Transnational Feminisms at the World Social Forum: Key points from Janet Conway’s Work on the Feminisation of Anti-globalisation Spaces [1]
1. Different feminist
positionalities with regards to the World
Social Forum (WSF), and its constituent movements:
- Feminists should use
the occasion of the WSF to organise their own autonomous feminist or
women’s spaces within or alongside it;
- Feminists should use
the occasion to interact with other progressive movements who are present
at the WSF;
- Feminists should be deeply
engaged in struggles over the WSF itself and engage with its constituent
mixed or non-feminist movements as allies in the struggle against
neoliberal globalization for social justice and also as feminists seeking
to further en-gender the politics and practices of those movements.
If we agree with Conway’s
conclusion that “The World Social Forum needs feminism and feminists need
initiatives like the World Social Forum to make another world possible” (p14 /
p68), how is the WMW going to engage with the WSF process, in terms of
participating, or not, in both the International Council (IC) and as delegates
and organisers of activities in the event itself? Do we continue to struggle
over the organisational structures of the WSF or to simply exploit the spaces
of the WSF as fully as possible (Matte, 2005)?
2. Factors that influence
these various feminist positionalities:
- Long-standing feminist
concerns about the importance of political and organisational autonomy of
women’s movements vis-à-vis male-dominated movements of the left.
- The “NGO-ization” of
feminism world-wide as an effect of the UN Decade and associated
development strategies, and the contradictory political effects this has
had on feminist movements: highly professionalized, internationalised feminist
policy experts and advocates vs.
grassroots women’s, poor peoples’ and indigenous movements who have grown
more combative in the face of aggressive neoliberalism.
- How has the WMW positioned
itself on the ‘activist-femocrat continuum’ (recognizing that many feminist
networks move back and forth more or less successfully between these poles)?
- Despite the fact that
both ‘socialist’ and ‘radical’ feminisms of the WSF have significantly
mutated beyond their 1970s expressions and are converging in significant
respects (against neoliberalism, conscious of their internal diversities,
exclusions, inequalities, etc), questions persist about the terms of
collaboration with non-feminist others and the relative weight of the body
politics of sexuality and reproduction to those of food, water, land and
work.
- The
feminist character of each forum depends largely on the character of
feminist movements in the host locality, how strong they are politically
and organisationally, in general, and vis-à-vis other progressive
movements. While internationalised feminist networks have been key actors
struggling over the governance of the WSF at its IC, it has been the
feminisms rooted culturally, politically and organisationally which have
most successfully made the forum feminist.
- How should the WMW be
supporting these local feminisms to a greater extent within the dynamic of the
WSF?
- The need to recognise
the contribution of feminism to contemporary emancipatory movements and
spaces such as the WSF: “Feminism is changing the world through a
tenacious search for convergence across difference, a reflexivity about
unequal power relations… and a commitment to inclusion, participation and
amelioration of those conditions of inequality… Feminists learnt the hard
way that there is no one transhistorical “patriarchy” that produces a
common oppression among women, let alone a unified political subject
“women”, nor a unitary feminist politics. Feminists are bringing these
political knowledges to the WSF.” (p67/68)
3. Differences among
transnational feminist networks: the position of the WMW compared to the
Articulación Feminista Marcosur (AFM) (particularly apparent during the WSF in
Nairobi, 2007):
AFM |
WMW |
Events sponsored in 2007: Feminist Dialogues (FD); building anti-globalisation alliances
against fundamentalisms; feminist movement building; Women’s Rally; etc. |
Events sponsored in 2007: migration and violence against women; food
sovereignty and alliances between rural and urban women; women and work;
WMW’s Global Charter; IV Social Forum on Sexual Diversity; labour and
globalization (2 events); Social Movements Assembly. |
Events attracted almost exclusively female audiences, largely
professional or upper class (particularly the African participants). |
Events fairly mixed in terms of gender and class, with the workshop
on the Global Charter, for example, including lots of men, women workers of
the WSF and women activists from poor people’s movements in Kenya. |
In their political culture, the FD’s events had the character of
international meetings that could have been taking place anywhere in the
world. Being in Africa seemed largely irrelevant. |
In their events, the WMW engaged in a thorough-going place-based
internationalism, using the opportunity to “give a voice to the women’s movement
of Africa and reinforce its leadership within the World March of Women” (p9). |
The AFM and some other networks comprising the FD are actively
constituting the WSF, including through participation in its governing
