Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice

The book Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice is a volume edited by Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer that aims to demonstrate the importance of transnational feminist theory in today’s political climate for challenging neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms. The editors argue in their introduction that transnational feminism complements the theoretical work within intersectional feminist and decolonial feminist frameworks, even though these three theoretical approaches are often portrayed as in opposition to one another. It is transnational feminist practices of solidarity based on differences versus similarities that allow for collaborations across geographical, social, and ideological boundaries. The empirical chapters are broken down into five sections: Provocations, Scale, Interrogating Corporate Power, Intractable Dilemmas, and Nationalisms and Plurinationalisms. These subsections highlight the role that transnational feminism can play in challenging current systems of globalization. The first section, ‘‘Provocations,’’ contains Tambe and Thayer’s introduction to the volume, which examines the advantages of taking a transnational feminist perspective for creating transnational solidarities built on acknowledging differences across various boundaries. In addition, Tambe and Thayer challenge the divisions that scholars have often created between transnational feminism and intersectional and decolonial feminisms by arguing that all three theoretical frameworks aim to challenge systems of oppression such as settler colonialism, neoliberal globalization, and capitalism. Jennifer C. Nash’s chapter focuses on the relationships between how people conceive of transnational versus intersectional feminisms by examining women’s studies job advertisements within the academic job market. Nash finds that intersectionality serves as a lens within job advertisements while transnationalism serves as an area of intellectual inquiry, typically focused on non-U.S. populations. Inderpal Grewal’s chapter ‘‘Rethinking Patriarchy and Corruption’’ shows how to conduct comparative work between the global North and South without viewing them as separate, bounded entities and denying the linkages and connections between nations and empires. The second section, ‘‘Scale,’’ recasts the conceptual idea of scale in the analysis of social movements. Srila Roy explores the role of scale in understanding the transnational protest assemblage that developed in response to sexual violence and rape in India during 2012 in the chapter ‘‘Transnational Feminism and the Politics of Scale: The 2012 Antirape Protests in Delhi.’’ The chapter reminds us that women’s movements have always been both national and global, constituted through interconnected histories of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. Carmen Dı́az Alba’s chapter ‘‘Transnational Shifts: The World March of Women in Mexico’’ examines how scale and space explain the changing dynamics of the social movement of the World March of Women. This chapter highlights the challenges of maintaining interscalar activism over time. The final chapter in the scale subsection, Rafael de la Dehesa’s ‘‘Network Ecologies and the Feminist Politics of ‘Mass Sterilization’ in Brazil,’’ uses the history of mass sterilization in Brazil to introduce the theoretical concept of network ecology. Network ecology expands the analytic lens of transnational feminist ideas regarding the transnational circulation of ideas, knowledge, sources, and the like by including the dynamics among multiple stakeholders engaged in debates. The third section engages with the topic of interrogating corporate power through critiquing empirical examples of corporate attempts to construct various forms of gendered subjectivities. Laura L. Lovett examines the transnational circulation of children’s toys in the chapter ‘‘Transnational Childhoods: Linking Global Production, Local Consumption, and Feminist Resistance’’ to show ways in which the Reviews 91