Search Results

I find a new form of feminism in the activist narratives and analyze its nature by following the theorization of Ōgoshi Aiko, a feminist scholar in philosophy, who has maintained personal contacts with activists, including the late Matsui Yayori. This feminism, which I call JMSV feminism, differs from global feminism in that it has achieved transnational solidarity based on the realization that women are differentiated by power relations, not based on the discourse of universal womanhood promoted by global feminism. JMSV feminism is a form of critical transnational feminism characterized by postcolonial historical consciousness; intersectionality; transnational solidarity; mutual transformation; and the centrality of survivors. JMSV activists have demonstrated how feminists of a former colonial empire may develop an ethical relationship with underprivileged women by listening to their voices with moral humility. They also suggest that feminism is effective when it intersects with other kinds of activism.

This introductory chapter presents the central themes and structure of the book, providing a background of transnationalism and transnational feminism. Interdisciplinary paradigms such as transnationalism are located within and shaped by national imaginations in nuanced ways in U.S. interdisciplinary scholarship. In the 1980s, transnational approaches to the study of feminism emerged through critical engagements with existing ways of addressing global feminism. These emerging approaches sought to move away from understandings of global feminism that ignored inequalities and differences between women. The book thus examines the possibilities and the limits of the paradigm of transnational feminism that has arisen in interdisciplinary fields of study that have specifically been committed to break from nation-centric visions of the world. It focuses on unsettling the nationalization of the paradigm of transnationalism, and to use this discussion of transnationalism to open up questions about interdisciplinarity, finding ways to unsettle the disciplinary mechanisms that posit interdisciplinary fields such as women's studies.

This chapter examines how and why Korean plastic surgery consumption occupied the minds of Jezebel (a mainstream US feminist blog) writers, editors, and millions of readers as well as Womenlink’s (Korea’s premiere feminist non-profit organization) members, panelists, and forum attendees at roughly the same time from 2012 to2013—feminists from opposite ends of the world so to speak. By closely reading Jezebel’s coverage of the topic and juxtaposing it with Womenlink’s activism in Korea, this chapter examines first, the role of social media sites in US discourses about Korean women’s bodies. How have social media sites renewed fetishized interest in Korean bodies while fueling cosmetic surgery consumption in Korea itself? Second, both groups agree that Korean plastic surgery consumption is a feminist “problem,” yet their differing geopolitical locations and political investments affect their articulation and understanding of this particular problem. How might we think about these two feminist groups relationally?

The epilogue concludes with an assessment of the gendered politics of the final three years of Balaguer’s rule within the context of both the increasing attention to global feminism and the democratic transition to President Antonio Guzman in 1978. It looks specifically at the event surrounding the International Women’s Year (1975) and the ways the women in the opposition pushed forth a more active and gender-conscious agenda. Although the shifts were subtle, a clear difference in tactics manifested itself across the political spectrum as women advocated a more aggressive and cross-partisan platform of feminist rights. Through these transformations the grounding of modern Dominican feminism is then visibly linked to its early predecessors of the 1920s pre-Trujillo period while also embedded in the fifty years of engagement with authoritarianism and transnational activism.

The Epilogue demonstrates how the UN Charter’s women’s and human rights promises inspired feminists throughout the Americas, and how the Cold War stifled the movement and largely erased the historical memory of inter-American feminism. Paulina Luisi and Marta Vergara helped organize an inter-American feminist meeting in Guatemala in 1947 that articulated broad meanings of inter-American feminism and global women’s and human rights. However, the Cold War’s pitched battle between communism and capitalism narrowed both “feminism” and “human rights” to mean individual political and civil rights. The Cold War also contributed to historical amnesia about this movement. The epilogue explores how Cold War politics affected each of the six feminists in the book. Each woman sought in different ways to archive the movement and write inter-American feminism into the historical record. The epilogue also provides connections between their movement and the global feminist and human rights movements that emerged in the 1970s through the 90s. It argues that the idea that “women’s rights as human rights” was not invented in the 1990s; rather, it drew on the legacy of early twentieth-century inter-American feminism.

This chapter introduces the central argument of Decolonizing Universalism. The book seeks a way out of the anti-imperialism/normativity dilemma, according to which we face a choice between (a) opposing imperialism and reducing feminism to a parochial Western conceit or (b) opposing gender injustice and embracing Western chauvinism. The solution to this dilemma is a universalism that does not treat Western values and interests as exhaustive of feminist normative possibilities. Nonideal universalism is a position according to which feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and transnational feminisms is a justice-enhancing praxis. This conception of transnational feminisms makes it possible to imagine a genuinely normative feminist position that does not license justificatory or constitutive imperialist intervention—and that does not require commitment to controversial forms of individualism or autonomy or to gender-role eliminativism. The introduction also discusses the book’s methodology and situates the book’s project within contemporary political philosophy and feminist theory.