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research-article2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918817525feminist reviewAnneeth Kaur Hundle, Ioana Szeman and Joanna Pares Hoare

introduction

Feminist Review

what is the transnational Issue 121, 3­–8

© 2019 The Author(s)
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in transnational feminist sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0141778918817525
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918817525
www.feministreview.com

research?

Anneeth Kaur Hundle

Ioana Szeman
Joanna Pares Hoare

The focus on the transnational in feminist research aims to decentre Western epistemologies, shaking the foundation
of the sometimes taken-for-granted framework of Western—and specifically UK, US or European-focused—feminist
research in the English language; it aims to disrupt the embedded hegemonies of nationalist ideologies, in all their
heteropatriarchal connotations. The transnational as a qualifier for feminist research methods and methodologies
specifically aims to continue the project of transnational feminism, understood as a feminist paradigm and plural
field of feminist thought, research and practice that can manifest as scholarly, intellectual and activist projects.
Transnational feminisms, as activism and scholarship, have largely been developed and influenced by the work of
self-identified women-of-colour feminists located in the Global North and postcolonial scholars or ‘Third World
feminists’ located both in the North and South. While situated knowledges and feminist methods and methodologies
that engage with the process of knowledge production from a critical and intersectional perspective represent ongoing
explorations in Feminist Review, the focus on feminist methodologies from/with a transnational angle has added, we
believe, a special urgency to this themed issue.

Feminist epistemologies are co-constitutive of feminist methodologies and praxis. Transnational feminisms extend
postcolonial feminist criticism to focus on the situations of women in multiple geographic contexts in feminist theories
and activist practice, through the decentring of both national and imperialist/neocolonial power structures (Mohanty,
Russo and Torres, 1991; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Alexander and Mohanty, 1997). They also integrate insights from the
post-structural and postmodern turns to interrogate binaries of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, the ‘West’ and ‘non-
West’, and emphasise the uneven ways in which power and resistances have unfolded globally (Grewal and Kaplan,
1994). To counter an emptying out of the ‘transnational’ into a capitalist mode of exchange, intersectional approaches
work to situate women’s lives and possibilities in relation to critiques of modernity, imperialism, colonialism,
nationalism and global capitalism. Scholars and activists, as well as others working within transnational feminist
paradigms, continue to refine critical responses to Western white, imperial and liberal feminist hegemonies. They do
so through the interrogation of what historically have been presented as liberatory frameworks such as: benevolent
modern empires, imperialisms, militarisation, (neo)liberal capitalism, global and international feminisms, women in
development (and later iterations of this concept) and global governance feminism paradigms, and nationalist
religious fundamentalisms, among others. These interrogations function as a mode of organising both knowledge and
power in feminist-orientated projects.
4    121  what is the transnational in transnational feminist research?

As M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2010) remind us, the transnational, when used with its critical
edge in feminist research, opens up the space for understanding intersectional perspectives and women’s lives in
different contexts and geopolitical locations, with a focus on both similarities and differences. These kinds of
transnational feminist endeavours seek to take into account and assess contradictions and complications with an
understanding of ‘scattered hegemonies’, to use Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s (1994) term, in a transnational
context. Grewal and Kaplan remind us that:

We need to articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal
nationalisms, ‘authentic’ forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple
levels … transnational feminist practices require this kind of comparative work rather than the relativistic linking of
‘differences’ undertaken by proponents of ‘global feminism’; that is, to compare multiple, overlapping, and discrete
oppressions rather than to construct a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified theory of gender. (ibid., p. 18)

Transnational feminist research, therefore, is a radical framework with an ability to speak to connections and
inequalities between the Global North and South; to confront histories and contemporary practices of imperialism,
colonialism and nationalism and their effects on women, gender and sexuality issues; and to displace Eurocentric and
liberal feminist theories and ideologies.

self-reflexivity and the politics of location: many voices, multiple

locations
As we write this introduction, we are reminded that editing represents one of ‘the everyday collaborative spaces and
tools through which academics create knowledges and learn to speak to various communities inside and outside of
academia’ (Nagar and Lock Swarr, 2010, p. 4). Often these collaborative spaces are erased and devalued in Western
academic contexts, where the focus on individual outputs dominates.

