Engendering Transnational Transgressions

From the Intimate to the Global

Eileen Boris, Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Barbara Molony, Eileen Boris, Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Barbara Molony

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000222791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

Engendering Transnational Transgressions reclaims the transgressive side of feminist history, challenging hegemonic norms and the power of patriarchies. Through the lenses of intersectionality, gender analysis, and transnational feminist theory, it addresses the political in public and intimate spaces.

The book begins by highlighting the transgressive nature of feminist historiography. It then divides into two parts—Part I, Intimate Transgressions: Marriage and Sexuality, examines marriage and divorce as viewed through a transnational lens, and Part II, Global Transgressions: Networking for Justice and Peace, considers political and social violence as well as struggles for relief, redemption, and change by transnational networks of women. Chapters are archivally grounded and take a critical approach that underscores the local in the global and the significance of intersectional factors within the intimate. They bring into conversation literatures too often separated: history of feminisms and anti-war, anti-imperial/anti-fascist, and related movements, on the one hand, and studies of gender crossings, marriage reconstitution, and affect and subjectivities, on the other. In so doing, the book encourages the reader to rethink standard interpretations of rights, equality, and recognition.

This is the ideal volume for students and scholars of Women's and Gender History and Women's and Gender Studies, as well as International, Transnational, and Global History, History of Social Movements, and related specialized topics.

1
INTRODUCTION

Eileen Boris, Sandra Trudgen Dawson, and Barbara Molony

We live in a global age, but no more so than many times in the past. Over the last decade, transnationalism has come to define the scope and practice of writing on international organizations; movements of people, goods, and ideas; and collaborations across national borders. Nonetheless, activists and scholars alike have deployed the term “transnational” with divergent, and at times, almost oppositional meanings: some highlighting the “national” part of the word, and thus foregrounding the nation as a body from which collaboration can spring, and others emphasizing the “trans” part, thereby undermining and decentering the nation as either a unit of (scholarly) analysis or a reified entity. Feminist activists and scholars have viewed the transnational along a spectrum from advancing movement goals to embedding the modern nation-state in such evils as imperialism, sexism, racism, and economic exploitation across a wide geographical and social reach. A disturbing early tendency came from judging past women’s transnationalism through the lens of the Cold War, which dismissed some groups as Communist front organizations or as political—as if feminisms were apolitical.¹

These discussions are fraught. Laura Briggs and Robyn Spencer, for example, have sought to ally feminist scholarship on transnationalism with “political movements that work to undo the nation and its violences, including imperialism, racisms, and colonialisms” without rejecting all transnationalism. They admit that transnational connections have “allowed for certain types of solidarities to take root.”² The negative characteristics of modern nations, in turn, may call into question both reformist movements in the name of transnational cooperation and scholarly analyses using transnational approaches. Other scholars of feminist ideas and politics note the importance of studying nineteenth- and twentieth-century cross-border feminist advocacy, which, ipso facto, recognizes the existence of borders and the need to transcend them in collaborative solidarity for promotion of shared reformist goals—despite the imbalance between Western voices and those of Asian, African, and Latina feminists.³ Rebecca Adami and Katherine M. Marino have uncovered the generative role of delegates from India, Latin America, and other regions outside of the West in gendering the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while Keisha N. Blain and other scholars of the African Diaspora offer an alternative Black-centered view of transnationalism.⁴ In studying the defining of girlhood in India through age of consent laws in their global context, Ashwini Tambe, for one, recognizes that policy-making at the

intergovernmental sphere … is frequently shaped by imperial and parochial interests … [and] transnational feminists typically deemphasize the significance of advocacy in [intergovernmental] sites because national representatives were usually elite figures who were committed to their respective nationalist narratives.

However, she concludes that there is value in recognizing interstate transnationalism.⁵

This collection embraces the scholarly benefit of a transnational approach, especially one that acknowledges intersectionality. Intersectional consciousness allows us to develop a novel category of analysis in this collection, that of gendered transgressions that cross (or redefine) “national” boundaries. “Trans” in both terms—transnational and transgressive—suggests destabilized meanings, and each of the chapters in this book addresses destabilized and transgressive gendered behavior across borders and time, through disrupting social and cultural expectations and transnational diaspora or feminist collaboration.

As understandings of the transnational have grown to include the local in the global and the national in the international, and vice versa, historians have expanded the subjects and objects of inquiry. This collection, based on papers originally presented at the 2018 conference of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH), builds on such recent trends but adds the intimate.⁶ Its contributors come from nine countries; chapters together span every continent. In the process, the collection reclaims the transgressive side of feminist history: challenges to hegemonic norms and to the power of patriarchies. Through the lenses of intersectionality, gender analysis, and transnational feminist theory, the chapters address the political in public and intimate spaces, including households, plazas, social movements, and states. Through linking the concepts, transnational and transgression, the volume asserts that marriage resisters, gender non-conformists, feminist activists, and others who contested relations of power served as vanguards of change. By labeling these women as transgressive, their own contemporaries may have sought to reinforce as normative the behavior transgressive women challenged. We see them—conversely and through the lens of history—as transformative of their societies and of gender itself.

