EN270: Transnational Feminism, 2011/12
Sorcha Gunne
s.gunne@warwick.ac.uk
Office: H540
Office Hour: Tuesday, 11am
Term 1: Key concepts and debates
Week 1) Introduction
Week 2) Subalternity and Experience – Mahasweta Devi, ‘Draupadi’
Week 3) Woman and Nation – (extracts from) Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcón and
Minoo Moallem (eds) (1999) Between Woman and Nation
Week 4) Woman and Nation – Assia Djebar, Fantasia (1993)
Week 5) Woman and Nation – Selection of Poetry from Seamus Heaney and Eavan
Boland
Week 6) Reading week no seminar
Week 7) Migrating Selves – (extracts from) Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands
Week 8) Migrating Selves – Toni Morrison, No Mercy (2008)
Week 9) Migrating Selves – Richard Flanagan, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997)
Week 10) Conclusion
Assessment: You will have 2 essays (2,500 words each) and a 2 hour exam. Essay 1 is
due in term 2, week 3 and Essay 2 is due in term 3, week 3.
‘The particular strength of the
masculine sociodicy comes from the
fact that it combines and condenses
two operations: it legitimates a
relationship of domination by
embedding it in a biological nature
that is itself a naturalized social
construction’
– Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine
Domination
Why Feminism?
‘If it is quite illusory to believe that
symbolic violence can be overcome
with the weapons of consciousness
and will alone, this is because the
effect and conditions of its efficacy
are durably and deeply embedded
in the body and in the form of
dispositions’
– Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine
Domination
Why ‘Transnational’
Feminism?
Let’s talk about the hair. Why do I call it “yellow” hair and not
“blond” hair? Because I’m pretty sure everybody calls my hair
“brown.” When I read fairy tales to my daughter I always change
the word “blond” to “yellow,” because I don’t want her to think
that blond hair is somehow better.
My daughter has a reversible doll: Sleeping beauty on one side
and Snow White on the other. I would always set it on her bed
with
the
Snow White
side
out andas
she
‘[I]t is
necessary
to see
“women”
a would toddle up to it and
flip
the skirt
over to
Sleeping
Beauty.
complex,
impure
category
that
bleedsI would flip it back and say,
“Snow
is of
so apparently
pretty.” Shediscrete
would yell, “No!” and flip it
across White
borders
back....
When
I asked
her
why she
didn’t like Snow White, she
identities,
such
as sex,
gender,
race
told
“I don’t
her hair.”
Not even three years old, she
andme,
nation’
[andlike
I would
add class]
knew that yellow hair is king. And let’s admit it, yellow hair does
have magical
powers.
You
could Purity
put a blond wig on a hot-water
– Irene
Gedalof,
Against
heater and some dude would try to f%*$ it’
– Tina Fey, Bossypants
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes:
Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1986)
This essay analyzes the ‘production of the “Third World
woman” as a singular, monolithic subject in some
(Western) feminist texts’
Mohanty identifies 6 modes of
defining women primarily in
terms of their object status:
Women as victims of male
violence; Women as universal
dependents; Victims of the
colonial process; Victims of the
Arab familial system; Victims
of the Islamic code; Victims of
the economic development
process
Women as a category of analysis: ‘This
focus is not on uncovering the material
and ideological specificities that
constitute a particular group of women as
“powerless” in a particular context. It is,
rather, on finding a variety of cases of
powerless groups of women to prove the
general point that women as a group are
powerless’
‘If relations of domination and exploitation are defined in
Feminism
terms of without
binary Borders
divisions – groups that dominate and groups that are dominated – then
surely the implication is that the accession to power of women as a group
is sufficient to dismantle the existing organization of relations. But
women as a group are not in some sense essentially superior or infallible.
The crux of the problem lies in that initial assumption of women as a
homogenous group or category (“the oppressed”), a familiar assumption in
Western radical and liberal feminism’
– Chandra Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes
'Feminism without borders is not the same as “border-less”
feminism. It acknowledges the fault lines, conflicts,
differences, fears, and containment that borders represent. It
acknowledges that there is no one sense of a border, that the
lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities,
religions, disabilities, are real – and that a feminism without
borders must envision change and social justice work across
these lines of demarcation and division. I want to speak of
feminism without silences and exclusions in order to draw
attention to the tension between simultaneous plurality and
narrowness of borders and the emancipatory potential of
crossing through, with, and over these borders in our
everyday lives’
– Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders
Limits of Mohanty’s argument in
‘Under Western Eyes’
‘Where Mohanty engages in a particular critique of
“Third World Woman” as a monolithic object in the
texts of Western feminism, her argument is
premised on the irreconcilability of gender as
history and gender as culture.... How will the ethnic
voice of womanhood counteract the cultural
articulation that Mohanty too easily dubs as the
exegesis of Western feminism? The claim to
authenticity – only a black can speak for a black;
only a postcolonial subcontinental feminist can
adequately represent the lived experience of that
culture – points to the great difficulty posited by
the “authenticity” of female racial voices in the
great game that claims to be the first narrative of
what the ethnically constructed woman is deemed
to want’
– Sara Suleri, ‘Feminism Skin Deep
Why bother crossing borders?
‘Many transnational feminists identify the international
division of labour rather than cultural conflicts or
transactions – as the most important defining feature of
postcoloniality. These major sites of labor exploitation and
resistance are located in the Free Trade Zones in the Third
World, in sweatshops in the United States and Europe, and
in home-based labor everywhere. By linking these sites,
they recognize the spatial interpenetration and integration
of the First and Third Worlds; the First World exerts its
economic, political, and cultural influence in the Third
World, while internal conclaves of a Third World are being
constructed within the territorial boundaries of the First
World’
– Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and You-me Park, ‘Postcolonial
Feminism / Postcolonialism and Feminism’
What Bahri suggests...
‘A meaningful transnational literacy will require recognition
of the location of readers and of reading as a socialized
activity within a particular context. It will require that we
learn to read literature by and about “Third-World” women as
more than informal sociology, even as it will enjoin upon us
the need to read global experiences and events as complex,
intricately interwoven social texts. In other words, it will
oblige us to recognize the complexities of subject construction
everywhere and to learn to read the world through what I
would refer to as the “logic of adjacence.” We would then
read women in the world not as the same but as neighbours,
as “near dwellers” whose adjacence can become more
meaningful. Through this logic – a logic that might be usefully
applied to the general orientation of postcolonialism – we
would read the world, not as one (in the sense of being
already united), but as belonging together’
– Deepika Bahri, ‘Feminism in/and postcolonialism’
Rejecting One Story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg