ABSTRACT
In this chapter I argue for transnational feminist analysis in research on equality building through the case of gender training in Europe. I apply a transnational feminist analytical framework – one which interrogates hegemonic narratives of Western feminism, privileges relational understandings of systems of power, and recognises reciprocity between local and global in knowledge building – to a study of trainers for gender equality working in Europe. Drawing on this analysis, I discuss shifting positionalities, locations and dislocations, cultural borders and European identities, and epistemic hierarchies that these trainers navigate. The shifting positionalities of the trainers and their movement across borders, fragment Eurocentrism as a regime of knowledge and foreground relationality within diversity. The stories of the trainers reveal epistemic hierarchies of gender knowledge and the ways in which these knowledges can be challenged and reformulated through transnational exchange. They also contextualise individual equality actions within a global genealogy of equality work and representation therein. Through this analysis I advocate for more inclusive and critical meta-geographies of gender expertise, which facilitate reflexivity and the recognition of the paradoxes of equality work, including the local-global dimensions thereof. The transnational feminist lens I have applied to European equality work reveals how individual trajectories and actions relate to, and are constitutive of, a global circulation of gender knowledge. This shows reciprocity and exchange, and the need for praxis guiding cartographies which document power relations and the transnational formulation of equality work and transformative knowledge.
