ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the people might think through debates around intersectionality beyond the Global North, taking seriously other geographical and institutional spaces as sites of feminist theorizing around intersectionality. It focuses on interviews with feminist activists and theorists in West Asia and North Africa, many of the conversations focused on the question of how intersectionality traveled to the region, what made this travel possible, what “baggage” it traveled with, and what it might have displaced through its arrival. The chapter explores the idea of traveling theory, and what happens when theories like intersectionality travel from the Global North to the Global South. The question of knowledge production and power emerged strongly across all interviews, suggesting tensions around how knowledge from the West—and in particular the US—is able to travel to the Global South and influence local understandings in ways that are both productive and unproductive.