Collaboration was essential to the emergence of this issue of Feminist Review. The idea for this issue emerged from a
panel organised by Anneeth Kaur Hundle on transnational feminist anthropological research at the American
Anthropological Association meetings in Denver, Colorado in 2015. While the panel focused specifically on transnational
feminist methodologies in the discipline of anthropology, the insights gleaned from the session and conversations
after the conference compelled the participants, who were all feminist anthropologists, colleagues and friends, to
consider questions of methodology in transnational feminist research in general. Some participants had had some
exposure to feminist methodological texts, sources and handbooks that focus on research practice and activism
(Craven and Davis, 2013, 2016; Hesse-Biber, ed., 2014), specifically in relation to anthropology and ethnographic
research, and many had some training in research methodologies in general. However, they did not always have
adequate time, energy or sources to reflect more deeply on the process of research or the development of transnational
feminist frameworks and methodologies in the context of research.

The subsequent call for papers that we issued at Feminist Review was addressed to feminist scholars and activists
across disciplines, and sought to build on earlier issues of Feminist Review, in particular Issue 115 on ‘Methods’
(Gunaratnam, Hamilton and Brah, eds., 2017), in exploring feminist research methods from an intersectional
perspective, the researchers’ positionalities, ethics and the entanglement of feminist methodologies and
epistemologies. We sought contributions from scholars and activists located internationally, with experiences working
in universities in the Global North and South, across disciplines, and who are critically engaging with transnational
feminist frameworks to shape their feminist practices, research projects, research questions, research design and
their methodological approaches. We asked authors to reflect on the process of conducting transnational feminist
research and on the kinds of methods, research material and methodological approaches that were central to their
transnational feminist approach. We asked scholars to think about how transnational feminist research and its
methodologies allow researchers to ‘get the question right’ in the first place.
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Ioana Szeman and Joanna Pares Hoare    121  5

We were especially interested in questions of positionality, location and ‘situated knowledges’; the role of reflexivity
in the process of conducting transnational feminist research; the efforts required to work against the grain of the
existing forms of canonical scholarship or heteropatriarchal nationalisms in research practice and scholarship; and
other kinds of insights, concepts and conclusions that emerged out of the process of developing transnational feminist
methodologies and analyses in the course of research.

The researcher’s positionality, as a tenet of feminist methodologies, is even more salient when working transnationally
or adopting a transnational lens. The researcher’s social location vis-à-vis the subjects of feminist research raises
questions relating to mobility, access and privilege, which are sometimes veiled by a transnational focus. This aspect
may help unpack the privilege that is often attached to transnational mobility, although as Purvi Mehta’s article in
this issue demonstrates, this privilege can be disrupted by transnational feminist activism practised ‘from below’: in
her article, Mehta writes of how Dalit feminists sought solidarity and similarity with women from other parts of Asia
beyond the nation, as they have been excluded from a caste-based society.

The contributions in this special issue make feminist interventions in disciplines as varied as anthropology, cultural
studies, history, development studies and translation studies. The authors work or have worked on different
continents—Europe, North America, Africa and East Asia—and their research journeys have in most cases involved
travelling to other continents or countries (India, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, the Netherlands, Sweden, USA,
Japan). In the case of the article ‘Sister Outsider and Audre Lorde in the Netherlands: on transnational queer feminisms
and archival methodological practices’, the researcher’s journey to archives in the Netherlands and the USA highlights
the erasures of Black lesbian feminists from the archive in the Netherlands and recounts the productive transnational
encounter between US and Dutch Black lesbian feminists in the 1980s, an encounter that was transnational in the
activists’ positioning against the heteropatriarchal nation state and their erasure from it. In her intimate and
compelling exploration of these ‘fragmented archives’, Chandra Frank offers stories of kinship, intimacy and loss in
relation to transnational queer feminist encounters and exchanges, but also reveals important claims about the
nature of archival research methodology. Through a methodology rooted in several crucial practices, ‘orientation’
(Ahmed, 2006a, 2006b), ‘listening’ (Campt, 2017) and ‘intervention’ (Appadurai, 2003), Frank reclaims the political
solidarity forged between the Sister Outsider collective and Audre Lorde.

In addition, Audre Lorde’s legacy—and presence—as a transnational ‘cultural worker’ is picked up in two of our themed
book reviews. Carolina Topini reviews Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck’s Audre Lorde: Transnational Legacies (2015),
and we also include a review by Ricky Frawley of Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race
(2016). Gloria Wekker was one of the members of ‘Sister Outsider’ and hosted Audre Lorde in Amsterdam.

Several articles seek to locate feminisms in activist communities from a transnational perspective and engage with
feminist activists from minority ethnic backgrounds, in places as varied as Uganda, Japan, India and the Netherlands.
Purvi Mehta’s article ‘Dalit feminism in Tokyo: analogy and affiliation in transnational Dalit activism’ provides an
incursion into the history of Dalit activism and combines ethnographic interviewing and archival research. Mehta
explores the efforts of former devadasi Dalit women and Dalit activists to forge commonalities between the experiences
and struggles of Indian devadasis (a form of caste- and temple-based prostitution) and ‘military comfort women’ in
Japan’s former colonies who were sexually exploited during World War II. By focusing specifically on the testimonies and
claims of two Dalit activists who seek transnational allies in their struggle for caste emancipation in the local-regional
context of India, Mehta examines the ways in which ‘analogy’ and ‘affiliation’, as well as the tensions they may provoke,
become key concepts in transnational feminist activist practice and in transnational feminist frameworks more broadly.
Likewise, in her Open Space piece focusing on transnational feminist translation practices, ‘English hegemony, Anglo
privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis in transnational feminist research’, Deborah Lunny touches
on Japan-based activists’ desire to learn from and ‘join in struggle’ with activists in other parts of Asia, in recognition
of the role of Japanese women in Japan’s aggression as a colonial power in other Asian countries.
6    121  what is the transnational in transnational feminist research?

Anneeth Kaur Hundle’s article, ‘Postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence and transnational feminist
research in contemporary Uganda’, grounded in fieldwork, archival and media research in Uganda, focuses on a high-
profile case of domestic violence and femicide of a middle-class Punjabi housewife in Kampala, Uganda in 1998. She
examines the responses and interpretations of indigenous urban publics, women’s rights activists and the racialised
‘Asian community’ to the event, as well as the kinds of tensions and moments of unity that emerged in the immediate
aftermath of cross-racial feminist organising. Hundle ultimately makes a case for the need to develop transnational
feminist frameworks from and within Uganda and the Global South by utilising the feminist concept of ‘postcolonial
patriarchal nativism’ to understand Indian migrant women’s experiences in Uganda after the 1972 Asian expulsion; by
using relational and intersectional approaches across racially and communally compartmentalised ‘African’ and ‘Asian’
populations; and by working past the epistemological occlusions of predominant global and nationalist feminist
frameworks in Uganda. She also cautions against the urge to romanticise cross-racial African-Asian solidarities in
feminist practice in Africa and the Global South, and argues the importance of paying close attention to the frictions
and inequalities among different groups of women engaged in feminist practice and consciousness-building.

Deborah Lunny’s ‘English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis in
transnational feminisms research’ is based on her long-term experience of working with feminist NGOs in Japan and
examines the politics, practices and labour of transnational feminist activism and knowledge-making through the
work of ‘reading, interpreting, summarising, translating and editing’ feminist texts. Lunny reflects on her
experiences working with feminist groups in Japan and raises key lessons learned about the role of English language
hegemony and ‘Anglo privilege’ in the production and articulation of transnational feminist knowledge-making.

interdisciplinary and geopolitical orientations: critiques and absences

Alongside the intellectually and politically generative nature of transnational feminist studies, the field is also
continually subject to interrogation and contestation. Indeed, tracing the codification and institutionalisation of
transnational feminism is an important project, as the approach is always subject to co-optation and to the celebration
of forces of globalisation. Thus, these critiques suggest that transnational feminist frameworks may operate
hegemonically from the same imperialist networks they seek to critique, and even work to shore up the hegemony of
neo-liberalism and other liberal political projects (see Nagar and Lock Swarr, 2010; Fernandes, 2013; Roy, 2017).

As the authors of ‘From the academy to the boardroom: methodological challenges and insights on transnational
business feminism’ remind us, the transnational—as related to globalisation, NGOs, global development institutions
and multinational transnational corporations—can be applied to capital accumulation and lead to the slow and
creeping co-optation of gender equality and women’s empowerment goals by corporate actors as ‘smart economics’
(see World Bank, 2006; Wilson, 2015). Coined by Adrienne Roberts (2015), transnational business feminism (TBF) is an
analytical framework that critically assesses the interconnected worlds of corporations, development, gender
equality and women’s empowerment to reveal these processes of co-optation and the way that ‘transnational’ and
‘gender’ can become terms emptied of any radical potential in the context of corporate capitalism. In ‘From the
academy to the boardroom’, Katherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill argue that important lessons can be
learnt from the ‘blockages, hostile relations and miscommunications’ that they encountered while attempting to
access information and materials about gender empowerment projects instigated by corporate actors, as well as from
the kinds of power dynamics and inequities that manifest within development policies that shape women’s experiences
in the Global South. Significantly, they provide us with an understanding of the complexities and challenges that are
embedded in transnational feminist research in relation to ‘transnational business feminism’, helping us to expand
the scope of transnational feminist paradigms and research problems.