bodies, but… |
The WMW is more inclined to get its hands dirty through coalition
work on concrete issues involving a fuller range of activist practices, in
which it is a strong feminist partner but does not set the rules of
engagement. |
The FD is constituted
primarily by self-described transnational feminist networks. In their
everyday activities, these networks may be embedded in place-specific ways
but their discourses and practices within the FD largely avoid place-based
specificities. While FD speakers may identify themselves by world region,
their discourses about neoliberalism, fundamentalism and militarization tend
to be globalist in nature and abstracted from particular struggles on the
ground. |
The WMW is constituted as a co-ordination of place-based feminisms,
concretely engaged in specific geographies, on context-specific struggles
pertaining to poverty and violence against women, in place-specific terms. |
Strangely monocultural, a product of the particular transnational
circuits of feminist activism produced of the UN processes in the 1990s. |
Own points of contact with the UN system, but historical roots are
quite different: from its beginnings, the WMW represented a different kind of
feminist transnationalism, oriented to movement building, acutely conscious
of building a global network of place-based activists and the challenges of
negotiating place-based difference. In the diversity of its constituent
groups in terms of sectors, scales and modes of activities, in its reliance
on “contentious politics” more than lobbying, and in its articulation to the
anti-globalisation movement…the March represents novel developments in the
field of transnational feminist politics (p9). |
More abstracted, academic, and often place-less discourses. |
Building, in practice, a new kind of feminist movement through
concrete attention to specific issues of concern to poor and marginalized
women in specific places and with less regard as to whether they call
themselves feminist, share the same discourse on sexual rights, etc. |
The radicality of the feminism of the FD lies in the centrality of
the body as a site of politics... The inter-related axes of neoliberal
globalisation, militarism and war, and fundamentalisms are integrated through
a focus on the body as a mediator of social relations. The feminist networks
of the FD have been in the forefront of the struggle for the protection and
inclusion of sexual and reproductive rights in the spaces, practices and
discourses of the WSF… feminists of the AFM have seen the Forum primarily as
a space for advancing dialogue across difference among the movements,
premised on a transversal politics that incorporates the body as the site of
intersecting social struggles. |
Struggling to get feminism recognised -within the organising process
of the WSF - as an answer to neoliberal globalization...as a social movement
that is bringing something that is central and not simply as one of an
infinite number of groups, identities, and strategies… In this view, feminism
is itself a radical and egalitarian project of social transformation. In the
anti-globalization movement and the WSF, feminists “have helped expand the
anti-neoliberal agenda into an equality agenda.” (WMW, 2005) These discourses
and practices, with their strong emphases on anti-capitalism,
anti-imperialism and coalition-building with other movements, draw clearly on
the legacies of socialist feminism. |
The transnational feminism of the FD, while highly sensitized to
diversity and inclusion along race, nation, generational, and sexual lines,
and despite a radical critique of neoliberalism, does not instantiate a clear
class option. |
Rooted in the place-based survival struggles of poor women and
clearly aligned with mass grassroots economic justice movements like Via
Campesina. |
Discourses are more analytically sophisticated than those of the WMW
but rhetoric outshines practice. The intellectuals of the FD are producing
uniquely feminist theoretical reflections on the meaning of the WSF, making
strong contributions to an emergent global discussion. |
Practice is far more advanced than theory. The largely descriptive
discourses that the WMW produces about itself focus on its organising and
mobilising practices. In its place-based transnationalism and through its
coalition politics, the WMW is making its most important contributions to the
broader movements, although as knowledge, it remains largely inexplicit. |
More analytically coherent. |
More advanced politically. |
Major campaign against fundamentalisms, linking the economic
fundamentalism of neoliberalism with rising ethnic and religious
fundamentalisms. |
“The March seems to be studiously avoiding the language of
fundamentalism” (p7, footnote 10). |
------------
[1] - Transnational Feminisms and the World Social Forum: Encounters and Transformations in Anti-globalization Space. Conway, J. in Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8:3, April 2007
- Troubling Transnational Feminism(s): Contesting the Future of Feminism at the World Social Forum (submitted June 2007) Conway, J. in Transnationalising Women’s Movements: Solidarities Without Borders, eds. Dufour, P., Masson, D. e Caouette, D. UBC PressLast modified 2007-11-13 08:31 AM
This item is available in
Français, English, Español