Methodologies and theories vary by chapter, but the collection overall draws upon intersectional gender analysis and what has come to be known as “transnational feminist theory.” A critical approach that combines postcolonial, women of color, and Global South perspectives, transnational feminist theory—when critical of imperial feminism of the past and liberal hegemonic feminism of the present—questions the structural, discursive, and representational underpinnings of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. It explores alternative knowledge production. The chapters are archivally grounded; by examining neglected documents (such as family mementos, photographic images, missionary records, movement publications, oral narratives, and monument inscriptions), they take us to new places and reconsider events, individuals, and organizations that historians thought we knew. Some chapters, such as those centering Indigenous histories, rely on ethnographic accounts and deploy oral interviews to recover the past. A few chapters explicitly apply current feminist theories of gender, sexualities, and identity, fully conscious of the distance between the historian and the lives reconstructed. Other chapters complicate the history of suffrage, peace negotiations, and educational exchange. Some chapters disrupt conventional understandings of feminism itself, especially as women interact with each other across the globe.

This collection expands recent scholarship in two directions. It emphasizes the transgressive, that is, behavior by individuals and groups against the hegemonic and normative in culture and society. It also brings into conversation literatures too often separated: history of feminisms and anti-war, anti-imperial/anti-fascist, and related movements, on the one hand, and studies of gender crossings, marriage reconstitution, and affect and subjectivities, on the other. Finally, it offers case studies out of the ordinary and in far-flung places that encourage rethinking standard interpretations of rights, equality, and recognition.

How have historians and other gender scholars employed concepts of the transnational and examples of gendered transgressions in recent studies? And how does this volume highlight the intersection of these two modes of analysis? In this Introduction, we examine recent trends in both of these foci (transnationalism and transgression) and then discuss the linkages of the chapters in two parts, “Intimate Transgressions: Marriage and Sexuality” and “Global Transgressions: Networking for Justice and Peace.”

Thinking about the transnational

Discussions and publications on the relationship of imperialism, transnationalism, and feminism emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century, engendering a scholarly field denoted as transnational feminist studies.⁷ Early expressions of the term “transnational” appeared in a number of works, including, but not limited to, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton’s 1992 “Towards a Definition of Transnationalism”; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s 1994 edited collection, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices; and Aihwa Ong’s 1997 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.⁸ These studies used the concept in a variety of ways, from referring to the links between countries forged by migrants and the “study [of] the relations between women from different cultures and nations”⁹ to the impact of global migration on family life. The transnational turn allowed us to examine relationships between gender and power across boundaries defined by “nations” and among women in transnational networks, as well as power relationships forged by imperialism and its legacies.

Although many early global networks displayed a “West and the rest”¹⁰ or “Sisterhood is Powerful”¹¹ Western-centric approach that, as we have noted, scholars now criticize, we stress that relationships of power occurred within the “second” world of the State Socialist East as well as among non-Western countries and within nation-states.¹² For example, how does indigeneity function against the power of settler colonialism? How is one’s gendered nationality defined when it comes to migration and immigration? These issues are considered in several of the essays in this collection. An intersectional lens is necessary in such cases; holding fast nationally defined homogeneity would make the subjects of these essays illegible. Thus, transnationalism goes far beyond “international studies.” It considers elite women and their cross-border networks for anti-war, labor, and anti-imperialist activism as well as gender justice; non-elite women and their cross-border networks, often working for similar goals, but adding economic justice; multiple ethnicities interacting within a nation constructed of immigrants from other countries; marriage and sexualities across borders; and practices of gender—in terms of both intimacy and other forms of power.

Transnational feminism followed—and to a certain extent subsumed—Third World feminist analysis. Third World feminism developed, as noted by philosopher Ranjoo Seodu Herr, “in opposition to white second-wave feminists’ single-pronged analyses of gender oppression that elided Third World women’s multiple and complex oppressions in their various social locations.”¹³ She further notes that transnational feminist approaches consider “nation-states and nationalism as detrimental to feminist causes, whereas Third World feminists are relatively neutral to, and at times even approving of, nation-states and nationalism.”¹⁴ Several chapters in this collection bring in non-Western feminisms and women’s networks, challenging the notion that feminism is exclusively a Western import and transnationalism is primarily a reflection of that assumption. As Uma Narayan writes, “feminist perspectives are not foreign to … Third World national contexts.”¹⁵ Like Tambe, Herr suggests that advocacy through cross-border networks of elite, and even government-sponsored, feminist activists sometimes has had merit. She calls for a reexamination of the approaches of Third World feminism to enhance transnational feminist scholarship. Several chapters in the second part of this collection address this issue.

Chapters that focus more on intimacies in transnational contexts resonate with other approaches in Third World feminism—those that, according to Herr, “pay attention to individual women’s agency and voices” and are grounded in the “histories, contexts, and preoccupations of the specific locations being studied,” rather than being too dependent on theory, a warning that political scientist Leela Fernandes also has made.¹⁶ Here an intersectional mode of analysis enhances the grounded, human experiences of gender construction through transnational movements and migrations. Addressing transnational migrations and their gendered effects, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, and their collaborators have explored the interconnection of empire, intimacy, and concepts of beauty and the body in the context of diaspora and the circulation of culture.¹⁷

Some researchers long viewed history and its actors (both famous and subaltern) through varied, intersecting, and non-homogeneous portals of observation, but the term “intersectionality,” rooted in Black feminist activism, entered into academic discussions in the 1990s through the work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.¹⁸ According to sociologist Ginetta Candalario, because early uses of intersectional analysis focused on the United States, the bringing together of transnational studies and activism with intersectionality has “offered a powerful corrective to the particular paradigms of earlier race and ethnic studies, area studies, and women’s studies.”¹⁹ Thus, sociologist Vrushali Patil contends that transnational feminist appro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributor biographies
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Matronage: a useful concept for understanding the involvement of women in the public sphere in ancient societies
• Part I Intimate transgressions: marriage and sexuality
• Part II Global transgressions: networking for justice and peace
• Index