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This chapter discusses the aim and objectives of the volume by way of addressing the recent debates in the discipline of art history. The two main themes that comes through from this discussion are the current efforts of decolonising the curriculum of art history and the discipline itself, and the ongoing challenges to art history and its canon particularly coming from the perspectives of transnational feminism and postcolonialism. This introductory chapters draws upon scholars whose studies have been key to these discussions, including Okwui Enwezor, Nada Shabout, James Elkins and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and relevance of them to the volume. This chapter ends with an explanation of how each section and chapters contribute to these debates and what novelties they bring into art historical scholarship.

The chapter discusses Jewish Israeli women immigrant artists through the case study of artist Jennifer Abesirra (b. 1984), an immigrant from France of Algerian origin. Abesirra's artworks stand as examples of the complex, multilayered, and dynamic identity of immigrant women in Israel. The discussion in the chapter integrates global and transnational aspects of women's migration with local perspectives, which are unique to the ethnic, religious, social and civic circumstances in the state of Israel. It tackles feminist issues, arguing for a new understanding of the role played by immigrant women within the nation–state. While striving to problematize essentialist theorisation, it examines heterogeneous constructions of gendered selves by women who live in transnational contexts: out of the mosaic of artistic artefacts analysed arises an argument that challenges the binary thinking that distinguishes the ‘Israeli society’ from ‘women migrants, and ‘the State of Israel’ from the ‘Middle Eastern space’.

This chapter provides an overview of social movements in the socio-cultural, economic, and political context of Hong Kong. It also draws on feminist and social movement scholarship to illustrate how the empirical focus on Hong Kong can advance theoretical deliberations on transnational feminism. Constructions of collective identity are fundamental to grievance interpretation in all forms of collective action. However, current debates within feminist scholarship reveal that this alignment between identity and mobilization has only been partially addressed. Identities, within these debates, are conceived as extant before movements, which subsequently make them salient by deploying them strategically for political and social change. On the contrary, social movement scholars argue that collective identity is not only necessary for successful collective action, it is often an end in itself. This chapter argues for feminism as a “collective action frame,” rather than a “collective identity,” so as to facilitate our understanding of how women activists build transnational feminist solidarity. The meanings of feminism that dominate at any particular moment are not given a priori, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across women's movements. This framing process facilitates the extension of personal identity in movement contexts and generates the collective action frame that inspires and legitimizes women's activism.

This chapter examines how the processes of translation spilled out during the International Women's Year (IWY) conference held in Mexico City in 1975. More specifically, it explains how the IWY fostered the creation of a new language of transnational feminism. It also considers three interrelated elements that played particularly critical roles in the unfolding history of the conference: how the conference came to be imagined as an event; the role of temporality in structuring that imagination; and how questions of representation and identification informed participants' conduct. The chapter highlights a key moment in the conference: the confrontation between North American feminism and Third World feminine Leftism, represented by Betty Friedan and Domitila Barrios de Chungara, respectively. It argues that the conference was not only a struggle for power and unity but also a struggle between globally gathered feminists for commensurability itself.

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 chapter examines the recent union of transnational history and feminist history that has resulted in a field called transnational feminist history, which it describes as sharing core values, especially in disrupting conventional narratives by decentering those actors and processes that have often dominated historical studies. It first provides an overview of transnational history and transnational feminism before discussing four areas of inquiry important in both fields and that highlight the cross-fertilization between them: periodization, politics of place, identification, and infrastructures and social movements. It also explains how transnational feminist history brings to the fore international organizations crossing borders, allowing women to develop feminist consciousness.

In scholarly discussion of the comfort women issue as a site for pursuing transnational feminism, the positionality of Japanese women has been examined as victims and as accomplices. An intense debate between Ueno Chizuko and Kim Pu-ja has taken place about how feminism could transcend nationalism. In her narrative, Nakahara Michiko, a historian, demonstrates an intricate way in which women from Japan and other Asian countries achieved transnational solidarity at the site of the movement, suggesting that Japanese people need to accept themselves as citizens of the perpetrator state regardless of their personal identifications. The narrative of Bang Chung-ja gives insight into the delicate nature of interaction between resident Korean activists and Japanese activists while pointing to the intersectional nature of the comfort women issue. Yoneda Mai is one generation younger than many Japanese activists, but her story echoes other stories in terms of respect for survivors, critical historical consciousness, and resistance to imperialist feminism.

