Transnational Feminist Politics, Education, and Social Justice

Post Democracy and Post Truth

Silvia Edling, Sheila Macrine, Silvia Edling, Sheila Macrine

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350174481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Written by an international group of feminist scholars and activists, the book explores how the rise in right-wing politics, fundamentalist religion, and radical nationalism is constructed and results in gendered and racial violence. The chapters cover a broad range of international contexts and offer new ways of combating assaults and oppression to understand the dangers inherent within the current global political and social climate. The book includes a foreword by the distinguished critical activist, Antonia Darder, as well as a chapter by renowned feminist-scholar, Chandra Talpade Mohanty.

Part One

Overviews: Challenges and Possibilities

1

Borders and Bridges

Securitized Regimes, Racialized Citizenship, and Insurgent Feminist Praxis

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

“Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.”

Gloria Anzaldua

It is July 2020 and we are in the midst of an unprecedented global health pandemic that has laid all social inequities bare, an ongoing anti-racist revolution in the streets of US cities and around the world proclaiming Black Lives Matter following the violent death of George Floyd (and Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, among others), an acute economic crisis and the “failure of the social experiment that is America” as Cornell West named it. So, what does a radical, anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminist struggle entail in these violently racist, misogynist, neoliberal times?¹ What do anti-racist feminist scholars, activists, and cultural workers need to know, analyze, and learn about so we can forge ethical solidarities across material and virtual borders, and build the landscapes of racial and gender justice that we dream about and struggle for? What does it mean to craft insurgent knowledges through our writing, our art, our cultural productions, our activism, and our pedagogies?

In 2020 our understandings of feminism, decolonization, and transnationalism are in flux, contested in social movements, State policy, and social and political theory. In 2020, 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, decimation of labor movements, and the rise of right-wing, proto-fascist governments around the world (Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in the United States). All these phenomena are of course connected to global economic crises (the oil crisis in the 1970s and the stock market crash in 2008 and now 2020), neoliberal governmentalities, global racialities, and mass unemployment, displacement and dispossession of particular groups of people worldwide.

Undergirding all of my scholarly work are my activist commitments to building radical, anti-racist, transnational feminist communities in all of the spaces I have lived in over four plus decades of living in the United States. None of this work would be possible without these dissident communities. And this I think is the key to living an insurgent life as an anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminist in these times. Building and sustaining the “intellectual neighborhoods” (Toni Morrison) and communities of dissent that inspire and can sustain an insurgent feminist life. The very first “intellectual neighborhood” I collaborated in building and which set me on my journey over four decades ago was as a graduate student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I co-organized with Ann Russo, the Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives conference in 1983—I believe this was the first or one of the first conferences of this scale to bring US women of color and feminists from the “third world” into conversation about the “common differences” in our feminist praxis. It was the beginning of my intellectual journey in the company of feminists of color. Historically, the conference emerged from decades of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and national liberation movements that women in the Global South (we called ourselves third world women then) had waged since the 1940s, and the revolutionary freedom and civil rights movements that women of color had waged in Global North. Questions of intersectionality and relationality of structures of power and women’s place-based resistance; the complexities of working across race, class, sexuality, and nationality in the context of multiple colonial legacies and imperial adventures of the United States; the centrality of economic issues, poverty, and class in envisioning and enacting gender justice; the significance of identity and community (who are the “we”?); and the theoretical and epistemological contributions of a decolonial feminist engagement were all issues that emerged from this collective space—and that have stayed with me through all the work I have done since then.²

I have always believed that the intellectual work we are passionate about is in some way connected to (but not identical with) our own biographies. My experience of a radical community of third world and women of color thinkers at the Common Differences conference made it clear that an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist feminist community was possible, indeed necessary, in and outside the academy. My definition of transnational feminist praxis is anchored in these very particular intellectual and political genealogies—in studies of race, colonialism, and empire in the Global North and South, in the critiques of feminists of color in the United States, and in studies of decolonization, anti-capitalist critique, and LGBTQ/Queer studies in the North and the South. My use of this category is thus anchored in my own location in the Global North, and in the commitment to work systematically, and overtly against racialized, heterosexist, imperial, corporatist projects that characterize North American global adventures. My interest lies in the connections between the politics of knowledge, and the spaces, places, and locations that we occupy. This essay is an attempt to think through the political and epistemological struggles that are embedded in radical critical, anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminist praxis at this time.³

