week9 desai face of fem politics post-beijing

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activists within and between countries in theNorth and South. More importantly, however,

given the spaces within which transnational

feminists operate and the modalities of transna-

tional activism, the strategic focus of movements

shifts from redistribution to policy and discursivechanges. As Rai (2004) notes, policy and dis-

cursive changes highlight process over outcomesand emphasise empowerment without shift in

material resources. Thus, the ironic state of the

feminist movements post Beijing, I argue, is that

(some) women’s agency is visible everywhere evenas (most) women’s lives remain mired in multiple

inequalities.

The paper is divided into three sections. The

first reviews theoretical debates in the literature

on transnational social movements, the secondfocuses on the UN and the Feminist Dialogues

as sites of transnational feminism and the finalsection offers reflections on transnational femin-

ism and feminist politics.

Transnational socialmovements

With the exception of feminist scholars, most

social movement scholars relate transnational

social movements to contemporary globalisa-tions.3 As Seidman (2000) notes, today there has

been a paradigmatic shift in our understandingof social institutions and social relations. Most

social analysts argue that contemporary globa-

lisation has not only led to a reorganisation of

the economy on a global scale, but has also

shaped a new social imaginary in which we are

expected to rethink social relations and identitiesas fluid, flexible, and de-territoralised rather

than confined to bounded spaces (Guidry et al .

2000; Hamel et al . 2001). While most theoristsrecognise that globalisation is uneven and affects

men and women in various parts of the world

differently, we are nonetheless all urged tounderstand how the local and global, both fluid

categories, inform each other and how the

interplay of the two shapes both.

For social movements this has meant going

beyond the usual nation-state based movements,theoretically and methodologically. Yet the term

‘‘transnational’’ is still bound to the nation even

as the perspective seeks to transcend it. Thus, the

analytic aim is to understand how the local – interms of issues, identities, strategies, methods,

targets of protest, and world-views – becomes

global and how the global is evident in the local.

Movement analysts assume that identities, net-

works, and communities are as likely to beglobal as local and that global dynamics and

audiences constrain and facilitate movements.A major consequence of this transnational

understanding of social movements has been the

rethinking of the concept of social movement

itself. As many scholars have indicated, there hasbeen a conflation of social movements, NGOs,

and networks in transnational social move-

ments. Thus, some analysts like Keck and

Sikkink (1998) and Moghadam (2005) prefer to

use networks as the unit of analysis as they havebecome the organisational expression of trans-

national social movements, while Tarrow (2003)would like to differentiate social movements

from other categories not by the goal of social

change but methods used, i.e., social movements

use contentious methods while NGOs and net-

works tend to use routine means of socialchange. Piper and Uhlin (2004) prefer to use

the concept of transnational activism instead

of social movements. They define activism aspolitical activities based on a conflict of interest

that challenge or support power structures, thatare carried out by non-state actors, and that take

place outside formal politics (Piper and Uhlin2004: 4). Such a move blurs distinctions between

NGOs and social movements and indicates the

difficulties of using categories like social move-

ments that derive from state-centred sociology

for transnational politics. Guidry et al . (2000)redefine movements as practices of resistance

rather than organised efforts at collective changeand suggest that in the context of globalisation

we need to focus on the relationship of move-

ments with public spheres, modalities of powerand resistance, identity formation, and their

normative penumbrae. These definitional issueshave been central in the current analyses of

women’s movements as scholars have moved

away from ‘‘global’’ or ‘‘international’’ feminist

movements to transnational feminist practices

and solidarities (Grewal and Kaplan 1994;

Mohanty 2002), or debated the use of feministversus women’s movements (Basu 1995), and

lamented the ‘‘NGOisation’’ of women’s move-

ments (Alvarez 2000; Desai 2002). As I will show

320 Manisha Desai

r UNESCO 2005.



below, these conceptual issues are importantboth because they construct movements even as

they describe them and also because they show a

discomfort with the shift in political terrain that

has not led to greater equality for women.

