Globalization, colonialism, and gendered politics in transnational feminist theory

Transnational Feminism

Women's Culture-

This work will use the quote: "Culture...consists in the way analogies are drawn between things, in the way certain thoughts are used to think others" as a focal point or a beginning in making a connection between Shohat's argument that globalization...just be seen as part of the much longer history of colonialism in which Europe attempted to submit the world to a single 'universal' regime of truth and global institutional power' and the sexualization of female bodies in popular culture in order to analyze gendered politics of power that position women differently than men in relation narratives of progress, development, the modern, social evolution and their opposing narratives (i.e. primitive, underdeveloped, backward uncivilized, caught in a timeless past).

Introduction

The feminist agenda has changed a great deal since the earlier days of its existence with the agenda of gaining voting rights for women. The world has become more complex and more dangerous particularly for women and especially in cultures that accept and even expect domestic violence toward women. Colonialism's agenda and the agenda of the drivers behind globalization are not that much different but there is a difference in that women have acknowledged and recognized that there has to be a better more effective method than those utilized in the past by feminists pushing for a change.

Women's Organizations: Whose Agenda Calls the Tune?

A great deal of tension is inherent in the definition of women's culture and Brenner (2000) reports that there is great conflict between women and the organizations that generally assist and enable women and states further that the reason this conflicts exists is because women are now in a position to be taken seriously on the world stage. However the globalization movement, even though there are surface actions that have been taken to improve the plight of women, the agenda of globalization must needs be questioned and researched. These women's organizations are operated from the nationalism point-of-view and since that is the agenda calling the tune for these organizations they are not actually representing women as such but are issuing forth assistance on the terms of those who are in control so to speak and on the basis of what the United Nations and the European Union dictates to be the rights of women on a very generic and impersonal basis.

Transnational Feminism: Different Cultures and Different Definitions

Equal Rights can be assumed to hold different meanings when those rights are experienced in two different countries as well as two uniquely different settings in culture. Therefore, equality would surely mean two very different things to women in different cultural settings. For example, equality for women in the United States and equality for women from the in third world countries very likely hold meanings that are quite different. In third world countries, where women are treated as nothing more than property, have never had the right to vote, have always appeared in public with their faces covered, never received much education, and never made their own life choices, the word equality is initially beyond their capacity to conceive.

Colonialism and Globalization: Same or Different Agenda?

Colonialism was a goal of molding all religions, cultures, and societies into one accepted protocol of operation that would be the same from one country to the other, and that would cross cultural, ethnic and religious boundaries. However, as it was soon learned the people and countries that were targeted for these changes resisted such changes as do those who are the target of change in today's world in which larger more powerful countries are promoting efforts of Globalization.

Globalization's Agenda

Globalization is indeed making the world a smaller place with its' integration of so many levels and layers of life from the East to the West and North to South. However, what must be understood is that globalization is 'international' in its basis however, in understanding transnational feminism it must be stressed that transnational is more than crossing of physical national boundaries but as stated by Jouvert (2000) transnational feminism is a crossing of national boundaries on the 'conscious' level and at the same time is a "superseding of nationalist orientations." (Jouvert, 2000))

Women in the New Millennium

If feminism or equal rights for women is ever to be realized in truth on a worldwide level then the transnationality of feminism must be realized within its fullest and broadest concept and must be realized on the 'conscious' level of all who support women and their rights in society. Jouvert (2000) candidly explains the dilemma that nationalism has placed upon the lives of women in her statement:

However, nationalisms are not just patriarchal. In the contemporary study of European women travelers revealed the ways in which Eurocentric discourses about the colonized woman as victim of her culture became widespread, they also suggest that these women travelers were expressing nationalist ideas about the superiority of their country and their capabilities and the inferiority of colonized Others. This explains why, for instance, British women in the late nineteenth century continued to believe that their own countries were havens of freedom when they themselves did not have the vote, and were struggling for their rights. It can also explain why many working-class women in Britain, locked in labor struggles, could still support the project of British colonialism. Nationalism creates these misrecognitions; that is, a deliberate and ideological forgetting, and such practices continue to this day. For instance, women from Islamic countries have obtained refugee asylum in the U.S. because they claim that their patriarchal cultures persecute them, even though the U.S. remains a country with an extremely high rate of domestic violence." (Jouvert, 2000)

Indeed Jouvert in the above statement has put into perspective the inherent different between feminism in terms of globalization and feminism that is transnational in nature.

Summary & Conclusion

Community-based movements have succeeded in mobilizing masses in the past twenty years, according to Brenner (2001) "reflect[s] historic continuity. For centuries women have entered into political struggle in order to secure the livelihoods of their families and communities." What is new is the advent of women in leadership positions and political office who have incorporated women issues into their programs which offers new hope and presents new possibilities. Just as British women felt their country was full of freedom even though they did not have the right to vote there are cultures in the world that freedom within that specific society would be prison within another in the view of women.

In order for feminism to become transnational the elite women in the richer countries must be able to consider and conceive the plight of the rural women in a third world country and as well all within the feminist movement must be able within their own consciousness to cross a deep chasm in order to comprehend women of other nations and cultures as to what their specific needs might be, even though those may be very different from their own.