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Area studies, transnationalism, and the feminist production of knowledge

Signs; Chicago; Summer 2001; Ella Shohat;

Volume: 26

Issue: 4Start Page: 1269-1272

ISSN: 00979740Subject

Terms:

Globalization

Feminism

Multiculturalism & pluralism

Abstract:Sholat argues that a viable multicultural feminist practice is needed to address the divisions and inequalities produced by mainstream

feminists, area studies, and other academic fields in relation to the study of globalization.

Full Text:

Copyright University of Chicago, acting through its Press Summer

2001

While one can study the position offeminism in the context of the Middle East and Middle Eastern studies, I want to examine some of

dangers of studying women and gender in isolation, within ghettoized and geographically defined discursive spaces such as area studies

Throughout my work, I have argued for a relational understanding offeminism, that is, for a nonfinalized and conjunctural definition ofeminism as a polysemic site of contradictory positions. Yet Eurocentric versions of global feminism (not unlike the paradigms that inf

the sociology of modernization, the economics of development studies, and the aesthetics ofpostmodernism) assume a telos of evoluti

toward a reductive identity practice. Performed within the discursive framework of development and modernization, the study of broad in some ways fictive entities such as "Middle Eastern women" and "third-world women" reproduces Eurocentric notions of culture undethe sign of global feminism. This approach, to my mind, has become a malady in feminist studies, even in relatively more multicultura

transnational analytical frameworks. Any serious analysis has to begin from the premise that genders, sexualities, races, classes, nations

and even continents exist not as hermetically sealed entities but, rather, as part of a set of permeable, interwoven relationships. This kin

relationality is particularly significant in a transnational age typified by the global traveling of images, sounds, goods, and populations.

arguing for a multicultural/transnational feminism that is alive to the conditions and concerns of this new moment, I would ask us to ret

the Eurocentric identity designations, intellectual grids, and disciplinary boundaries that have produced such figures and discourses as th

world women and Middle Eastern studies.

Eurocentric definitions of feminism have cast "third-world" women into a fixed stereotypical role, in which they play the part of passivevictims lacking any form of agency. Within standard feminist historiography, for example, "third-world women's" involvement in

anticolonialist struggles has not been perceived as relevant for feminism. Since the anticolonialist struggles of colonized women were n

explicitly labeled "feminist," they have not been "read" as linked or as relevant to feminist studies. A certain strain of feminism hasprivileged a specific narrative that revolves exclusively around European and Euro-American feminist trajectories and that is cast

exclusively around terms of sexual difference. Yet, the participation of colonized women in anticolonialist and antiracist movements did

often lead to a political engagement with feminism. However, these antipatriarchal and even, at times, antiheterosexist subversions with

anticolonial struggles remain marginal to the global feminist canon. In my work, I have reread the activism of third-world women

throughout the period of colonization and decolonization as a kind of subterranean, unrecognized form of feminism and, therefore, as alegitimate part of feminist historiography. Recognizing invisible feminist histories works against the Eurocentric legacies of area studie

and global feminism to rearticulate the spaces, moments, and subjects of feminist studies.

These legacies have led to the well-intentioned but problematic women's studies curricular response to "international" or "multicultural"

lacunae within what I call the sponge/additive approach. In this approach, paradigms that are generated from a U.S. perspective are

extended onto "others" whose lives and practices become absorbed into a homogenizing, overarching feminist master narrative. This ki

facile additive operation merely piles up newly incorporated groups of women from various regions and ethnicities -- all of whom are

presumed to form a separate and coherent entity, easily demarcated as "difference." This form of multiculturalism and internationalismundergirds most global feminism.

