Western feminism, white feminism, missionary feminism, carceral feminism – many of us might be familiar with these important critiques leveled at feminist activism, movements, and theorizing over the last four to five decades. Learning about the emergence of each of these critiques in light of specific and historically contingent theoretical and global political feminist developments that animated transnational feminist theorizing such as “women’s rights as human rights”, will be the focus of this seminar. The 1990’s saw an unprecedented increase of globalized capitalism through institutions of global governance and the proliferation of industrial production resulting from neoliberal expansion and deregulation of markets and media. Despite specific gender-based human rights protections and burgeoning NGO networks to enshrine them, the effects of these forms of globalization– growing gender gaps in poverty, lack of access to education, unsafe and precarious working conditions, environmental destruction, lack of reproductive care, high rates of sexual violence, were borne disproportionately by women and persons experiencing gendered oppression in the Global South. This created a need for feminists to not only critically theorize about sites, sources, and structures of gendered oppression, that extend beyond the borders of the nation-state, but also to critically question how gendered oppression guiding human rights discourse was understood through the lens of the experiences of feminists from the Global North. Resultingly, transnational feminist theory solidified as a theoretical approach and interdisciplinary field – the convergence of, post-structural, post-modern post-colonial, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theoretical interventions that “emerged as a critique of imperial modes of practicing feminism, and its intellectual foundation included a focus on the relationship among colonialism, racial formations, and gender/sexual regimes.” (Tambe &Thayer pp. 16.)

The seminar will provide participants with an introduction to two interrelated threads of transnational feminist theorizing on 1) the epistemic, political, and material manifestations of settler imperialism and colonial violence that perpetuate globalized forms of racialized and gendered oppression and 2) global and local forms of feminist organizing, activism, and resistance that emerged in response to them that inform feminist theorizing and activism today. By reading texts, listening to podcasts, and other materials, we will engage with topics such as: the conceptual interdependence of racialized and gendered violence in colonial logics, the hierarchical production of knowledge due to ongoing colonial structures and violence, the perpetuation of material and epistemic violence through international legal, political, and economic institutions such as international development projects and human rights, and critical engagements with examples of how the hierarchical production of knowledge has served to Other and objectify on the basis of race, gender, culture, biological essentialism, and religion in feminist theoretical interventions and movements.