ABSTRACT
I will start with a pedagogical experience that inspired this essay. In 2003,
I taught a newly designed graduate seminar, “Transnational Feminist
Practices.”1 My students were intrigued by exploring this new field of
transnational feminist cultural studies. The seminar combined the study
of diasporic cinema and current discourses of transnationality in order to
examine border and transcultural identities in the global contexts of exilic
dislocation, patriarchal violence, and ethnic cleansing. For all my students,
this was a fresh intellectual experience. As foundational texts for the
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seminar, we read Inderpal Grewal’s and Caren Kaplan’s work answering
the question, “Why do we need a theory of transnational feminist prac-
tices?” We then moved to essays by Meena Alexander, Leo R. Chavez,
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stuart Hall, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Nawal
el Saadawi, Ella Shohat, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Trinh Minh-ha, and
others. We investigated critiques of “global feminism” and “global sister-
hood” with the understanding that, as Kaplan claims, these discourses
“have naturalized and totalized categories such as ‘Third World women’
and ‘First World women.’”2 Probing these readings, it became clear that one
of the main concerns of the field is to trouble the First World/Third World
binary and to scrutinize the often subtle operations of the Eurocentric
logic that historically patronizes non-Western spaces and peoples, while
endlessly privileging “First Worldness.” It also became clear that the dis-
cussions of Second World women in relation to transnational feminist
studies were nowhere to be found in the essays we studied.