It is in this context, then, that I resist the temptation of asserting the "Middle East" as a unified category of analysis about which the exp

intellectual is expected to produce knowledge that adds her "other" culture to a preexisting nucleus. I am critical of the move to

gerrymander knowledge into categories of imagined spaces corresponding to isolated regions and areas of the globe. We should pay

attention in particular to the ways that universities erect disciplinary borders to maintain conceptual boundaries that continue to reprodu

the discursive quarantine of fields of inquiry. The majority of women in the world can only be found in the margins of most curricula,

fenced off into the Bantustans called area studies. Middle Eastern studies often implies that women in the region are somehow not affecby U.S. agendas and policies or that there are no women from the region who live in the United States. That is, area studies erases the

historical and discursive links between regions. Elsewhere (1999) I have argued that the "Americas" and the "Orient" are connected prio

the formation of contemporary geopolitics; that American colonial discourse did not add on orientalist discourse but was itself constitut

by it; and that the colonial discourse of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East and South Asia generated a specific form of orienta

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discourse directed at North Africa and West Asia during the later part of the imperial era. My point in making such spatial and temporal

links is to reimagine the study of regions and cultures in a way that transcends the conceptual borders inherent in the global cartography

the cold war.

Feminist studies is diacritically defined by its relation to the various disciplinary configurations with which it engages. On the one handengages with area studies, whose origins lie in cold war containment policies. On the other hand, it engages with ethnic studies, whose

origins lie in minority activism in a single nation-state -the United States. Yet, ironically, despite the progressive genealogy of ethnic

studies, it too has neglected to engage with transnational analysis. Even within the critical space of ethnic studies, we tend to find an

implicit and almost invisible U.S. nationalism. Although nationalism is often seen as a specifically third-world malady, it is no less rele

to ethnic studies as well as to feminist and queer movements in the United States. If one reviews most women's studies curricula, one ca

easily detect a submerged North American nationalism. In this context, ethnic studies and women's and gay and lesbian studies can deplargely unconscious, nationalist exceptionalism. While I have no quarrel with the idea of U.S. uniqueness, I do quarrel with the idea tha

uniqueness belongs to the United States alone. And such an approach erases the historical parallels and global links among differentnational formations. The implicit nationalism of many multicultural, feminist, and gay and lesbian curricula can lead us to miss numero

opportunities for relational analyses and for cross-disciplinary and transnational connections.

The concept of relationality that I am calling for should not be confused with cultural relativism. Although the concept of relationality g

back to structuralism, I am using it in a translinguistic, dialogic, and historicized sense. The project of a relational multicultural feminism

has to be situated historically and geographically as a set of contested practices. Thus, one of the challenges facing relational feminism

to do with the translation of ideas from one context to another. For example, questions of race have historically been less central in theMiddle East and North Africa, where the operative terms have tended to concern religion. A feminist scholar has to negotiate responsib

these diverse contexts of reception to intervene in the interstices of conjunctural semantics.

Relational, multicultural feminism goes beyond a mere description of discrete regions and cultures. It transcends the additive/spongeapproach, which simply parades the women of the globe in a UN-style "family of nations" pageant. Thus, to have a truly relational anal

we would have to address the operative terms and axes of stratifications typical of specific contexts along with the ways these terms and

stratifications are translated and reanimated as they travel from one context to another. Issues of class, nation, religion, gender, and sexu

all meet and contest at these intersections. But, rather than lead us into immobility, such articulations of contradictions help us chart the

conflictual positioning of women in the contemporary world. We must look for ways in which our variegated pasts and presents paralleintersect, overlap and contradict, and analogize and allegorize one another to place contested perspectives in dialogical relation within,

between, and among cultures, ethnicities, and nations. In sum, it is crucial to place the often-ghettoized histories, geographies, discourse

and disciplines in the political and epistemological synergy of relational feminism.

[Reference]

Reference

[Reference]Shohat, Ella. 1999. "Taboo Memories and Diasporic Visions." In Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink, 131Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[Author note]

Ella Shohat

[Author note]

About the Contributors

[Author note]

Ella Shohat (shohat@postbox.csi.cuny.edu) is professor of women's studies and media studies at the City University of New York Grad

Center and Staten Island. She has lectured and published extensively on the intersection of postcolo

[Author note]

nialism, multiculturalism, and gender. Her books include Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: Univers

of Texas Press, 1989), the award-winning Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, coauthored with Robert Stam (Ne

York: Routledge, 1994), (as coeditor) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Post-colonial Reflections (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997), and Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). H

work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, and Turkish.

[Author note]

Women's Studies Program

Media Culture Program

City University of New York