Troubling Transnational Feminism(s): Contesting the future of feminism at the World Social Forum

Introduction

            The World Social Forum (WSF) is a new development in transnational social movement politics. It is rightly celebrated by many feminists as an autonomous space for the convergence of an unprecedented array of activisms, including a great variety of women’s movements, from all over the world. As such, it provides unparalleled opportunity both for encountering diverse feminisms and for engendering non-feminist movements who are otherwise broadly aligned in the struggle against neoliberal globalization.

            This chapter is not about the WSF per se, but takes the WSF as a rich and significant site for contemporary transnational feminist praxes. Feminist positionalities have varied historically and they continue to shift vis-a-vis the Forum but transnational feminisms are undeniably present as significant forces constituting the WSF and making particular and irreducible contributions to contemporary emancipatory movements in and beyond the WSF (Conway 2007b).  In this chapter, through a comparative study,  I contend that the feminist encounters in, over and around the WSF involve contestations not only over the WSF but over the character of feminism itself.  An exploration of the contemporary contours of transnational feminist politics against the backdrop of the intensifying transnationalization of social movements associated with the WSF, this study  exposes differences appearing among transnational feminist networks and analyzes their significance, while also arguing that transnational feminisms are broadly convergent in the contributions they are making to emancipatory movements in the WSF and beyond.

            There are plural and competing transnational feminist politics and projects apparent at the WSF. While they appear broadly convergent, they lead largely parallel lives, suggesting an uneasy co-existence. Many activists are reluctant to discuss the tensions for fear of needlessly polarizing the situation. I share that concern.  In an effort to constructively explore the plurality, complexity and contradictions of feminism in this space, I examine two distinct expressions of transnational feminism at the WSF, represented by the Feminist Dialogues and its leading network Articulación Feminista Marcosur (AFM), and the World March of Women (WMW).^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]-->} The women leaders in these networks recognize each other as friends and fellow feminists who “do some things together [but] basically don’t find affinity.” (Mtetwa 2007)

            The chapter begins by historicizing the presence of the AFM and the WMW at the WSF and their and allied efforts to make the Forum feminist. The 2004 WSF in Mumbai merits special attention as a high point in this process and the first appearance of the Feminist Dialogues. The feminist ground seemed especially unstable and contested at the 2007 WSF in Nairobi where axes of difference appeared to be more sharply drawn. From a range of feminist commentary about the Forum, one can discern distinct feminist positionalities which, as I conclude, also imply conflicts over the character of feminism itself.

Feminisms at the Forum

            In each of the WSFs in Porto Alegre, women have been well represented among the participants, and comprising more than half (52%) the delegates in the first year. The huge and diverse Brazilian women’s movement has always been in evidence in numerous Portuguese-language events each of the four years that the Forum has taken place there, but notably not in the large-scale and multi-lingual events. In 2002, women comprised a less impressive 43% of delegates and continued to be woefully under-represented as speakers in the major panels and conferences.

            By the 2003 WSF, in response to feminist pressure and protest, there were signs of improvement in women’s representation in the major events and efforts to incorporate a gender perspective throughout the program. However, the continued marginalization of women and feminism in the leadership, large-scale events and more internationalized discussions of the Forum was obvious, even as “gender” appeared as the second most widely addressed issue in a keyword survey of the 1700 self-organized activities of the 2003 WSF (Miriam Nobre quoted by León 2005, 17). This phenomenon, in which feminists and feminisms are impressively present in a proliferation of grassroots, self-organized and often small-scale activities in the Social Forum program, as well as in the popular spaces and streetscapes of the Forum, while being systematically ignored intellectually and politically in the non-feminist spaces of the Forum, has continued to characterize WSFs in Latin America as recently as the 2006 event in Caracas.

            In the Latin American iterations of the Social Forum, the World March of Women and The Articulación Feminista Marcosur have been two particularly visible streams of feminist participation. Both are active on the WSF’s International Council.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]-->}  In the 2002 WSF, the World March contingent included women from twenty countries. Their lavender flags and T-shirts were everywhere, especially in the massive street manifestations of the WSF. In the caucus meetings of the ‘social movements of the WSF,’ the March was a visible and vocal feminist presence and ensured some feminist content in final declarations. Its slogan, ‘the world will not change without feminism; and feminists cannot change women’s lives unless we change the world’ met with roars of approval at the closing ceremonies at the 2002 WSF. In 2003, the World March was even more visible, with a large booth and a whole program of gender-related events, including a major event in the youth camp on ‘feminism and a new political generation.’ (World March of Women 2003b, 5–6)

            The March’s commitment to grassroots mobilization, street action and the claiming of public space resonates with many other iterations of the anti-globalization movements, especially among youth, and also characterizes its presence in the WSF. Drumming, chanting, singing, and theatrics enrich and disrupt the spaces of the Social Forum, especially in Brazil, and “question the practices, codes and consciousness of those who are our ‘partners’ in the daily fight to make another world possible.” (World March of Women -- Globalization and Alliances Collective 2005)

            In the WSF, the WMW has been a consistent and critical participant, functioning as an autonomous feminist power, pushing for the integration of feminist struggles against patriarchy into all the major movements’ and their debates. In addition to its steadfast participation in the International Council (IC) of the WSF since 2001, the March has also committed to the Social Movements World Network which emerged from the 2002 WSF. This network meets in assembly at each WSF and formulates common declarations. The WMW is increasingly asserting that feminists have intellectual and political resources to share which are essential to building alternative worlds. The March aims to foster dialogue on the role of women and feminism across all the progressive movements (World March of Women 2004; Burrows 2005).

