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

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).