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 discusses some of the dominant trends in transnational feminist knowledge and the “regime of visibility” that increasingly disciplines transnational research and theory. One of the overarching trends in transnational feminist research is the systematic attention to the emergence of new sites and spaces that move people beyond the territorial borders of nation-states. The result of this trend is an orientation of transnational feminist research toward two intellectual imperatives. First, transnational feminist research is largely oriented toward the study of border-crossing cultural, political, and socioeconomic phenomena. Second, this search for border-crossing sites has inadvertently led to an emphasis on empirical and theoretical work that generalizes from sites that are characterized by particular markers of visibility. Other trends in transnational feminist research include important insights about the impact of globalization on labor as well as the reworking of identities of class and gender.

This chapter reiterates the argument that relations among women activists are constructed, not only on the basis of difference, but on shared understandings and aspirations. Women's movements in Hong Kong are embedded in a socio-political environment characterized by fluidity, heterogeneity, and partiality. On one hand, it allows social movements with diverse concerns, interests, and expertise to co-exist. On the other hand, alternative discourses cannot constitute a fully developed, singular ideology. As this environment shifts with the increasing influence of the Beijing government, women's activism may well become less effective, since it is not equipped, in its present form, to operate successfully in a more homogenous environment. Transnational feminist solidarity through transversal politics that is emerging in Hong Kong will prove to be increasingly complex and complicated in the long term. However, this book suggests feminism as a collective action frame through which we might try to sort out the interactions and negotiations among women activists in diverse historical periods and socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts. Transversal politics show us how activists with conflicting ideas and interests are talking across their differences and taking collective action and how understandings and interpretations of feminism are unfolding.

This chapter introduces the constellation of figures that make up the global Filipina body—the mail-order bride, the sex worker / trafficked woman, and the domestic helper / overseas contract worker—as the embodiment of racialized and gendered labor that the Philippine nation provides for a global capitalist economy. Within Filipina/o diasporic cultural production, the global Filipina body represents the failure of the heteropatriarchal Philippine nation under neoliberal globalization. Situating this book within the overlapping fields of Philippine studies, Filipina/o American studies, transnational feminisms, and queer studies, this chapter argues that the queering of the figure of the global Filipina body allows for a queer and feminist engagement with the politics of nationalism(s) in the context of the diaspora.

The introductory chapter presents the two main arguments of the study. First, as a result of both the Trujillo and Balaguer regimes’ efforts to uphold the Dominican Republic’s international reputation as stable and project an image of a progressive and progressing nation, women found and expanded spaces of global and transnational activism that advanced basic political rights and paved the way for the late 20^th century feminist movement. Second, while the paternal constructs of rule upheld by Trujillo and Balaguer did advance women’s roles in certain arenas of society and politics, they also paradoxically enforced a superstructure that maintained a traditional understanding of women’s innate abilities as maternal public figures. It elaborates on the historiographies of Dominican women’s history, transnational feminism, and dictatorship, and lays out the structure of the subsequent chapters.

This concluding chapter argues that the paradigm of transnational feminism provides a critical case study for the examination of the implications that transnational perspectives have for the way in which people make sense of the complex and deeply interconnected world. This is because transnational perspectives have sought to capture contemporary global phenomena that have unsettled modern nation-states, and also because such perspectives have been at the forefront of interdisciplinary knowledge that has grappled with the real material and political effects of people's knowledge practices. Indeed, transnational feminist scholarship has produced rich theoretical and empirical understandings of a wide range of sociocultural, political, and economic phenomena. Moreover, the most profound potential of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship has been its ability to interrogate its own complicities in the structures of the power it has sought to change.

Chapter three functions as a bridge between the first two chapters on locating possibilities for liberation in the grey area of Antillean departmentalization, and the next two chapters on African women’s demands for independence. It examines the ways in which Eugénie Éboué-Tell’s and Jane Vialle’s work in the French senate connected the anticolonial activism of women in the Antilles and French Equatorial Africa, and extended this activism beyond the borders of imperial France to include the United States. Both women forged transnational black feminist networks and thus claimed multiple communities and political affiliations that often defied imperial and national borders.

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.

This chapter distinguishes the features that make certain feminisms complicit in imperialism from universalism and develops a nonideal universalist position that is simultaneously feminist and anti-imperialist. Characteristic of imperialism-complicit missionary feminisms are commitments to ethnocentrism, justice monism, idealization, and what this chapter calls “moralism.” Ethnocentric justice monism is the view that gender justice can only be actualized within one set of (Western) cultural forms. Idealization and moralism involve the adoption of a false social ontology according to which the West’s ostensible superiority comes from endogenous cultural factors, the West represents the desired future of all societies, and Western action is driven by concern with justice. In contrast, nonideal universalists hold that feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and recognize that transnational feminist praxis is a justice-enhancing project. Justice-enhancing projects are not monist about justice, and they recognize the practical character of judgments about what will aid transitions out of nonideal conditions.