism and
Globalization
Edited by Margaret A. McLaren
London • New York
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
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Selection and editorial matter © 2017 Margaret A. McLaren Copyright in individual chapters is held by the
respective chapter authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0258-9
PB: 978-1-7866-0259-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-258-9 (cloth : alk.
paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78660-259-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78660-260-2 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface: Toward a Decolonial Feminism for the 99 Percent
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
 Introduction: Decolonizing Feminism
Margaret A. McLaren
PART 1: DECOLONIZING EPISTEMOLOGIES, METHODS,
AND KNOWLEDGES
 1 Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy
Linda Martín Alcoff
 2 Knowing without Borders and the Work of Epistemic Gathering
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.
PART 2: RETHINKING RIGHTS
 3 Indigenous/Campesina Embodied Knowledge, Human Rights Awards, and
Lessons for Transnational Feminist Solidarity
Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Sylvanna M. Falcón
 4 Decolonizing Rights: Transnational Feminism and “Women’s Rights as
Human Rights”
Margaret A. McLaren
PART 3: CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION: THE SPACE
BETWEEN
 5 Constitutional Patriotism and Political Membership: A Feminist
Decolonization of Habermas and Benhabib
Kanchana Mahadevan
 6 “Home-Making” and “World-Traveling”: Decolonizing the Space-Between
in Transnational Feminist Thought
Celia T. Bardwell-Jones
 7 The Special Plight of Women Refugees
Kelly Oliver
PART 4: DECOLONIZING DIALOGUE, SOLIDARITY, AND
FREEDOM
 8 The Dynamics of Transnational Feminist Dialogue
Barbara Fultner
 9 Building Transnational Feminist Solidarity Networks
Sergio A. Gallegos
10 Decolonizing Feminist Freedom: Indigenous Relationalities
Allison Weir
Index
About the Contributors
Preface
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Toward a Decolonial Feminism for the 99 Percent
As I write this, our understandings of feminism, decolonization, and
transnationalism are in flux, contested in social movements, state policy, and
social and political theory. In 2010, Jacqui Alexander and I wrote about the use
of the transnational as a normativizing gesture in neoliberal times.1 We asked
then what a radical, counterhegemonic, transnational/decolonial feminism might
look like. My questions are not substantially different seven years later, although
the explicit exercise of power is more visible at this historical moment. In 2017,
the transnational necessitates acknowledging explicitly carceral regimes;
geopolitical climate destruction; militarized national borders; massive
displacement of peoples (war, climate, and economic refugees); proliferation of
corporatist, racist, misogynist cultures; lean-in and glass ceiling (liberal)
feminisms; the decimation of labor movements, and the rise of right-wing, proto-
fascist governments around the world (Modi in India, Erdovan in Turkey, Trump
in the United States).
An important moment then for a book on Decolonizing Feminism, especially
one that offers original, nuanced, and visionary feminist analysis that crosses
epistemological and disciplinary borders and provides conceptual tools to
decolonize hegemonic feminisms and fracture the transnational as a
normativizing gesture. Organized around the central question of what it would
mean to “decolonize transnational feminism” in the age of neoliberalism,
feminist philosophers, and social theorists take up core transnational feminist
concerns in deeply thoughtful and provocative analyses of human rights,
citizenship and immigration, and dialogue/solidarities in the quest for justice and
freedom. The volume consists of ten smart and provocative chapters organized
around four central themes: Decolonizing Epistemologies, Methods, and
Knowledges; Rethinking Rights; Citizenship and Immigration: The Space-
Between; and Decolonizing Dialogue, Solidarity, and Freedom.
Margaret A. McLaren in her Introduction to the volume describes the
questions at the core of the project: “What does it mean to decolonize feminism?
How do the frameworks/approaches of decoloniality and feminism inform,
enhance, contradict, and mutually influence one another? How can decolonial
approaches to feminism help to navigate twenty-first-century concerns of the
increasing influence of global capital and transnational corporations, repressive
state forces, nationalism, xenophobia, the forced displacement of peoples and
immigration, the increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor within
nations, the increasing global wealth gap between nations of the global North
and the global South, and the looming environmental crisis?”
These are urgent and important political and intellectual questions at this time
when the rhetoric of “transnational” has been co-opted on a large scale in
neoliberal university settings. Administrators are “transnational” since they
travel across the globe in search of profitable partnerships with universities in
other countries, and for “international” students who can pay for higher
education that is no longer available to working-class and poor students in the
United States. Academic curricula are also “transnational” since “study abroad”
programs now buttress a normative curriculum that supposedly prepares students
to compete in a global market. In the U.S. academy “transnational” often
becomes a placeholder for business as usual, marked as “progressive” in the face
of a conservative, xenophobic backlash. Globalization and transnational
knowledge production becomes the new managerial mantra in neoliberal
universities.
In addition, the larger geopolitical landscape poses urgent and significant
challenges to those of us committed to an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist,
decolonial feminist praxis. While the old/new, constantly shifting political
terrain of Trump and company suggests the consolidation of a white