SUNY series, Genders in the Global South

Feminisms and Ummah in African and Southeast Asian Writing

Shirin E. Edwin

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438486406
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines Muslim women's creative strategies of deploying religious concepts such as ummah, or community, to solve problems of domestic and communal violence, polygamous abuse, sterility, and heteronormativity. By closely reading and examining examples of ummah-building strategies in interfaith dialogues, exchanges, and encounters between Muslim and non-Muslim women in a selection of African and Southeast Asian fictions and essays, this book highlights women's assertive activisms to redefine transnationalism, understood as relationships across national boundaries, as transgeography. Ummah -building strategies shift the space of, or respatialize, transnational relationships, focusing on connections between communities, groups, and affiliations within the same nation. Such a respatialization also enables a more equitable and inclusive remediation of the citizenship of gendered and religious citizens to the nation-state and the transnational sphere of relationships.

Chapter 1

Ummah and Friendships

Transgeographic Inscriptions of Transnational Islamic Feminisms

In the past decade or so, new frameworks of knowledge production have emerged to destabilize the binary structure of comparative methodology by continually emphasizing the highly politicized nature of identity formation in modernity.

—Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women’s and Gender Studies.”

As an example of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, Khairudin Aljunied points out the unique merging of two religions—Islam and Christianity—in the architectural composition of the Hajjah Fatimah Mosque in Singapore:

The mosque’s minaret is a duplicate of the church spire of the century-old St. Andrew’s Cathedral not far from it. Not only that, slightly slanted, the minaret has also been dubbed the “Singaporean version of Italy’s leaning tower of Pisa.” (29)

While Aljunied attributes this hybridity to the “inclusivist” culture of Islam and Muslims, such sights in fact reveal a spatial topology of two or more faiths that exceed inclusivity. In other words, the church stands physically distant from the mosque. Yet its architectural presence within the minaret respatializes the distance so it exists within the minaret as its duplicate—inscribed in it and difficult to separate. Also reoriented in this respatialization from coexistence (close to each other, marked by spatial distance) to existence within each other are the directions of the flow of influence and information: or quite simply the appropriations of influences, power, and ideas, from Western Christian designs (the cathedral) to Eastern Islamic constructions (the mosque). These appropriations—how the influences are received and what the colonized do with these influences—also respatialize power relations. Such architectural aesthetics of faith and communities are not uncommon. A much older and more popular example of unusually respatialized relationships, notes Barry Flood Finbarr, is that of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus that also houses within it the shrine of John the Baptist. Muslims and Christians have worshipped here for centuries.

Along these lines of reimagining transnational relationships as respatializations of power relations, in this chapter I attempt a theoretical redefinition of transnationalism as transgeographic intercourse between two or more such geographies as classes, languages, ethnicities, or religions to address inequalities, exclusions, and misrecognitions of feminist agendas of the Third World or Global South. I approach this redefinition from two angles. First, I point out the implicit prioritization of issues in current formulations of transnational feminisms and the abiding influence of this consensual prioritization on theorizations of transnational Islamic feminisms. Secondly, and more importantly, I focus on the direction of information, “theory,” influences, and interlocutors to rebalance materially and historically uneven powers in transnational relationships (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 2). To these ends, this chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section highlights the limits of transnational feminism by tracing its genealogy, unfurling primarily in the sites of movements, organizations, and activist spheres. In the second section, in particular, I underscore the striking discursive similarity between Islamic and transnational feminisms to foreground the lack of critical self-reflexivity and the risks of normativizing a discursive practice. This discursive impasse, as I also argue in the second section, is responsible for the underarticulation of ummah as human community—a heterogeneously federated community—that is both essential and operative for understanding Muslims today. To move out of this impasse, I connect such concepts as “contact zones,” “Muslim cosmopolitanism,” and “dissident relationality” (or “dissident friendships”) to Muslim women’s ummah-building gestures of dialogues, exchanges, and encounters for solving gendered problems, not simply because they foster solidarity or coalitions but because they enable a more inclusive theorization of transnational feminist activity. Most importantly, these ummah-building strategies perform the key task of reorienting “theory” or the flow of information and influences from hegemonic structures of power to materially and historically weaker sites. I conclude this chapter by underlining the governing idea of this book: that a respatialized transnationalism rests on neglected sites of knowledge production and practices—imperfect, improvisational, and even immature—outside of formally legislated policy gains in everyday and aleatory encounters, dialogues, and relationships. Highlighting them abets a redefinition of the temporal and spatial subjectivities of transnational feminism.¹ I begin with a brief overview of transnational feminism to engage with its roots in two basic features—formal movement building and organizational mobilizations, underpinned by solidarity and the consensus over the unstable character of transnational feminisms.