Despite the diversity of opinions on whatconstitutes a transnational social movement,

there is consensus on the modalities of transna-tional social movements. Most analysts agree

that the dominant protest repertoire of transna-

tional activism includes education and mobilisa-

tion, symbolic framing, and strategic use of information. Advocacy, lobbying, support, and

direct action are secondary. Furthermore, the

major targets of most transnational movements

have been policy mechanisms of local, national,

regional, and multilateral international institu-tions. Finally, while a lot of transnational

activism is cyber based, it also involves travelto sites of protests and gatherings. Such a

modality, I argue, privileges educated, middle

class activists or ‘‘popular intellectuals’’ (Baud

and Rutten 2004) over other movement activists

and participants. Baud and Rutten (2004) definepopular intellectuals, as distinct from organic

and public intellectuals, as ‘‘knowledge experts’’

who often are formally educated and not fromthe constituency/class on whose behalf they

make claims and frame issues, but are usuallyfrom the middle classes. Moghadam (2005) also

emphasises the rise of educated women aroundthe world in the emergence of transnational

feminist networks. Waterman (2000) sees trans-

national activism as ‘‘globalisation from the

middle’’ as it is middle class educated people

moving around the same circuits. In the case of feminist, women’s movements, activists seem to

circulate from the academy to UN agencies tointernational NGOs.

It is this discursive modality and the dom-

inance of ‘‘popular intellectuals’’ within transna-tional social movements that have led to what I

call transnational social movement (TSM) scep-tics even as there are many transnational social

movement (TSM) boosters. The TSM sceptics

focus on the unevenness of transnationalism and

its impact on internal movement dynamics as well

as consequences for the project of social transfor-

mation. For example, Basu (2004: 1) wonders, ‘‘Istransnational feminism after 1985 another form of

Northern-based feminism in disguise? Or is it like

the feminism of 1970s dominated by Northern

groups and their understandings.’’ She is con-cerned with the representation of Southern

organisations in such networks. As I will show

below, there are Southern women and NGOs

represented in these networks; the question is, do

they focus on issues of women’s inequalities inboth the North and the South?

Seidman (2000) argues that transnationalactivism is not inevitable or irreversible as

suggested by the experience of the international

labour movement – which had its heydays in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries butreceived major setbacks after the Second World

War – and also because tensions between local

needs and international concerns are often hard to

reconcile. Wiest et al . (2002) argue that the

geography of TSM is pretty uneven with mostNorthern countries still overrepresented and with

few collaborative relationships among socialmovements across geographic divides as North-

ern movements still fund most Southern move-

ments. Furthermore, education is a necessary

cultural capital in TSMs and this has led to

friction between those with formal education andthose without, reproducing other inequalities

within and across countries.

Based on his research on the transnationalenvironmental movement, Pollack (2001) dis-

cusses how there is still little epistemologicalopenness among the major transnational move-

ments. He shows how women and indigenouspeople are confined to their specific contribution

but not seen as central to redefining the agenda,

most of which he sees as re-interpretations of the

western/modern vision. He argues that transna-

tional movements are a ‘‘political empty box’’with a lot of participation but little change.

Others have focused on issues of accountabilityof networks (Smith & Johnston 2002).

TSM boosters, on the other hand, see it as

an effective response to a globalised world.Writing about transnational feminist networks,

Moghadam (2005) argues that they are aninnovative feminist response, participatory and

non-hierarchical, and the most effective form of

organising in an era of globalisation. The

question is: effective for what? They have been

effective in generating critique and policies but

not necessarily in advancing alternatives forwomen’s emancipation. Batliwala (2002) raises

the important issue of differentiating between

transnational actors, such as DAWN, WIDE,

Transnationalism: the face of feminist politics post-Beijing 321

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WEDO, AWMR, the feminist networks thatMoghadam (2005) describes, which are primarily

educated middle-class women who intervene in

policy debates and sometimes in direct action, and

those grass-roots networks that are composed of

people affected directly in their homes andcommunities by the process of globalisation. She

discusses two innovative transnational networks,Women in Informal Economy Globalising and

Organising (WIEGO) and Slum/Shack Dwellers

International (SID), in which local community-

based movements have formed partnerships withNGOs and academic institutions (WIEGO is

based at Harvard University), to gather data and

research to propose people-centred solutions at

international, institutional levels and are also en-

gaged in local organising. While the community-based movements in these networks do work on

issues of livelihood at the local level, their focustoo is policy based rather than redistribution per

se. However, such networks have been successful

in changing perceptions about the poor and

marginalised people and their right to participate

in decisions that affect their lives as well as theirabilities to generate solutions to their situations.

