On October 29th, Stephen Colbert interviewed Anita Sarkeesian on his show, The Colbert Report, about the Gamergate controversy. Before ending the interview, Colbert asked Sarkeesian the following question: “As a man, am I allowed to be a feminist?” to which Sarkeesian answered with a question of her own: “Do you believe that women should have equal rights to men and we should fight for those rights?” When Stephen answered in the affirmative, Sarkeesian said, “Great, then you are a feminist.”

Is he, though? If equality between men and women was the only premise on which feminism stood, and if Stephen Colbert, adhering to this all-encompassing premise of feminism, were to live in Rwanda, where female representation in parliament is as high as sixty four percent—compared to the sixteen percent female representation in the United States Congress—could he be a feminist there? As an article published in April of this year in The Guardian states, in Rwanda, “gender rights are enshrined in its constitution, and a swath of laws have given women the right to inherit land, share the assets of a marriage and obtain credit.”

So, mission accomplished, right? Feminism wins the day. Women have equal rights to men. By that definition alone, the feminist fight in Rwanda should be over.

But then the aforementioned article goes on to state that, despite these accomplishments, “Domestic violence [in Rwanda] remains common and widely accepted.”

Well, isn’t that something?

What I am trying to say here is not that Sarkeesian is wrong in her definition of feminism, for it concerns a very specific political agenda, but that she is wrong in not clarifying that the parameters through which she is defining feminism are not universal—though the possibility exists that she is assuming they are. At any rate, she could have said: “Great, then as far as the U.S. is concerned, Stephen, you are a feminist” and that would have been a bit closer to the truth.
But in expressing that gender-specific feminism is the only feminism, and by extent the only way to be a feminist, Sarkeesian is partaking in a very American and Eurocentric view of feminism—deemed, seemingly, universal—and discarding the radical differences with which other countries and cultures engage with feminism.

A good example of this is the UN women’s conference in Mexico in 1975, in which Gloria Steinem, an icon of feminism in the United States, drew up a feminist manifesto without consulting women of the southern hemisphere of the globe; that is, women who came from countries which had been former colonies and were considered, based on the country’s development or lack thereof, of the “Third World.” Aili Mari Tripp, in her chapter, “The Evolution of Transnational Feminism” (Global Feminism 2006), in recounting this incident, tells us that: “Women from the South tended to focus on how women’s problems were defined be global inequality, imperialism, and other political concerns that were not seen as gender-specific…[challenging] Northern women to see development issues as women’s concerns” (61).

Indeed, instead of a global feminism, which seems to be, as Grewal and Kaplan state in their article, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” articulated “primarily by Western or Euro-American second-wave feminists as well as by multinational corporations,” the shift to using the term transnational to talk about feminism could prove more beneficial as it “could signal cultural and national difference” (666). In talking about these differences, we could look at the example of China’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s, which emerged as part of an anti-Qing movement that demanded political rights for women, and not out of a desire to emulate New Zealand or Australia, which had granted suffrage in 1983 and 1902, respectively.

In regards to feminism as a transnational phenomenon which particularizes experience, rather than universalizes it, Tripp further notes that in Africa, for example, specifically in the countries such as Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and Somalia, the women present during peace negotiations have demands “more oriented toward pragmatic solution to health, education, and other problems, rather than vying for positions of power in a restructured state” (68).

The need to address these different needs, then, becomes paramount for the feminist movement. And the way to really do it is not through a Western-centric perspective on women’s issues which aims to be universal and in the process erases difference of experience, but by acknowledging the very real differences which exist across borders and cultures for women. In other words, by looking at feminism through transnational lenses.