From this week’s readings, I have a better understanding of the term ‘transnational’ than I did before.  After ten weeks, we’ve struggled to pinpoint the denotation of the elusive term (especially compared to international, global, cosmopolitan, etc, like we discussed in our first weeks).  Grewal and Kanplan provided a handful of worthwhile uses of the term (664-665), but they were able to relay a particularly clear definition of the term in their article: “such usage relied on a universal subject of feminism, while transnational could signal cultural and national difference” (666).  This idea, to me, demonstrates the inability to use ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ as synonyms, because it emphasizes the difference between universal and particular conceptualizations.  Rather, ‘transnational’ finds itself safely between the two extremes.

The idea of transnational (rather than global/universal or local/particular) feminism is helpful for incorporating specific issues from different nations or cultures to create a strong, unifying activist force.  Ferree and Tripp delineate the history of modern feminism, particularly the conflicts and disagreements confronted between separate states.  For instance, when feminism is portrayed as a global issue, confusion arises.  This is because feminism is such a vague umbrella term under which so many diverse issues reside, that global agreement does not exist.  Cultural nuances in different areas of the world place greater importance on political representation than a woman’s right to her own body, for instance.  Recall Shu-Mei Shih’s article in Minor Transnationalisms, where she referenced a woman who “disagreed strongly with the assumptions of Western feminism […] and has since publicly repudiated Western feminism” (73).  Ferree and Tripp pointed out that this feeling is not uncommon among feminists outside of the United States, especially.  For instance, the global South has complained about the “limited and singular vision of feminism” presented by the North (61), and they have made strides to alter the transnational feminist lens to make these issues more relevant for them as well.

Ferree and Tripp reveal a spectrum of conceptualization from universal agreement regarding feminist issues across the globe, to particular cases based on state or culture.  Generally, global agreement exists regarding women’s suffrage and violence against women, as the article points out (56, 63).  However, some cultural practices, such as foot binding in China, bride wealth in Uganda, and genital cutting in Kenya and other parts of the world, are more specific and ambiguous (58).  While some could argue that cultural relativism must be accounted here, others proclaim the gendered injustice of these practices; “the global feminist is one who has free choice over her body and a complete and intact […], while the traditional female subject of patriarchy is forcibly altered, fragmented alienated from her innate sexuality, and deprived of choices or agency” (Grewal, Kaplan 669-70).

All in all, despite the wide spectrum regarding the scope of feminist (or anti-feminist) customs, transnational feminism stands apart from global or local feminism in that it is able to encapsulate and give credit to nuances between nation-states, without overgeneralizing goals in a manner that may be interpreted as a “subtle form of cultural imperialism” (Ferree, Tripp 61).

As a high school and college student, I heard the instruction many times, from nearly every teacher I wrote an essay for: Use academic sources, not those that are only published online, and not — emphatically not — Wikipedia. As an instructor, I now find myself giving the same advice, suggesting that students choose peer-reviewed, academic publications over informal articles and depositories of information such as SparkNotes and Wikipedia. While the move to embrace technology and new media in the classroom has turned tweets and blog posts into viable objects of critical analysis, a bias toward the stable, authoritative voice of texts that are privately written, published and purchased remains in academia. This is the form of knowledge that allows a voice to speak with the authority of the intellectual, state-sanctioned academy, knowledge that, as Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, “presuppose(s) and constitute(s) at the same time power relations” (27). Such a voice must be fixed as a referent; it offers a complete thought with a position that is assumed rather than negotiated. It invites neither collaboration nor interrogation.

It is clear, then, how sources such as Wikipedia that can be cooperatively edited, that bring together competing voices, and that do not and never will exist in a stable, final form fail to access the authority that is particular to academic constructions of knowledge. In “The Encyclopedia Must Fail! – Notes on Queering Wikipedia,” an article published in online, open-access, open-peer-reviewed journal Ada, Noopur Raval addresses issues of how even sources of knowledge like Wikipedia may continue to enforce ideological limits on who produces knowledge and what information should be accessible. The content of Raval’s argument raises important questions about just how open collaborative sources like Wikipedia truly are, but the form that argument takes provokes pressing questions as well. Raval’s article appears in a context that, like Wikipedia, lacks the permanence and imposing presence associated with professional publication. The source is solely online, targets a “diverse and fundamentally interdisciplinary readership,” and allows online, open peer review through its review website (Ada). It is neither specialized nor professionalized in the manner of those reassuringly academic sources my past professors and I have recommended to students.

Raval’s article calls our attention to the importance of analyzing “the transactions, the people, and conditions of knowledge production that facilitate or create challenges to diversity programs within any movement.” In her critique of problems she believes Wikipedia must address, Raval reiterates the issues that exist in traditional forms of knowledge: only some voices are represented, information can be suppressed, and access is not universal. If these are problems a source like Wikipedia cannot fully resolve, we can easily imagine the attack Raval might mount on traditional forms of academic knowledge. The expensive, highly specialized books and journals that are produced and reviewed by a small field of scholars who possess authority do little to increase diversity, access, or freedom of expression in the production of knowledge.

Given the content of Raval’s article, publication in Ada seems well suited to her engagement with collaborative, open access bases of knowledge. However, the article’s publication in such an open format emphasizes to me the fundamental problems that still exist in how we construct, access, and reference information from collaborative and variable sources. Though Raval addresses failure as a means of critiquing through commentary and collaboration, her depiction of failure as a “subversive process” that “gains transformative potential as a strategic tool in history writing and permanently etches difference in its grain” can also speak to the form of her article. I wrote earlier that sources like Wikipedia and, perhaps, like Ada, fail to represent academic authority. If we assume such failure in Raval’s article, can we read it as a form of subversion? If so, how effective can that subversion be within a wider field of academic discourse?