Many of the transnational mappings outlined in these articles follow a postcolonial trajectory, and a North–South axis of
geopolitical orientation. In this process, however, other axes, such as East–West, become less salient. As Deborah Lunny’s
Open Space contribution demonstrates, Anglo privilege has a great influence on the politics of citation in feminist
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Ioana Szeman and Joanna Pares Hoare    121  7

scholarship, on who counts as knowledge producer versus informant and/or activist. ‘The postsocialist “missing other” of
transnational feminism?’ Open Space piece highlights the absence from transnational feminisms of feminist scholars and
activists from the postsocialist space. Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Redi Koobak discuss the issues
that emerged out of a conference on the dialogue between postcolonial and postsocialist feminisms in relation to
transnational feminist frameworks, identifying points of tension between the two paradigms. They focus on three issues:
the ‘discordant timelines’ of postcolonial and postsocialist feminisms; tensions surrounding questions of race, positionality
and epistemology; and methodological intersections and differences across these fields of feminist theorisation. In the
end, their piece provocatively interrogates the assumed relationships between transnational feminist research and
postcolonial feminisms, especially when wrought in relief against the postsocialist feminist tradition. The book reviewed by
Kirisitina Sailiata, Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, an anthology edited by Joanne
Barker (2017), similarly seeks to challenge and disrupt dominant frames of epistemology.

The postsocialist space remains under-theorised in transnational feminist encounters, an aspect that ‘The
postsocialist missing other of transnational feminism?’ challenges and grapples with (also see Suchland, 2011), as
scholars and activists from postsocialist societies confront and seek to decolonise Anglo(phone) privilege in relation
to the production of knowledge and theories relating to gender and sexuality. At the same time, despite the growing
expansion of the EU in East Central Europe, feminist scholars continue to operate within the constraints of national
frameworks. Transnational centres of feminist thinking in the postsocialist space within and beyond Europe, such as
Central European University’s (CEU) Department of Gender Studies and the Center for Critical Gender Studies at the
American University of Central Asia, operate in hostile environments where political and public rhetoric questions the
very validity of ‘gender’ as a concept. Recent developments in the region, including the forced closure of gender
studies and migration studies departments in Hungary (including at the CEU) are extremely worrying and remind us
that knowledge is power and those in power know it, as dictatorships in the region have demonstrated in previous
decades when the social sciences were virtually eradicated as viable disciplines.

Generative critiques like those included in this issue suggest that the influence and currency of transnational feminist
frameworks on feminist research and scholarship across different disciplines and in relation to feminist activism have
been, and continue to be, considerable. Today, with heteropatriarchal nationalisms on the ascendancy (and not just
in the postsocialist space1), the critical engagement of transnational feminist frameworks—political as well as
theoretical and methodological—in order to ‘get the question right’ seems more urgent than ever.

author biographies
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California, Irvine, where she is affiliated with the Department of Global and International Studies and the
Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is currently a visiting professor at the Center for African Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, where she is writing her book manuscript, Unsettling Citizenship: African Asian Lives and
the Politics of Racialized Insecurity in Transnational Uganda, an ethnographic exploration of liberal and non-liberal
African-Asian citizenship formations in Uganda. Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology
at University of California, Merced and a Research Associate at Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University
in Kampala, Uganda where she taught a graduate seminar on Gender and Feminist Theory in African Studies.

Ioana Szeman is Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. Her
book Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018) is
based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with urban Roma. Ioana’s articles have appeared in books and journals,
including Theatre Research International, New Theatre Quarterly, TDR and Performance Research; her latest publication
‘“Black and white are one”: anti-amalgamation laws, Roma slaves and the Romanian nation on the mid-nineteenth

1 See Issue 119 of Feminist Review on ‘Gender, violence and the neoliberal state in India’ (Purewal et al., 2018).
8    121  what is the transnational in transnational feminist research?

century Moldavian stage’, can be found in the collection Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s
Most Mutable Book edited by Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). She
is a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective.
Joanna Pares Hoare is an independent scholar and a member of the Feminist Review Collective. Joanna has a PhD
in Development Studies (SOAS, 2014); her PhD research examined gender, activism and civil society in the context
of international development intervention in Kyrgyzstan, and she maintains an ongoing interest in these issues
in Kyrgyzstan and the wider postsocialist space. Other areas of research interest include sexual and reproductive
rights, gender-based violence, the influence of Russia-influenced ‘traditional values’ rhetoric on local activism and
civil society, and activism for LGBT rights. Joanna has published in Nationalities and has a chapter on ‘Narratives of
exclusion: observations on a youth-led LGBT rights group in Kyrgyzstan’ in the recently published edited anthology
Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

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