Limits of Transnational Feminisms: Genealogies, Spaces, and Stable Instabilities

The impetus for a transnational feminist spirit and space can be traced to international conferences and conventions sponsored by powerful international organizations since the early 1980s. In the vein of anti-imperial and decolonial ferment, these conferences have (also since the 1980s) bravely anticipated and battled the onset of globalization.² Most notably, theorists cite the UN decade for women (1976–1985), the UN Conference in Kenya in 1985 and in Beijing in 1995, and transnational political organizations such as the European and African unions, including agencies such as the UN and organizations that pioneered the organizational impetus for uniting women’s voices across national borders.³ Sociologist Myra Marx Ferree calls this increased mobilization of feminist issues “the democratization of feminism” in that movements now involved greater participation from “ordinary citizens and social movements, not merely governments and elites” (15). Since Mohanty and Alexander’s foundational theorization of transnationalism as a potent tool for countering global capitalistic dominance, and since gradually devaluing such theoretical vocabulary as “sisterhood,” “international,” (“adhering to nation-states”), and “global” (“prioritizing northern feminist agendas”), transnational feminism emerged as the preferred lens for feminist praxis, premised on comparative, relational, and historical conceptions of women (Nagar and Swarr, 2010, 4). But this transnational growth in feminist issues was far from uniform or linear. It was contested, interrupted, and contradictory in character even as transnational feminism sought to remedy the inadequacies of “global sisterhood” and international and global feminisms (4). It differed from its predecessors in that it was willing to accept diverse and “new modes of subjectivity” from uneven relations, as Inderpal Grewal, Akhil Gupta, and Aihwa Ong recognize in transnationalism, the “uneven and unequal exchanges and effects [that] generate new modes of subjectivity and political activity” (1999, 655).⁴ Similarly, Nagar and Swarr point to transnational feminisms’ ability to attend to diverse shades of globalization and the formation of subjectivities in relation to globalization (2010, 5).⁵ And Briggs, McCormick, and Way (2008) detailed its numerous meanings in “globalization, neoliberalism, colonialism, and internationalism” to denaturalize the term and focus on its cross-disciplinary score. As such, the definition of transnationalism that has endured is the one proposed by Briggs et al, “as much as it belongs to the worlds of free trade agreements and export processing zones, transnationalism belongs to genealogies of anti-imperial and decolonizing thought” (628).⁶

It is odd then that despite the often contested, contradictory, and unstable forms of transnationalisms, the theorization of transnational feminist experience rather stably and uniformly constellates around an unchanged set of themes, actors, and sites of knowledge production. It tenaciously privileges a lexicon of solidarity—linkages, alliances, and connections. Despite insurmountable and glaring chasms, incommensurabilities, and strangeness, even impossibilities, transnational feminist theorization unflinchingly aims for “understanding and solidarity,” asserts Piya Chatterjee (2009, 132). “Epistemological divides are geopolitical divides,” Chatterjee pithily suggests, underscoring irreconcilable differences between various geographies (communal, regional, national of other kinds). And yet these cross-border divides seem fluidly connected by an “imagined bridge” between scholarship and activism, resting on “leaps of faith, hope and tenacious optimism,” capable of coalescing ethical and just solidarity across borders around feminist causes (132). Consequently, a three-point pattern emerges around transnational feminisms—topoi, actors, and sites. First, the set of topics or “feminist issues” as Amrita Basu calls them:

cluster around familiar themes: women’s legal and political rights, violence against women, reproductive choice and abortion, sexual freedom, employment opportunities and discrimination, and women’s political participation and representation. (2010, 10)

Second, the actors of knowledge production in transnational feminism are, as Manisha Desai and Nancy Naples delineate transnational feminist activity, “grassroots organizers” and “transnational activists” who advocate through transnational networks to link global politics with local struggles (1992, 33). Finally, the sites of transnational feminist praxis are clearly identified as organizations, networks, and movements. Myra Marx Ferree (2006) points out that feminism and feminist movements are often used interchangeably (18).