Batliwala (2002) argues that because such net-

works represent people and are accountable tothem, they are more legitimate than other elite and

middle class networks and NGOs that have noconnections to the constituency on whose behalf

they make claims.It is within this complex terrain of transna-

tional social movements that I locate the two

sites of transnational feminism.

Transnational feminism at the

UN and the feministdialogues

Women organising across national borders, asmany scholars (Rupp 1998) have pointed out,

are neither new nor specific to contemporary

globalisation. The phenomenon is at least acentury old, emerging within the context of the

old abolitionist, suffragist, and socialist move-

ments. Yet ‘‘transnational feminism’’ emerged in

academic discourse in the US (Desai 2004) and

has been responsible for shaping the movementas much as describing it. It emerged to describe

women’s solidarities across the world, primarily

in response to their participation in the UN’s

International Decade for Women (1975–1985),with its four world conferences – 1975 in Mexico

City, 1980 in Copenhagen, and 1985 in Nairobi,

with a follow-up conference in Beijing in 1995 –

and preparatory national and regional meetings.

The term ‘‘transnational feminism’’ was seldomused by the women’s movements and INGOs

until after the Beijing conference. Today it iswidely used but remains contested as I found at

the Feminist Dialogues in Brazil in 2005 where the

Latin American feminists were uncomfortable

with the term. To them it was too reminiscent of transnational corporations. I use it to represent

both a theoretical perspective, a ` la Grewal and

Kaplan (1994) and a descriptive term.

The four world conferences, and accompa-

nying NGO Forums, were contentious eventswith women from the South, not all of whom

identified as feminists, challenging Northernwomen’s conceptions of women’s issues based

solely on gender and sexuality and insisting on

bringing in issues of development, nationalism,

and neo-colonialism. These differences among

women began to be acknowledged and ‘‘solida-rities of difference’’ (Desai 1997) were forged as

they continued to meet over the decade and

shared experiences of inequalities and strugglesfor justice. It was the 1985 conference in Nairobi

that marked a shift from contention to solidarityand by the fourth conference in Beijing women

despite their differences had found a commonlanguage in the human rights framework.

‘‘Women’s rights are human rights’’ emerged

at the World Conference on Human Rights in

Vienna in 1993 but became paradigmatic in

Beijing. Thus, the UN conferences and thenspecialised agency meetings, such as the Con-

vention on Elimination of all forms of Discri-mination Against Women and the Committee

on the Status of Women, became the prime sites

of this new phase of transnational activism.Most women who attended the NGO Forums

accompanying the UN conferences, which arefor government delegations though increasingly

many governments include activists and NGO

members among their official delegates, were

middle-class educated women from INGOS,

donors, academics, and activists. At the Hair-

ou/Beijing Forum, in which I participated, thegrass-roots women were present as well but most

participated in their own Forum outside the

main workshops in tents sharing, performing,

322 Manisha Desai

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and selling handicrafts. Ironically, the Chineseauthorities saw this as a conference of foreigners

and restricted the participation of most Chinese

women. Only women from the major INGOs

and donors were involved in interacting with the

official conference in Beijing.Following Beijing, most women’s move-

ments, including religious women and funda-mentalist movements and governments, were

using the rights framework to claim rights both

at home and in global spaces. Thus, violence

against women, reproductive rights, livelihood,housing, education, and sustainable develop-

ment were all framed in terms of women’s rights.

