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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.

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 offers a description and analysis of a pedagogy project—a graduate seminar held at Syracuse University in 2012 which, while focusing on transnational feminist theories, fostered a critical praxis of radical feminist cross-border solidarities and nurtured epistemic friendships. The chapter examines the steps that constituted this collaborative process, including building a unit plan geared toward undergraduates, researching appropriate topics of discussion, and creating assignments and learning objectives. From here, the chapter considers some significant questions on friendship in light of this collaborative project in order to animate the complexities of such generative collective processes that foster solidarity, enable social action, and, also, reproduce inequality.

Women’s bodies represent a particularly contested symbolic terrain, especially within the political contexts of nationalism, globalization, revolution, occupation, and decolonization. Karina Eileraas Karakus asks how we might read women’s naked bodies in protest movements relative to gender and sexuality issues raised within the “Arab Spring” and transnational feminist praxis. By focusing on the “nude Egyptian blogger” Aliaa Elmahdy, who has deployed her naked body as a tool of resistance in cyberspace and on the streets, she argues that Elmahdy’s nude protest marks a moment of transition in the evolution of feminist protest. Within this shifting landscape, this chapter shows how the theater of feminist protest is both expanded and challenged by a new generation of feminists who navigate between conventional street protest and novel modes of cyber-attack while contributing new perspectives to longstanding debates about women’s artistic and political agency and the empowering potentials of female nudity.

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.

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical framework, methodology, and plan of the book in order to situate gender-based asylum in the context of global power relations. The chapter examines how a feminist international relations framework elucidates the distinctions between types of gender violence, between how “good” and “bad” non-citizens are constructed, and between “better” and “worse” countries in global politics. These distinctions operate when the United States negotiates the tension between immigration restriction and human rights obligations to protect refugees and determines who is “worthy” of receiving a grant of asylum. Finally, the chapter introduces the three worthy victim frames: autonomous; innocent; non-deviant.

This chapter explores the idea of friendship between women across cultures as a basis for social and political transformation. Deploying a transnational feminist analysis, the chapter enjoins Thrity Umrigar's novel The Space Between Us with Kumkum Sangari's essay “Consent, Agency, and Rhetorics of Incitement” to further a discussion on solidarity among women. The novel, arguably, revolves around the challenges to and potentials of dissident friendship. Set in Mumbai, India, Thrity Umrigar's second novel is about class-differentiated patriarchal oppression, the difficult choices women make within it, and their uneven consequences. The novel traces the parallel yet intertwined lives of the two protagonists, Sera, an upperclass Parsi, and Bhima, her elderly maid. While the women share a genuine friendship, it is born and nourished within insurmountable inequality.

The chapter examines the activities of women’s rights networks and associations in Morocco and Tunisia since the early 1990s, their relations to both transnational feminist networks and the UN’s global women’s rights agenda, the major campaigns and coalitions they have launched or joined, and their contributions to policies, practices, and discourses of democratization in their respective countries. How the women’s rights movements and “modernizing women” were situated in the Arab Spring, the constitutional and societal implications of the demand for women’s full and equal citizenship, and differences with the Islamist discourse will be a focus of the chapter, which draws on secondary sources as well as the author’s visits to the two countries and interviews with participants in the Arab Spring.

This chapter introduces transnational feminist and affect theory frameworks, two activist troupes, and key concepts of sentimental capitalism and hunger called theater to argue the significance of analyzing a global discursive regime of creative economy policy within the same analytical frame as activist performance. Highlighting recent articulations, affects, and contradictions of Indian creative economy policy, it presents shifting discursive and political histories. Rather than focusing on capital-rich cultural production, it makes a case for attending to unrecognized creativity within activist performance whilst analyzing the latter’s messy collaborations with hegemonic regimes of creativity. Outlines the book’s organization: Part 1 historically and spatially locates a global discursive regime in India, Ahmedabad, and Delhi; Parts 2 and 3 are ethnographies of the two troupes.

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and discusses the theoretical contribution that the book makes. Namely, the book demonstrates that peace negotiations are forums for norm diffusion and present opportunities for women to advance their interests for improving their status in the long-term. These women’s groups are linked to transnational feminist networks and as such frame their demands in language that echoes international women’s rights instruments. Despite the noted “liberal peace” bias in peacebuilding, women still need to struggle to be included in peace negotiations and have women’s rights included in peace agreements.

This chapter charts the formation of a women’s movement in Burundi following the outbreak of violence in 1993 which sought to end the armed conflict and to participate in the peace negotiations and details how women were able to include women’s rights in the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi. The women sought to forge a gender-based identity by including women who were both Hutu and Tutsi and avoiding contentious issues. Women’s organizations—which were part of a transnational feminist network—at various levels sought to help Burundian women participate in the negotiations including UNIFEM New York. Through their intervention, an all-women’s peace conference was convened where the participants proposed clauses to include in the final peace agreement. The resulting clauses reflect international norms on women due to the links between Burundian civil society and transnational feminist networks, the involvement of representatives of international organizations, and the use of international human rights instruments in constructing the language.

This chapter explains the asylum process in the United States, including relevant laws, political players, and requirements. The difference between affirmative and defensive asylum is discussed. The chapter also traces the concurrent historical trends in the United States both to restrict immigrants from entry but also to uphold human rights obligations to protect non-citizens fleeing persecution. For example, it explores how immigration restriction laws impact asylum seekers. Furthermore, it posits that restriction and protection are not antithetical but constitute each other as a part of statecraft and international hierarchy. The chapter also explores the history and development of gender-based asylum. Finally, the chapter provides data on refugees and asylees admitted into the United States.