Transnational Feminisms

Catalog description

This course critically engages a range of transnational feminist theories, movements, and praxis to analyze structures of power shaping people's lives in global contexts. The course seeks to decenter a body of feminist scholarship that often assumes shared visions of gender equality. Such studies conceptualize gender issues and concerns through a Eurocentric/colonial viewpoint by overlooking differences among people with respect to race, class, sexuality, and nationality. Course readings explore the ethics of cross-cultural knowledge production, activism, warfare, commodification of women's bodies, sexualities, and local resources. The main goals of the course are to expose students to a broad range of feminist thought and action and locate transnational feminist theories in relation to colonial and post-colonial narratives. It urges students to examine their own positions within global systems that connect the (often uneven) exchange of persons, capital, and ways of knowing. Ultimately, this course will cultivate an informed and reasoned openness to, and understanding of, difference and its relationship to power.