The state is the protector, promoter, and

enforcer of these rights even as non-state actors

are held accountable for some women’s rightsviolations. As I have argued elsewhere (Desai

2002), the rights discourse coincided with thedomination of the neo-liberal discourse and

structural adjustment policies and both can co-

exist as rights can be articulated without

challenging neo-liberalism as is evident in the

work of most UN agencies. Thus states wereexpected to meet their obligations to the inter-

national financial institutions and privatise and

cut public expenditures at the same time as theywere to ensure women’s and girls right to

education, health, and livelihood. As Molyneuxand Razavi (2002) argue, there is a consensus

that since Beijing, most governments havefulfilled their trade treaties rather than their

human rights agreements. Further, fundamen-

talist movements and governments have used the

same rights approach to deny rights to women

based on cultural claims. Thus, despite thediscourse of human rights, which claims that

all rights are universal, inalienable, and indivi-sible, political and cultural rights take prece-

dence over economic and social rights. The

increasing militarism post 9/11 has also shownthe inadequacy of the rights framework to

protect the rights of communities suspected of links with terrorism. In addition to these

contextual contradictions, the adoption of a

‘‘rights-based’’ approach to development by

international aid agencies and by the multi-

lateral financing institutions has led to the co-

optation of the language and principles of human rights. Scholars and activists alike have

criticised the human rights framework for not

problematising the state, depoliticising women’s

issues, focusing on individual rather thancollective rights, and establishing a regulative

rather than are distributive framework (Moly-

neux & Razavi 2002).

Thus, even the major gains of the feminist

activists at the 1993 Human Rights Conference inVienna, when violence against woman was seen

as a human rights violation and non-state actorswere also identified as guarantors of rights, have

been eroded in the contemporary juxtaposition

of neo-liberalism, fundamentalism, and militar-

ism. In recent years, there have been manyattempts, few successful, to hold non-state actors

(such as armed militant groups and transnational

corporations) accountable for human rights

violations caused by their actions. Most impor-

tantly, human rights discourse in transnationalfeminism has privileged UN and other interna-

tional institutions as the sites of activism.There are several structural and ideological

reasons for the limitations of transnational

feminism around the UN. (1) Born in the

aftermath of the Second World War, the UN’s

original mission of peace and promotion of trade soon became secondary to development as

countries in Africa and Asia were becoming

independent from colonial rule. Developmenthas been seen by many scholars as a neo-colonial

discourse, and a neo-colonial stance is reflectedin the structure of the Security Council, the veto

power for the victors of the Second World War,and its ideology and language of development

which identifies countries based on their level of

economic development. (2) The UN’s function-

ing is based on ‘‘inter’’ national rather than

‘‘trans’’ national relations among memberstates, which centres the nation as the primary

site of action. (3) Many member states, particu-larly the US, see it is as a space for the developed

countries to ‘‘aid’’ the developing countries,

rather than a place for nations to come togetheras equals around common issues. (4) Participa-

tion by non-state actors is confined to registeredNGOs, which furthers the NGOisation and

depoliticisation of movements.

These inequalities of the UN system and its

location in New York and Geneva, Switzerland,

have meant that women’s NGOs in the US and

Western Europe have easier access to andfamiliarity with it. Furthermore, most of the

US based women’s INGOs, whose activists

are primarily white women and middle-class,


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educated women from the South, focus onwomen’s issues in the Global South and repro-

duce the sense of the UN as a space for helping

women of developing countries rather than forseeking gender justice for women in their coun-

tries. Thus, structural inequalities within the UN

are reproduced among the women’s NGOs

participating in transnational activities at the

UN. The domination of women’s NGOs from

the US and Europe in the transnational spacearound the UN has been shown by many scholars

who have analysed the international women’s

decade and activism around the four women’sworld conferences as well as the other UN world

conferences (Desai 2002; McLaughlin 2004;

Mendoza 2002).Yet, as Chan Tiberghien (2004) shows,

within the space of UN conferences you see a

shift in the construction of gender from invisible

equality, of 1945–1975, to visible equality 1975–

1985, to difference from men in the early 1990sand finally differences among women following

the Beijing conference. Thus, she argues, aca-

demic feminist post-structuralist undermining of

gender has influenced feminist activists as wellthough this is not incompatible with ‘‘modern’’

articulation of feminist politics for human rights.

