Rethinking Gender from the South

518 Feminist Studies 40, no. 3. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Raewyn Connell Rethinking Gender from the South Dilemmas of Feminism Going Global From the time of the first UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City in 1975, the hegemony of the global North in feminism was contested. That historical moment, as Chilla Bulbeck explained in One World Women’s Movement, posed the questions of global solidarity and global inequality at the same time, launching a debate in which ambiguities in the global project of feminism quickly became evident.1 The debate has continued, though on changing terms. It’s now a familiar story. Within the North, Black feminists challenged the universal­ ized models of women’s oppression put forward by White radical and liberal feminist thinkers in the 1970s. The challenge was reinforced by the reception of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in the United States, by the rise of deconstructionist feminism and queer theory in the following years, and by the growing popularity of Kimberlé Crenshaw ’s concept of “intersectionality.” Even the numerical expansion of women’s and gender studies programs played a part, creating a more socially diverse audience for feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most important change in the North, in terms of global feminism, was the work of a generation of expatriate scholars, from Gayatri Spivak to Deniz Kandiyoti, who created a new conceptual space 1. Chilla Bulbeck, One World Women’s Movement (London: Pluto Press, 1988). Raewyn Connell 519 in the metropole’s universities. This new space was epitomized by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s famous essay “Under Western Eyes” and the collection Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism in which it finally appeared. Mohanty and her colleagues identified the colonial gaze in Northern gender scholarship and sharply challenged the stereotypes of “third-world women” in Northern feminist thought.2 Their critique has been heard. In the last twenty years it has become normal for feminist scholarship in the United States and Europe to acknowledge global context and global difference. This is plainly seen in textbooks. To take one example, the valuable US reader Gender through the Prism of Difference includes items from Bangladesh, Mexico, Spain, Guatemala, indigenous North America, and a good deal about migrat­ ion and migrants.3 Thanks to scholars such as Mohanty, Kandiyoti and Spivak, and the rise of Black and Latina feminism, postcolonial feminism has become a fixture in North American curricula and, more recently, in Europe.4 Courses on gender now emphasize, rather than elide, diversity. A shift has occurred in feminist research as well as teaching. Northern journals (including Feminist Studies) make a point of including contributions from around the world and publish special issues on feminism in the Arab world, India, Africa, or Latin America. Global surveys of knowledge have become a definite genre of gender studies. Witness Women’s Activism and Globalization, Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, and Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives, all published in the North, and all making efforts to think at a global or regional level and include material from the global South.5 Increasingly, 2. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarhip and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 3. Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Michael A. Messner, eds., Gender through the Prism of Difference, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000). 4. See, for example, Julia Reuter and Paula-Irene Villa, eds., Postkoloniale Soziologie : Empirische Befunde, theoretische Anschlüsse, Politische Intervention Postcolonial sociology: empirical findings, theoretical integrations, political intervention (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009). 5. Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai, eds., Women’s Activism and Globalization : Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002); Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Raewyn Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005); Christine 520 Raewyn Connell globalization has become an object of knowledge within gender studies. In the journals, the number of papers recorded in the Web of Knowledge database whose titles or abstracts combined the term “globalization” with a gender term rose tenfold between the early 1990s...