ABSTRACT
Nearly a decade and a half ago, Rachel Lee published her incisive critique of the institutional production and consumption of racial difference in women’s studies curricula. 1 She posits that in the 1980s and 1990s, the category “women of color” came to crystallize a fetishization of “marginality and nonterritoriality” within the field. Standing for disciplinary and national border crossings, “women of color” metaphorized “lack of territory … [as] a prerequisite for an acute perceptual brilliance.” 2 I begin this reflection on the politics and pedagogy of teaching transnational cinema with Lee’s account of her experience as a teacher of women’s studies because I find that teaching transnational cinema in the feminist studies classroom today continues to raise vexing yet potentially politically and pedagogically productive questions surrounding the celebration of disciplinary and global border crossings and (non)territoriality associated with transnationalism. 3