She argues that gender as equality has given wayto gender as intersection which opens up more

important ways to address women’s inequalities

even though the documents themselves do not

reflect this discursive recognition. For example,

most documents insist on two genders, male and

female, and do not talk of gender identities.The activism around the UN, however, raises

the relationship between intellectual representa-

tion, judged in terms of coherence of discourse,and political activities, evaluated based on success

for the people (Baud & Rutten 2004). Feminists,

most of whom are committed to women’s equalitybut have few connections with mass based

women’s groups, can end up in a ‘‘vanguardist’’

position. As Baud and Rutten (2004) argue, they

may become too intellectual or too constrained by

the international institutions. The NGOisation of the movement has provided many educated

women with good employment opportunities

in INGOS and opportunities for travel and

World Forum of Women Against Violence, Valencia, Spain, November 2000. The slogan reads ‘‘A world without violence

is possible’’. AFP/Alberto Estevez

324 Manisha Desai

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interaction with other feminist activists and forframing the position of the transnational feminist

movement. While they speak for their constitu-

ents, most are removed from them except as

service providers or gender experts. Clearly, there

is need for engendering knowledge and institutionsand transnational feminist networks like DAWN,

WEDO, and others have played an important rolein advancing the feminist research and policy

agenda at the UN and other international spaces

as shown by Moghadam (2005). The problem is

that increasingly such networks have become thedominant face of the women’s movements.

Another major site for transnational feminist

activism since the 1995 conference in Beijing has

been the World Social Forum (WSF). The first

WSF was held in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazilorganised by the Workers Party (www.worldso

cialforum.org). It was a response to two contra-dictory tendencies in Latin America in the 1990s:

increasing democratisation and the spread of neo-

liberal globalisation. The latter generated struc-

tural crises and inequalities while the former

provided a space to address these growing crises.The protests against corporate globalisations that

began in Seattle in 1998 and continued through

the end of the decade created new networks andled to the consolidation of the global justice

movement. It was in the name of the global justicemovement and as an alternative to the World

Economic Forum in Davos, where leaders of corporate globalisation meet, that the first WSF

was called in January 2001 in Brazil.

The WSF was organised as a democratic

space for people from around the world to share

their struggles and reflect on alternatives. Thelanguage of the WSF stresses process and

autonomy from state and parties, even thoughit was an initiative of the Worker’s Party.

Feminists were active in the WSF from its

inception and gender equality was stressed asone of the important aspects of global justice.

Yet the first two WSF, however, did not have asmany sessions on gender nor were women in

prominent positions in the International Orga-

nising Committee. It was to address this lack of

attention to feminist issues that women’s groups

from Latin America, Asia, and Africa met

informally at the 2003 Forum to discuss theidea of ‘‘Feminist Dialogues’’, which would

engender the WSF and make it feminist in its

focus, method, and participants.

The first Feminist Dialogues (FD) were heldat the 2004 World Social Forum in Bombay, India

(http://feministdialogue.isiswomen.org). Given

the contentious debates within women’s move-

ments and the debates within academic feminist

discourses around the term feminist, their self-identification as ‘‘feminist’’ is remarkable. I think

this identification reflects two realities. (1) All thenetworks that coordinated the FD – Development

Alternatives with Women For a New Era

(DAWN), Women’s International Coalition for

Economic Justice (WICEJ), Articulacio n Femin-ista Marcosur (AFM), National Network of