Neoliberal Regimes: Capitalist Dispossession, Securitized States, Imperial Democracies

I began thinking about borders and bridges—specifically about neoliberal/securitized regimes, anti-racist struggles, and anatomies of violence after hearing about the building of a US “mega-security wall” along the South Texas-Mexico border, and the struggles of immigrant activists and the Lipan Apache Women’s Defense (LAW Defense) organization to halt this explicitly imperialist partition project. What seemed obvious was the use of unjust, militarized state practices similar to those used in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, using the pretext of the “war on terror” and its earlier iteration, the “war on drugs” to mobilize simultaneous discourses of Islamophobia and nativism. And yet, at that time, a decade ago, the struggles of LAW Defense, even the building of the mega security wall in East Texas were almost completely absent from public discussion, in the media, and in left/feminist circles. Now of course the family separation of migrants has its epicenter in Texas, especially in the Rio Grande Valley. It is home to the largest center for “undocumented migrants and asylum seekers” and the “Casa Padre” shelter for minors which has a capacity to hold 1,400 children. While US imperial projects are not new, the post-9/11 global formation and operation of securitized states, anchored within the rhetoric of protectionism and the war on terror and accompanied by militarized, neoliberal corporate ambitions, is a phenomenon that deserves our ongoing attention.⁴

In this chapter, I examine three neoliberal, securitized regimes and three specific geopolitical sites—the US-Mexico border struggles around immigration, and cross-border indigenous rights in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas; Israel’s rule over the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank/Gaza; and India’s military rule and occupation of the Kashmir Valley (Jammu and Kashmir) as zones of normalized violence. Needless to say, each site is precisely about racialized citizenship projects that are constitutive of each of the three nation-states. At these sites, neoliberal and militarized state and imperial practices are often sustained by development/peace-keeping/humanitarian projects, thus illuminating the old/new contours of securitized states that function as neoliberal, imperial democracies.

Each site encodes genealogies, memories, and traumas of colonial occupation, partition, and violence in the building of the nation—what novelist Bapsi Sidhwa calls the “demand for blood” when the earth is divided. And in each of these geopolitical sites at the territorial borders of the nation, civilians are subjected to militarized violence anchored in the production of reactionary gender identities and dominant and subordinate (often racialized) masculinities. These three sites constitute occupied, disputed territories with violent colonial histories, and together they illustrate a new/old global order of militarized, racist violence engendered by neoliberal economic priorities.

Since the early 1990s, with India’s shift to neoliberal economic and political policies, the ties between the United States, Israel, and India have been forged through the vision of the regimes in power at that time: Bush and the neoconservatives, Sharon and Likud, and the BJP/Hindu Right. As Rupal Oza (2007) suggests, since the early 1990s, the geopolitical triad of the United States, Israel, and India share a vision of threat and security based on Islam and Muslims as the common enemy, cemented through close and ongoing economic and military alliances. The same anti-Muslim rhetoric is evident in the current refugee crisis in Europe, where the Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orban’s says, “Muslims must be blocked to keep Europe Christian … Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.” We witness neo-Nazi attacks on asylum seekers in Germany (remember the majority of the refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are Muslims), and the growth of detention centers, “reception centers,” or “camps” in Hungary and Turkey.

And we cannot forget Trump and his deployment of an “us and them” language of a securitized state, talking about refusing Muslims’ entry to the United States, and holding the government hostage to the building of a wall at the US-Mexico border. As Naomi Paik (2020) argues, Trump signed three executive orders immediately after taking office in January 2017: the so-called “Muslim ban,” an order focused on border security (building the wall), and a third order that bolstered immigration enforcement (giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement a sweeping mandate to remove all “illegal immigrants”). Taken together these executive orders are in fact an explicit legacy of the building of an historical US citizenship project anchored in governance practices of exclusion and exploitation anchored in race, gender, and labor. Since 2015, a new federal government initiative called CVE (Countering Violent Extremism— a pilot project in Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis) has been under way. CVE is described as a program that aims to deter US citizens from joining “violent extremist” groups by bringing community and religious leaders together with law enforcement, health professionals, teachers, and social service employees. In Los Angeles, CVE, in partnership with the American Muslim Women’s Empowerment Council (AMWEC), the LAPD, CIA, and FBI are partners in the creation of “patriotic Muslim women” who take on the task of countering violent extremism in their communities—thus producing empowered, loyal, Muslim women citizens. Basarudin and Shaikh (2020) suggest that it is liberal feminist discourses of motherhood and empowerment that are appropriated in the service of national security and “motherwork” deployed so that gender appears and disappears in the war on terror. In moments that the US policies of rendition and/or torture impose violence on their bodies they become invisible, but in moments when there is a productive convergence between the empowered Muslim woman and state policies she becomes hypervisible.⁵