            The Articulación Feminista Marcosur is a Latin American feminist initiative, a “space for feminist intervention in the global arena,” born of the limitations and contradictions of the UN-focused transnational feminism of the 1990s. More particularly, the Articulación confronts “pensamientos unicos” (unitary ways of thinking that suppress pluralism) which appear in oppositional movements as well as among neoliberals (Vargas 2003, 914). In the 2002 WSF, these feminists spearheaded a major campaign against fundamentalisms, linking the economic fundamentalism of neoliberalism with rising ethnic and religious fundamentalisms. Cardboard masks depicting giant lips were sported by thousands of participants in the WSF’s many street demonstrations. The accompanying slogan was ‘your mouth is fundamental against  fundamentalisms.’ In a single symbol, the masks captured the realities of people silenced by fundamentalisms, people who can speak but are afraid to, and those who raise their voices in protest. This mobilization reappeared in 2003 and 2005 WSFs in Porto Alegre and 2007 in Nairobi and involved other feminist networks including AWID (Association of Women in Development) and WICEJ (Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice). Carol Barton of WICEJ commented:  “We see it as a very powerful campaign for bridging differences in what have sometimes been different universes within global feminist organizing. It addresses issues around women’s rights to control their bodies and their lives as well as women’s economic and social rights. It has brought these two strands together.” (Duddy 2004). Vargas sees the campaign as more broadly relevant, as a struggle against fundamentalist forces “that seek to negate the full diversity of humanity, by legitimizing the use of violence to subordinate one group to another, one person to another.” (Vargas 2005, 110 citing Articulación Feminista Marcosur 2002)

            The Articulación has also organized numerous sessions in the WSF program, notably “cross-movement dialogues” which convene speakers from different movements of the WSF to explore their differences and foster mutual understanding and recognition. In a similar way, the Articulación has recognized the need for dialogue across difference among feminists. In 2003, 120 feminists from a dozen networks primarily from Latin America gathered in a pre-WSF strategy meeting, the immediate pre-cursor of the Feminist Dialogues.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]-->} A chorus of feminist voices, including from networks like the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ) and the Association for Women in Development (AWID), argued for the importance of feminists carrying feminist perspectives into global movements for social change and assuming greater leadership roles, particularly at the WSF. These feminists saw feminist analyses on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation and so on,  as critical contributions to global social justice movements, including the movement against neoliberalism. Likewise, in their foregrounding of fundamentalism, militarism, and patriarchy, feminist analyses and politics had much to contribute to the discourses of more narrowly economic justice movements. Feminists organized a dialogue among women’s, peace, and economic justice movements at the 2003 WSF.

            Towards the 2004 WSF, a number of regional and international feminist networks agreed to collaborate and work more strategically toward fewer but larger scale events targeted to audiences of 1000-4000 participants. The leading groups were Articulación Feminista Marcosur, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), INFORM Human Rights Documentation Centre (Sri Lanka), ISIS International, the National Network of Autonomous Women’s Groups (India) and the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ) with about 50 feminist groups participating in some form of consultation or planning. This collaboration built on the efforts of Latin American feminist networks at Porto Alegre, notably on the 2003 initiative by AFM in organizing pre- and post-WSF strategy meetings, and set the stage for a major feminist breakthrough in Mumbai (Barton, quoted by Duddy 2004).

Feminist breakthroughs in Mumbai: making the Forum feminist?

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->

            In 2004, the fourth World Social Forum and the first to be held outside of Brazil took place in Mumbai, India.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]-->} It saw over 80, 000 people attend from 132 countries, representing 2,660 organizations. Unofficially, as many as 155,000 participated.  The event was noteworthy for the huge participation of mass poor people’s movements. Women were over 40% of the dalit (‘untouchable’) and adivasi (tribal)  participation and 51% overall. Feminist networks played a  prominent role in organizing in Mumbai and share responsibility for expanding the political vocabulary of the WSF’s Charter of Principles to include patriarchy, militarism and war, racism, casteism and religious communalism alongside neoliberalism as key axes of opposition characterizing the WSF (Sen 2004, 218). Among the many innovations of the 2004 WSF, this more explicit recognition of the multiplicity of oppressions and the expansion of political discourses beyond capitalism and imperialism was, in terms of feminism, probably the most significant development.