Women’s Autonomous Groups (NNWAG),

African Women’s Development and Communi-

cation Network (FEMNET), INFORM-Sri Lan-

ka, and Isis International-Manila – come fromurban, autonomous tendencies in their respective

countries, which are more likely to identify asfeminists; and (2) the rise of religious fundament-

alisms, their cooptation of the human rights

framework, and the participation of a large

number of women in those movements has

necessitated differentiating feminists, committedto gender equality, from other women’s move-

ments. So even as the FD emphasised the variety

of feminisms and the diversity of women’sexperiences in particular local/global contexts,

they clearly articulated their feminist identity.The FD focused on four themes: women’s

human rights (tensions at the intersection of globalisation and fundamentalism); reclaiming

women’s bodies (the struggle for reproductive

rights); challenging sexual borders and frontiers

(affirming sexual rights); and beyond the local-

global divide (resistances in current geopolitics)(Santiago 2004). The FD were organised auton-

omously from the WSF; they met a couple of days before the WSF, and were a fairly

closed gathering restricted to feminists from

the 7 networks. According to the CoordinatingGroup (CG) of the FD and participants who

were present at the 2005 FD, the 2004 FD inMumbai were a ‘‘disaster’’ as the two day

workshops were not well organised, facilitators

were identified at the last minute and hence were

not clear about their role, and logistics and the

facilities were neither comfortable nor handicap

accessible. But their efforts to change the WSF,however, succeeded. The 2004 WSF in India was

vastly different from its predecessors in Brazil.

Feminists from India were on the International


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Organising Committee, major plenaries all hadequal numbers of men and women participants,

and gender was integrated in most of the

workshops and most importantly issues of

caste/race and fundamentalism were added as

important aspects of global justice.Despite the limitations of the 2004 FD, the

CG decided to meet again in 2005 in Brazilwhere the WSF would be held. I participated in

the second FD as a facilitator. This time the

coordinating group had expanded to 18 net-

works from the initial seven and participationwas through an open application process. The

CG had raised money to bring women from

countries that could not afford to send them to

Brazil. About 230 women gathered for a 3-day

workshop that was run more or less like anacademic event. Not only were most women at

the FD middle-class and educated, there werealso regional imbalances. Both in the CG and

among the participants, women from Latin

America and Asia were a majority. Part of this

reflects the location – 80% of the 155,000

participants at the 2005 WSF were Brazilians – and part of it reflects the abilities of women to

mobilise funds.

A concept paper had been circulated aheadof time to set the framework for discussions. It

outlined a very complex, feminist analysis of thecontemporary context within which feminist

struggles are taking place around the worldand the need to focus on the body as an

important political site.

We would like the feminist dialogue to interrogate the

body, recover its complexities, and examine the ways in

which we can regain control over our bodies as a strategic

element of our collective agency and our vision of

alternatives. This is in relation to the inter-linkages of the

multiple oppressions arising from the consolidated and yet

autonomous forces of: neo-liberal globalisation, war,

conflict, militarism and militarisation, fundamentalisms’’

(FD 2005: 1–2).

The FD were organised to facilitate collec-tive reflection and used buzz groups, small group

workshops, and plenaries to facilitate participa-

tion. Translation remained a key impediment to

interaction. While there were simultaneous

translations in English, Spanish, Portuguese,and French for the plenaries, the group discus-

sions were based on language groups and thus

undermined the ability of those who spoke only

one language to interact with women fromregions who were not bilingual.

The language that framed the questions for

discussion reflected a mix of academic and

activist agendas. The small group workshops

focused on two questions: ‘‘the particular andgeneral dilemmas of the feminist movements and

the new strategies that can be developed inrelation to us and to other movements, including

the World Social Forum’’. Yet, it seemed that

the CG did not want to be seen as developing a

call for action and so we were instructed not tocome up with specific actions or plans of actions

but to think of strategies as a vision or a

framework. This tension between reflection

and strategising was evident throughout the

three days as women from different parts camewith different expectations, with different ex-

periences of organising, and different agendas.So while all the plenary speakers, some of whom

were members of the CG while others were

facilitators and academics like Maxine

Molyneux and Maria Betania, emphasised the

need to revive and revitalise the feminist move-ment as a political project, the CG did not want

to make any specific call to action. Partly, this

reflected their position: that local situations areso varied that a unified call did not make sense;

that there are a diversity of feminist perspectives,many not in the room; and the FD were not a

space for specific strategies. To avoid makingclaims on behalf of women in general, they

seemed unwilling to make claims even on behalf

of the FD. As a result, at the end of the FD

despite enriching discussions and their intention

to think of new strategies, there were nostrategies, general or specific, to work with other

movements or the WSF. As one facilitator fromParaguay noted ‘‘it is a privileged space for

privileged feminists’’.