However, while the “us vs. them” ideologies of securitized states justify borders, walls, and regimes of incarceration and more recently, regimes of mass deportation in the name of protection of the homeland, it is the connectivity and commonality of analysis and vision of justice (the bridges) between peoples across borders that feminists and anti-partition activists have in common that inspires my reflections. I argue that we have much to learn from analyzing the resistance politics and collective aspirations of freedom and selfdetermination across these sites and that developing these transnational feminist frameworks is in fact key to envisioning solidarities and building bridges across borders. A comparative analysis of the wars, and walls (symbolic and material) that constitute the securitized regimes, and colonial/imperial ventures of the United States, India, and Israel, reveals the ideological operation of discourses of “democracy” within the overtly militarized, securitized nation-states of India, Israel, and the United States, and suggests that the militarization of cultures is deeply linked to neoliberal capitalist values and the normalization of what Zillah Eisenstein (2007) and Arundhati Roy (2004) have called “imperial democracy” (Roy, 2004, p. 42; Eisenstein, 2007, p. 17). Needless to say, militarization always involves masculinization and heterosexualization as linked state projects, and neoliberal economic arrangements are predicated on gendered and racialized divisions of labor, and constructions of subjectivities, thus necessitating feminist critique.

National security states or neoliberal securitized regimes typically use connected strategies of militarization, criminalization, and incarceration to exercise control over particular populations, thus remaking individual subjectivities and public cultures. Tanya Golash-Boza (2016) adds another layer—she argues that mass incarceration is the other side of the coin of mass deportation, and that mass deportation is a gendered and racialized tool of state repression implemented in a time of crisis. So for instance, while Black men are the largest group incarcerated in the United States, Latino men are the largest group facing mass deportation. This understanding of mass incarceration and State violence is now in the public domain after Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement (not to mention George Floyd and call for defunding the police). The now-visible history of mass deportations since Obama (today nearly 90 percent of deportees are Latino and Caribbean men) and its link to the gendered and racialized immigration history in the United States is also no longer obfuscated by state managers. In addition, in terms of the so-called European “refugee crisis,” Greece built a barbed wire fence along the Greece-Turkey border in 2013, Hungarian prison inmates worked on preparing materials for 900 military personnel to begin construction of the 109-mile-long razor wire fence along the border with Serbia in order to “protect” Europe from migrants, they are ready to build a fence along the border with Romania, and Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands all introduced border controls to “manage” the refugee crisis. There are all connected sites of neoliberal citizenship projects that are deeply raced and gendered, anchored in colonial and neocolonial histories and economic priorities.

As feminist philosopher Iris Young (2003) argues, security states mobilize a particular gendered logic of masculinist protection in relation to women and children—a logic that underwrites the appeal to “protection and security” of the nation, and expects obedience and loyalty at home (patriotism). At the same time, the state wages war against internal and external enemies. In the context of the United States, it is this logic that Young claims legitimates authoritarian power in the domestic arena, and justifies aggression outside its borders. Here again the AMWEC and CVE example is instructive. As Basarudin and Shaikh argue: “Partnering with law enforcement in celebrating American multiculturalism and women’s empowerment is problematic when nestled firmly within a logic of securitization, surveillance, and vitriolic xenophobia against immigrants and people of color. Mining motherhood for soft counterterrorism becomes a productive convergence between state agencies and AMWEC members” (Basarudin and Shaikh, 2020, p. 127).

Militarized, neoliberal state projects in the United States, Israel, and India create and sustain endless wars, and border zones of violence while normalizing incarceration regimes within their respective domestic landscapes. The United States invests in a fast-growing, privatized prison industrial complex within its own borders, while consolidating post-invasion regimes of torture and collective punishment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similar questions need to be posed in relation to the “democracies” of Israel and India. In all three geopolitical contexts, the state mobilizes a masculinist securitized ideology based not on defense o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Transnational Feminist Politics, Education, and Social Justice
• Part 1 Overviews: Challenges and Possibilities
• Part 2 Contextualizations: Education and the Teacher Profession
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint