ABSTRACT
The transnational fact is a historical novelty. In historical terms, virtually all nations are, transnations, indelibly marked by the presence and pressures of other nations, both neighboring and distant. The concept of the “transnational” seems to have initially emerged in the 1970s from the fields of business and corporate culture, and only later became part of critical cultural analysis. In a broader sense, the “transnational turn” is regarded by many analysts as a response to the intensification and acceleration of longstanding processes of globalization and the need to go beyond binary oppositions between the national and the foreign, the local and the global. Transnational Feminism offers a powerful grid for examining the gendered nature of cross-border flows of people and cultural information around the world, especially emphasizing the hierarchical and gendered “channels” of these flows. The frequent ambivalence about the political valence of transnationalism reflects the inevitable ambiguities of any complex phenomenon which is thoroughly traversed by social contradiction.