There was a clear division in the CGbetween those who saw it as a space for reflection

and dialogue and those who saw it as a place toreinvigorate the feminist political project which

they felt had been undermined and fragmented

with the onslaught of globalisation, fundament-

alisms, and militarism post 9/11. Those who saw

it as a space for reflection focused on process

issues and tried to make the dialogue as openand participatory as possible. For example,

there were daily evaluation sessions; when

language-based workshops seemed too regional

326 Manisha Desai

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with not enough transnational discussion, theyreorganised the groups. But the focus on process

undermined outcome. Those who wanted it to be

more political did not succeed in reframing the

FD. Another divide revolved around the rela-

tionship of FD to the WSF. Some CG memberssaw it as an autonomous space, even though it

meets at around the time of the WSF, whileothers saw the main role of the FD as not only

influencing the WSF but also linking with other

global justice movements. Despite such differ-

ences, at the closing plenary, the CG membershoped that there would be another FD meeting

in 2007 when the WSF convenes again in Africa

and that during the year in between there would

be multiple feminist dialogues like the multiple

local and regional social forums.One of the sessions that the FD had organised

at the WSF in India and that was continued at theWSF in Brazil this year was an inter-movement

dialogue between the feminist, gay, lesbian, and

transgender, labour, and dalit/anti-racism move-

ment. The inter-movement dialogue at the WSF

was an example of taking intersectional politicsseriously. Its aim was to enable each movement to

re-conceptualise its vision in relation to those of

other movements. A representative from eachmovement had a chance to reflect on the ways in

which they had succeeded and failed in addressingthe issues of the other three movements. Given the

setting, all the representatives spoke of buildingalliances but again none of them engaged in the

questions of the dialogue very concretely. There

was no effort to think through ongoing coalition

building for redistributive efforts at local or

regional levels. The participants and most of thepanellists were women. Here were feminists who

had become autonomous from parties and othermovements and were now seeking to build

alliances based on a position of strength and a

well-developed feminist perspective. But if thissession was an indicator of coalition politics, it did

not seem very promising. Coalition politics forsocial movements has become the strategic

equivalent of micro-credit in development: a

panacea. But as the inter-movement session at

WSF in 2005 showed, movements have not done

the serious work of rearticulating their visions to

integrate other visions; reorganising their move-ments to include others; and rethinking strategies

to address issues of all inequalities, class, race,

gender, and sexuality, among others.

In addition to sessions organised by the FDat the 2005 WSF in Brazil, other gender and

feminists sessions were organised by INGOs, such

as AWID, WEDO, WIDE, CWGL, Latin Amer-

ican feminist organisations, academics, and most

visibly the World March of Women. The 2005WSF carried over the major issues from the WSF

in India but was organised differently. Work-shops, presentations, and meetings were orga-

nised into 11 themes, which met in 11 sites, with a

huge site in the middle for a youth camp where

35,000 young activists lived in camps and met forsessions to discuss various issues. It was in the

youth camp that there were incidences of sexual

harassment and young women did not let them go

unnoticed. They responded with a march and a

big public discussion about them. The womenwho led the protest were mostly from the World

March of Women. While there were manysessions related to gender and feminist issues at

the WSF, some of the major plenaries were male

dominated despite the presence of women on the

organising committee of the WSF. And as is often

the case, sessions dealing with gender issues weredominated by women, as presenters and partici-

pants. But it was heartening to see young

feminists, both men and women, most of whomwere not even aware of the Feminist Dialogues

that had taken place a couple of days previously.As the two sites above show, a new

geography of feminist politics is emerging.Feminist movements have to be local and global

and to frame issues that can speak to a global

audience. As the example of the FD and the

WSF shows, they also need to build bridges

across specific movements. But the terrain of transnational activism, given its reliance on

information technology and expert knowledge,cross-border travel and dialogic gatherings,

privileges educated middle class activists who

are able to engender discursive changes to im-plement which there are few resources and even

less political will in the era of neo-liberalism,fundamentalism, and increased militarism.