Though I agree that the extremely limited ability for diverse groups to access and contribute to academic knowledge is problematic, I wonder whether shifting to the open format of Ada and articles like Raval’s is a tenable option. Reading Raval’s article, I found myself wondering whether I would be willing to cite it in my own work. Whether because of the author’s work, the open review process, or its transposition to the website, the article contains several errors in grammar and style, and its online context does not engender a sense of reliability. I realize that the neat and resolved image of academic perfection and finality to which I’m comparing the article often acts as a barrier that prevents us from engaging with knowledge that doesn’t fit our arbitrary standards, but those standards are safeguards as much as limits: they allow us to assess the quality of information we bring into our own work. Even if those standards are not wholly rational or effectual, their undeniable influence makes it difficult for me to conceive how we can foster academic engagement that truly melds professionalism and accessibility.

Speaking from within the discipline of English literature, I struggle to imagine methods of interrogating the advent of fixed and authoritative knowledge in both content and form as Raval does without sacrificing the very authority that allows such an argument to be taken seriously. Yet perhaps my very perception of what kind of response would constitute a serious reception is limited by my academic training. Perhaps Raval’s article and the format of Ada step toward targeting a wider audience, with goals beyond the academy that can be enacted through our publications themselves, rather than through post-publication packaging of concepts or academic hashtagging that attempts to make our ideas meaningful to the public. Most troubling, perhaps my very resistance to integrate my idea of academic professionalism with the open forms of knowledge Raval discusses is indicative of an ideologically driven instinct to privilege sanctioned forms of knowledge over diverse, accessible, and less regulated media forms. As individuals within academia, we are often made poignantly aware of the systems that, like the Wikipedia policies Raval describes, “can be instrumentalized to systematically include or exclude factual information.” My academic training has made me cognizant of how such systems exclude certain groups, perspectives, and realities as well as particular facts. Yet despite this awareness, questions of how to combat those intellectual structures of exclusion in the present and especially in relation to the open production of and access to knowledge are often overlooked. Even when disciplines focus on granting a voice to the oppressed or critiquing social structures, they face the difficulty of breaking down academic barriers while speaking from behind them. Thus, I close this post still considering the question of how we can truly engage with issues of accessibility and openly confront the instability of knowledge in the form as well the content of academic work.

Transnationalism as an analytical frame supports both universalizing and particularizing visions of feminism.

As a transnational process feminism possesses a global constitution and at the same time it is composed and influenced by the particularities that characterize feminism in different regions of the globe. By analyzing feminism from a transnational approach it is presupposed that the struggle for equality is happening at a global scale and that it is a process determined by the interrelatedness between feminist movements from different parts of the world. Feminist movements benefit from both visions. The universalizing vision creates more opportunities for NGOs and international organizations, such as the UN, to pay attention to feminist movement’s concerns and demands, which can lead to financial support and policy changes that procure equality.

A particularizing vision of feminism, on the other hand, favors the perception of peculiarities in feminist movements around the world and how they influence each other. In addition a particularizing vision acknowledges that feminist movements are determined by varying factors, such as religion, policial and economic systems, depending on where they originate. Likewise this vision ratifies variations in feminist movements. The primary focus of some feminist organizations shifts according to the relevance of certain issues. For example, female circumcision in Africa or feminicide in Guatemala and Mexico, may not be the central concern in the agenda of a feminist group in Argentina. In the same way, video game feminism might not be the center of attention of a feminist movement from a country under an extreme religious regime.

Aili Mari Tripp provides particularizing and universalizing visions of feminism that are similar to what I have exposed above. Tripp states that the feminist movement’s influence and agenda have been multidirectional and that there are remaining issues around the world. Thus, feminism is still a universal matter. Indeed, after one and a half centuries of feminist movement’s efforts, inequality issues have not been resolved. Furthermore, misconceptions, misunderstanding, and plain ignorance plague the public’s general knowledge about feminism (social networks and Internet memes are a good example of this). A few weeks ago, Mariluz included in her post a speech given by Emma Watson at a HeForShe event in New York City, in which she called for men involvement and participation in obtaining equality for men and women. In addition, Watson reminds us  that women rights activism is not equivalent to a man-hating movement, rather a movement that seeks mutual understanding, which is achieved through communication.

In response to Watson’s speech, Andrea Peyser, a columnist from the New York Post accused Watson of asking for equal rights, but avoiding equal responsibility among men and women. Peyser considers that there is no inequality in the industrialized world and that the notion of women being victims of the patriarchy is rubbish. This is a clear example of the complacent attitudes that Tripp mentions in her article. Additionally, Peyser’s remarks constitute irrevocable proof that a particularizing view of feminism is essential, since she suggests that after achieving equality in the industrialized world, the matter is resolved and there is no need of speeches, such as Watson’s. Moreover, a particularizing view of feminism keeps us from generalizing women’s situation in industrialized nations. Women in these countries have different unresolved matters, which Peyser fails to notice. For example, in today’s elections there are proposals restricting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. According to Grewald and Kaplan, transnationalism is an approach that allows getting to the specifics. They refer to sexualities in postmodernity, nonetheless, as we have seen, the same can be said about feminism. Grewald and Kaplan call for an interdisciplinary approach to understand a global phenomenon. This approach, I think, would enable the study of specific groups. In this sense transnationalism supports universalizing and particularizing visions of feminism, since they complement each other.

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.