When Wendy Harcourt and Rawwida Baksh ask, “What are the different spaces from which transnational feminisms have operated and in what ways?” the frame for feminist praxis predictably and unambiguously emerges around advocacy, campaigns, and actions for transforming inequalities between men and women (2015, 4):⁷

Transnational feminist movements are understood as the fluid coalescence of organizations, networks, coalitions, campaigns, analysis, advocacy and actions that politicize women’s rights and gender equality issues beyond the nation state, from the 1990s, when deepening globalization and new communications and information technologies (ICTs) enabled feminist to connect readily with and interrogate their localities and cross-border relations. (5)

More precisely, Basu frames the aims of transnational feminism as not in abdicating, relinquishing, or conceding foundations, objectives, and constituencies but on balancing tensions between constituents and establishing strong foundations:

the challenge women’s movements encounter is achieving a productive balance between alliance and autonomy in several spheres. This entails first, attaining strong foundations within the national context while forging links with international and transnational forces. … Women’s movements have been most successful when they have engaged the state, through contestation and collaboration, without abdicating their own identities and constituencies … women’s movements have been best served by forging strong linkages with other social movements and groups within civil society without relinquishing their own objectives and identities. (2010, 3)

The clarification of the platforms and methods of transnational feminist praxis thus presages “alliance building” as its key aim (3).

Nevertheless, like its predecessors—global feminisms and international feminisms—transnationalism, too, faces a number of glaring challenges and ineluctable divides. Chief among its limits are exclusions and erasures of historical and material inequalities that provoke dichotomies between knowledge production and practice. Nagar and Swarr’s interrogation of the sites from which knowledge is produced, to the sites of its practice, thus calls for collaborative praxes between voice, authorship, and representation to address such dichotomous distances:

We suggest that interweaving theories and practices of knowledge production through collaborative dialogues provides a way to radically rethink existing approaches to subalterneity, voice, authorship, and representation. (2010, 2)

Blurring the distinctions between theory/method, individually/collaboratively produced knowledge, and academia/activism to “combine struggles for sociopolitical justice,” as Chowdhury joins in to formulate the theoretical imperatives of transnational feminism, also underpins the sedulous aim of bridging inequalities in power relations (2011, 7). However, in Women’s Movements in Global Perspectives, Basu notes that the literature on women’s movements:

ignores women’s movements in the postcolonial world, considers women’s movements products of modernization and development and assumes sameness in the forms of women’s repression and women’s movements cross-nationally.⁸ (1)

Secondly, leaps from particularistic to universal lead to a stretch from the most particular to the most universal, as Basu states, “In fighting for what appears to be particularistic goals—finding their voices, setting their own agendas, and creating their own social spaces—women’s movements are seeking the most universal objectives” (19). It was in response to the blanketing of these uneven and asymmetrical relationships in search of universal common grounds that Chowdhury’s timely study intervened to “reverse” transnationalism and unearth “exploitative” connections as transnationalism operated between major and minor domains (13). Still, conversations between women in Third and First World countries take place cross-nationally or as a relationship between the center and periphery, local and global, or major and minor. Even attempts to establish models of “bidirectional flows” that reify “comparative, multiple, overlapping and discrete oppressions rather than … hegemonic oppression under a unified category of gender” inadvertently lapse into a reaffirmation of hegemony in that they produce a subjectivity in relation to the center (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 19).

