Is global feminism really productive, or even global, if it reduces the real experiences of women outside the West to marginal notes?  Ella Shohat problematizes global feminism in her piece by claiming that too much focus on Western feminism, whether deliberate or not, has created an “overarching feminist master narrative” (1270).  There are two issues involved in the way global feminism is viewed, she suggests.  The first is this focus on the West, which is pervasive even if the West is geographically uninvolved in the area being discussed and uses the West as the baseline for feminist ideals in parts of the world that are completely different in many ways.  The second, she says, has to do with area studies and how they break the rest of the world up into regions and categories that may not reflect the people actually inhabiting certain spaces and may in fact allow for inaccurate generalization such as the idea that the “Middle Eastern” woman and the “third-world” woman are “passive victims lacking any form of agency” (1269).  From a transnational standpoint, such categorizations provide an incomplete picture of the people they are attempting to include not only because they generalize over (mostly) arbitrary geographical regions, but also because they ignore factors such as migration, immigration and intersectionality.  What about “Middle Eastern” women who live in United States, or for whom religion and race play a much larger role than is typical in Western discourse?  Shohat says she argues for “relational” feminism, which would allow for examination and discussion of feminism in specific parts of the world and in specific cultures as it relates to other “isms” and cultures, instead of invoking the West in all treatment of the subject.

Aihwa Ong puts it well when she describes anthropology’s organization of the world as “the West” and “the Rest” in Flexible Citizenship (30).  Ong’s book shows that some of what Shohat finds wrong with global feminism can also be applied to anthropology; specifically, both base their observations and expectations on Western ideals, which may have very little to do with what another culture wants for itself.  “Mass media continued to construct our world as a failed replica of the modern West,” she says of Malaysia (29).  “Although the comparative method is at the heart of anthropological knowledge, it has been a comparison that employs the West as a single measure of modernity against which other societies must be measured” (31).  While mass media and anthropology often seem to portray Southeast Asia as substandard because it is not as “modern” as the West, Ong suggests there is a fundamental difference in what Southeast Asia actually imagines as modern that may not have any bearing on Western ideals.  Not only is the region not conforming to those ideals, it may not even be considering them.  In this manner, utilizing the West as the cultural dipstick for how other parts of the world measure up is counter-productive and possibly even irrelevant, as Shohat suggests is also the case with modern global feminism.

In a quick search on transnational feminism I came across a 2009 TEDTalk given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a novelist from Nigeria.  The premise of the talk was “the danger of a single story,” the danger being that a single story can become an inaccurate or very limited view of a people, a country or a culture if it is repeated enough or remains the only story available.  While listening, I was reminded of Shohat’s remarks about the Eurocentric views of “Middle Eastern” women.  Frequently I think we do see these women generalized as so-called “passive victims” – debates over the hijab and whether or not it’s oppressive and degrading come to mind – or else somehow related to terrorists and radical Islam, and the problem with this is that their own personal stories and views are left out of the discussion.  “Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become,” Adichie says in her speech.

Adichie gives several examples of the “single story” being inadequate for understanding a culture or region, including a story about visiting the village of her family’s houseboy in Nigeria.  She talks about how she was constantly reminded by her parents that the boy’s family was poor and that they had nothing, but that upon meeting them she was shown a beautiful woven basket one of the sons had made, which took her by surprise.  “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor,” she says.  “Their poverty was my single story of them.”

One of the reasons I enjoyed Persepolis so much is because it allows the reader to see Iran not only from the perspective of a young person, but also from her parents’ perspective.  After being exposed to a lot about Middle Eastern women but not much from them, the scene where Marji’s parents react to her wearing nail polish with pride rather than anger in particular sticks in my mind as significant because it expands the “single story” I have of Iranian culture, as well as of the lives of women in that region.  Under the narrative of the oppressed Middle Eastern woman that I’m familiar with, Marji putting on nail polish would have been unacceptable not only to society but also to her parents; her father especially would have not allowed her to do it.  From examples such as this I would agree with Shohat that relative, transnational feminism is necessary for constructing more complete and useful stories that do not attempt to force “the Rest” into Western molds.