Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives.

What most contemporary theorists know as 'gender theory' has its roots in feminist theory, and that, in turn, arises from a 'disobedient epistemology' -from looking at phenomena through lenses that do not permit one to see only expected or conventional patterns of meaning.Feminist epistemology and theory is one such divergent view of reality in its focus on the disregarded categories of women and gender.There is a long and honourable tradition of feminist thinking and theorising which refuses to see society and the world through patriarchal eyes, and which interrogates relations of gender and power in society, in the academy and in discourse.This tradition is represented in Carole McCann and Seung-kyung Kim's Feminist theory reader: Local and global perspectives.The project of editing a book called Feminist theory reader evokes questions of selection.So, for example, one editor may feel strongly about including Mary Wollstonecraft's views in A vindication of the rights of women, while another may feel that Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex is the founding text that cannot be ignored.Obviously, though, it is impossible to include all the texts that have contributed to what we know as feminist theory, scholarship and epistemology.In an attempt to address this, the editors of the third edition of the Feminist theory reader have adopted the concepts of 'local' and 'global' as their organising principles.The central idea is to arrange the book around notions of theorising 'the local', that is, the phenomena that are closest to the researcher, and the 'global', namely those that are more distant.However, these categories are not self-evident, and some context is required.As we work towards decolonialising knowledge, we must also take into account ideas of the 'local' and 'global'.All too often, local: global has been posed as a binary opposition, where 'local' means underdeveloped, Third World and of the South, while 'global' means techno-savvy, First World and of the North.But as an epistemology of disobedience, feminist theory, which owes a great deal to Derridean deconstruction, challenges this hierarchical opposition as well as those that are imbricated with gender meanings.In the hands of theorists such as the Combahee River Collective (whose foremost exponent is Barbara Smith), 'local' means not only North American, black and feminist, but also lesbian, and speaks to the struggles of all black lesbian feminists.The collective's manifesto, which appears in the Reader, thus subverts and notions of 'local' as 'central' or as 'limited'.In these, and other pieces, the notion that feminism is 'only local' or 'only global' is overthrown, and the power interests underpinning the very terms are laid bare and subverted.