To use just one example to illustrate the failure of “bidirectional flows” of theory, I highlight Grewal and Kaplan’s emphasis on the onus of critiquing transnational oppression on American feminists in the US-sponsored war in Afghanistan. Grewal and Kaplan argue that American feminists failed to foster “transnational feminist alliances” to oppose US state intervention (20):

When the United States gave billions to General Zia to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, the United States propped up a regime that was inimical to women. U.S. feminists need to fight against this kind of aid on their home ground instead of abstractedly condemning Islam as the center of patriarchal oppression. (19)

Likewise, the sponsorship of international Christian fundamentalism by the Republican Party, they state, also oppresses women through “funding and development practices that structure reproductive and other politics” (20). In the fervent endeavor to foster cross-border transnational alliances, the burden of critiquing the “representation of culture within a hegemonic framework,” falls back on women in powerful sites who are enjoined to fight structures, reinstating hegemonic appropriations of feminist critique (20). Carole Boyce Davies’s statement that “cultural theorizing is often done by those with the power to disseminate, generally male scholars (more recently white women and Black men),” reiterates the well-known but underacknowledged hegemony of the power of theorizing by white women, meaning women in centers of power and privilege (1994, 13). Why is the force of critique in other sites not powerful enough to censure the US war on Afghanistan? In power relations, then, who critiques power also codes power and maintains it divisively. There exist robust censures of US foreign policy and Christian fundamentalism in transgeographic sites as I will show in my reading of African and Southeast Asian literature: these are not simply protests against foreign policies but imaginative recalibrations of spaces of power. Yet, Grewal and Kaplan’s transnational feminist model rests on the “concepts of multiple peripheries” that tie the domestic politics of a world power such as the US to its foreign policies through “multiple, allied, solidarity projects” (1994, 20). Why should the West, as I questioned earlier (citing Friedman), be used as a measure against which all other realities are understood? (2015, 4). How would such allied solidarity account for the inequality in material conditions between American feminists and their Third World counterparts? In other words, how can women facing uneven, asymmetrical, and dissimilar material conditions—economic and educational—be expected to craft solidarity projects? Solidarity projects, as I show throughout this book, cannot be articulated without revising the spaces of self in relation to broader sites such as nation and transnation. As I analyze in chapter 2, what would alliances look like between illiterate subaltern women and upper-class women? While Grewal and Kaplan rightly note that “location is still an important category that influences the specific manifestations of transnational formations,” I ask the following: how does alliance building realistically develop amid such locational asymmetry? (1994, 16). Most importantly, is locational assymmetry mapped onto broader landscapes? A consequence of what Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay calls “implicitly consensual priority issues” around which feminists are expected to rally—especially when feminists acknowledge the challenges of breaching incommensurabilities—is the notable omission of such feminist frameworks as ummah. As Alidou rightly points out, the idea of ummah—a religious identity—is central to transnational Muslim feminism as it goes beyond one nationalistic or ethnic identity that limits the possibilities of a transnational Islamic feminism (2005, 6). Yet, as Alidou argues, the hegemonic tendency to exclude Black Muslim women on account of nationalistic and racial grounds persists in theorizations of non-Arab Muslim women: of their experiences, ambitions, and (most of all) of their goals in feminism. More important, such hegemonic tendencies reproduce the challenges that feminists decry in transnational intercourse between unequal locations, namely the nonrecognition of differences and the production of knowledge in elite and politically motivated centers by an equally elite and the particularistic demography knowledge producers. Alidou defines such an oversight as the reproduction by Muslim feminists of the “colonial division” of knowledge production (5). This is most evident in the aura of epistemic authority about Muslim women as I will elaborate in the next section.

Spaces of Transnational Islamic Feminisms: Mirroring Transnational Feminisms

In this section, I contend that the template for knowledge production or epistemic authority on Muslim women in North American and European academies is b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Mapping Disjunctures and Dissonance: Transnationalism as Transgeography in Ummah
• Chapter 1 Ummah and Friendships: Transgeographic Inscriptions of Transnational Islamic Feminisms
• Chapter 2 Windowed Encounters: Gazes, Times, and Ummah
• Chapter 3 Intimate Bonds: Marriage, Race, and Ummah
• Chapter 4 The Sterile Womb: Nation Space, Domestic Violence, Polygamous Relationships, and Ummah
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover