Asian women’s studies after three decades: Institutional success, epistemic limitations, and the imperative of transnational solidarity

This article examines the three-decade project of Asian Women’s Studies (AWS), an institutional and epistemic endeavor that, while successfully challenging Western-centric feminism, inadvertently reproduced center–periphery dynamics. Drawing on archival research, interviews with AWS pioneers, and a systematic analysis of 414 articles from the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies (AJWS) between 2001 and 2021, this study explores AWS’s central paradox: efforts to decenter the West inadvertently created new regional hierarchies. The analysis reveals patterns including minimal personnel overlap (2.7%) between AJWS authors and Asian Association of Women’s Studies (AAWS) members, concentration in East Asia (58.5%, declining to 44.93% by 2022-2025) with South Korea and China representing over 40% of publications, and divergence between AAWS congresses addressing contemporary crises and AJWS publications analyzing structural issues through nationally bounded frameworks. This concentration corresponds with the journal's scholarship where only 9.6% engaged transnational perspectives, with limited engagement of critical theories (2.4% intersectional, 1.4% postcolonial, 0% decolonial), suggesting methodological nationalism that treats colonial nation-state borders as natural analytical containers. The article argues that confronting these internal hierarchies requires concrete institutional reforms–open-access publishing, multilingual platforms, rotating institutional centers–alongside methodological innovations enabling South-South solidarity networks capable of addressing transnational systems affecting Asian women.