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Transnational Feminisms at the World Social Forum: Key points from Janet Conway’s Work on the Feminisation of Anti-globalisation Spaces [1]

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1. Different feminist positionalities with regards to the World Social Forum (WSF), and its constituent movements:

  1. Feminists should use the occasion of the WSF to organise their own autonomous feminist or women’s spaces within or alongside it;
  2. Feminists should use the occasion to interact with other progressive movements who are present at the WSF;
  3. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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)?

  1. 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.
  2. 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?

  1. 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).

 

4. A central question for the future of feminism is how open, plural, dialogical and coalitional feminist movements will be, not just vis-à-vis each other, but in relation to movements which are recognized as broadly emancipatory but in terms other than feminist, both within the WSF and in other anti-globalisation spaces (p66/67)…

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[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 Press

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Last modified 2007-11-13 08:31 AM
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