Transnational feminism and

feminist politics

One of the main contributions of feminist

politics has been to re-conceptualise politics in


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several ways: to expand the terrain of thepolitical from public to ‘‘private’’ and from

productive to both productive and reproductive

issues; to emphasise multiple sites of resistance

and activism; and to move away from orthodox

notions of primary contradiction and revolu-tionary strategies to recognise multiple contra-

dictions and heterodox methods and means.Thus the issue of power is understood in terms

both of structural power of the state and the

capitalist economy and of the discursive power

of micro-politics (Piper & Uhlin 2004).But as I show above, transnational feminist

movements have primarily succeeded at the level

of discursive power. They have operated on the

notion of discursive representation rather than

political representation. Discursive representa-tion has sought to be inclusive, open, and self-

reflexive. Such an emphasis is in part a reflectionof feminists’ ability to harness communicative

rather than conventional power. Discourses

have an empowering function and are an

important site of resistance. But feminist dis-

courses have not become hegemonic, theyremain an alternative. And when discourses

such as gender mainstreaming and women’s

human rights are taken up by states andinternational agencies they tend to become

depoliticised and have little impact on actualpolicy changes.

As Pearson (2004) and Rai (2004) note,

transnational feminists have actively engaged the

institutions of global governance and made

important contributions to policy changes, fromgender mainstreaming to gender budgets, gender

codes of ethics to micro-credit, the Tobin andMaria Taxes,4 yet there is growing gender

inequality. Pearson (2004) argues that in part this

is a result of conflating academic feminist analysis

with feminist politics: while analysis is needed tounder-gird political action it is not political action

by itself. Simon-Kumar (2004) argues that under

neo-liberalism the state has become the market

with the result that women’s emancipation

depends on negotiating with the state and themarket in more complex ways. Thus a neo-liberal

moment calls for a neo-radical feminist politicsthat is based on intersectional analysis and

democratic practices but devises strategies with

other mass movements – such as unions in the

informal sector as well as export processing zones

that can hold corporations accountable, landredistribution and challenging agribusiness to

sustainable land use, fair trade economic alter-

natives, political quotas for women – that canredistribute resources and emancipate women.

Notes

nI wish to thank Valentine

Moghadam and Gale

Summerfield for their comments

on the paper.1. The CSW succeeded in

adopting six new resolutions on

gender mainstreaming in national

policies and programs; the

possible appointment of a special

rapporteur on laws that

discriminate against women;

trafficking; integrating a gender

perspective in post-disaster relief,

particularly in the aftermath of

the Indian Ocean tsunami

disaster; indigenous women; and

women’s economic advancement.

It also adopted four traditionaltexts on: women, the girl child and

HIV/AIDS; the International

Research and Training Institute

for the Advancement of Women

(INSTRAW); the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan;

and the situation of and assistance

to Palestinian women.

2. I use the term feminist to refer

to movements that challenge the

gendered division of labour in all

social institutions and relations

and seek women’s equality in the

economic, social, political, and

cultural realms.

3. Feminist scholars such as

Rupp (1998), Moghadam (2005),

Naples & Desai (2002) haveemphasised that transnational

activism is not new to contemp-

orary globalisation but has been

present in the women’s movement

since the mid–late nineteenthcenturies when women came

together across borders around

abolition of slavery, suffrage, anti-

colonialism, and labour

rights.

4. Pearson (2004) proposed this

tax, to be levied by national

governments on exporters in

proportion to the number of

women in the export zones, and to

be used specifically for gender

equity for women workers, not

just in the export zones but also

women in the economy as a

whole.

328 Manisha Desai

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