ABSTRACT
This book has argued that reorienting anti-essentialist feminist analysis from an emphasis on commonality to relationality allows more in-depth examination of the complex discursive, historical, social and political processes through which particular embodied practices and figurations have been both linked and constituted differently. This in turn enables greater attention to be paid to the ways in which practices may be both ‘known’ and experienced differently in different contexts, as well as to some of the specific formations and circuits through which cultural essentialism and racism have operated in relation to the representation of embodied practices. On the whole, and specifically through the web approach developed in its final chapter, the book seeks to generate a relational transnational feminist theory and politics premised predominantly not on the recognition that our experiences are essentially similar, or that we have suffered common ‘cultural wounds’, but rather on the basis of our fundamental discursive and social interdependence – that is, how we both depend on and affect one another both within and across cultural and geopolitical contexts. Potential directions for future research in this context are multiple. For
example, while my project has concentrated primarily on the similar theoretical, social and political effects that various comparative cross-cultural approaches may produce, it would be productive to examine the significance of their differences in further depth. How, for instance, does the social and geopolitical location from which particular cross-cultural parallels are constructed make a difference to the potential political effects of such comparisons? How might location shape the ways in which various cross-cultural comparisons are interpreted by different audiences? Moreover, my focus has been on how making links between different cultural practices is employed as a rhetorical strategy within feminist theory. It would also be useful to examine how comparative cross-cultural strategies are mobilised specifically within feminist and other forms activism or how they might be employed within more mainstream or popular cultural mediums. In this vein, we might consider whether, in addition to its potential contribution to feminist theory projects, the web approach might be utilised or adapted by activists or practitioners working ‘on the ground’. In conclusion, the web I have begun to
weave here suggests one particular path (produced from my own specific social perspective) that the development of a critical relational approach of this nature might take. It is unfinished and, as such, unfixed. I would encourage others to build on it, critique it, or to explore alternative paths, directions or shapes that such a project might take.