            The feminists on the India Organizing Committee created a women’s caucus which pushed successfully for gender parity among speakers at major events and the engendering of debates more generally (Duddy 2004). One of four mass events (of 25,000 people) in Mumbai, “The War against Women/Against War,” explored the links between patriarchy, militarism and cultures of violence. Among the more than 140 feminist events within the 2004 WSF program, Indian feminists associated with what would become the Feminist Dialogues mounted another major event addressing: “Religious Fundamentalism, Communalism, Casteism and Racism: the agenda of globalization?” The World March co-sponsored a panel on the future of the WSF process and organized another on “Diverse Alternatives for Global Change” in collaboration with other feminist (predominantly Latin American) networks, including Agencia Latino Americano de Información (ALAI), Red Latinoamericano Mujeres Transformando la Economía (REMTE -- Network of Women Transforming the Economy), South-LGBT Dialogue, and Women of Via Campesina. These two distinct clusters of feminist collaboration reappear repeatedly before and after Mumbai. The March once again mounted events in the youth camp. In the International Committee, observing how the Indian organizers worked with one another and “how the men seem very conscious of who is speaking and ask, ‘where are the women?’” Diane Matte of the World March of Women Secretariat concluded:  “I saw the presence of feminism [in the 2004 WSF in Mumbai] more than I ever saw in Brazil.” 

            The Indian National Network of Autonomous Women’s Groups hosted a women’s forum prior to the WSF in which regional and international feminist networks caucused  to identify points of convergence and common strategies vis-a-vis the WSF (World March of Women 2003a, 2). “Building Solidarities: Feminist Dialogues” took place over two days, involved 140 women, and successfully broadened regional diversity relative to the feminist encounters in Brazil. For the feminist organizations and networks not rooted geographically in South Asia, the WSF in Mumbai was an occasion to build knowledge of and relationships with the feminisms of the region, including of their relationship to the political parties of the Indian left and to other Indian social movements. (Barton in Duddy 2004).

            With broadening participation, accumulating experience, and ongoing experimentation in terms of format and process,^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]-->}  the Dialogues have been a unique forum for feminists to explore sensitive issues in the global women’s movement: North-South dynamics/inequalities; differing priorities around such issues as reproductive rights, violence against women or economic justice; differing choice of scales, institutional venues, and socio-cultural terrains for feminist work; differing assessments of human rights perspectives and strategies; women’s engagement with religion and understandings of religious fundamentalisms in different cultural settings. The Dialogues are also an opportunity to advance feminist understandings of the linkages among neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, neoconservatism, communalism and militarism in the present conjuncture and what this means for women’s rights and feminist strategies (Barton in Duddy 2004).^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]-->}

            Although the Feminist Dialogues were originally imagined as a way to strengthen the feminist presence in the WSF, their agenda quickly shifted to critical issues across regions and issues in global feminism, including linkages with other social movements but not limited to the WSF. The FD in Mumbai were “deliberate[ly] ambivalent” vis-a-vis the WSF, with feminists’ actively participating in the WSF while remaining organizationally autonomous in order to mount pressure from outside (Gandhi, et al. 2006b). “As a site of resistance, the WSF is one of the most dynamic spaces available to us as feminist activists and it is important to intervene in it while at the same time retaining our autonomy within the FD.” (Jones 2005a, 2) However, during the 2005 FD the following year in Porto Alegre, participants actually demanded more focused discussion on the WSF (Gandhi, et al. 2006b).

            In terms of the WSF, fostering cross-movement dialogue and breaking down sectoral silos emerged as key priorities in the FD. In Mumbai, these feminists went on to host an inter-movement dialogue involving two speakers from each of four movements: women’s, sexuality rights, labour and dalit rights/racial justice movements. Each was asked to speak to how their movement had incorporated class, gender, race and sexuality questions, the dilemmas and problems they had confronted and the strategies they had employed. Activists from the other movements were asked to respond. Then the second speaker from the original movement was asked to comment, refute or clarify. This proceeded through four rounds and was moderated. This format was repeated with great success the following year in Brazil (Gandhi and Shah 2006a).

            Organizers of the Feminist Dialogues committed to them until 2007. From Mumbai to Porto Alegre in 2005, Bamako, Mali in 2006, and most recently in Nairobi at the 2007 WSF, they have continued to grow in terms of absolute numbers, regional diversity and increased participation by young women.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]-->} 

Transnational feminisms in Nairobi: axes of difference

            The first World Social Forum on the African continent took place in Nairobi in 2007 with over 50,000 people participating. The majority of participants were African coming from every country on the continent. Women were clearly in the majority although official figures are not yet available. Women and feminists were again very active in the local organizing (Oloo 2006). 173 self-organized activities promised some explicit attention to women or gender or were organized by women’s groups or groups explicitly focused on women’s issues. I identified 70 different women’s organizations mounting activities and 55 other organizations mounting events directly addressing gender or women’s rights. While it is hazardous to compare with Mumbai, it is arguable that developments in Nairobi signal a deepening and widening diffusion of feminist concerns, broadly conceived, through the groups and movements of the Forum. While masculinist spaces and discourses remain numerous at the WSF, feminisms, plural and contradictory, are permeating at an extraordinary rate.

            By the 2007 WSF in Nairobi, the Feminist Dialogues had taken shape as a transnational feminist project with its own particular politic and aiming to make specific and coherent feminist interventions in the 2007 WSF program. The Co-ordinating Group of the Feminist Dialogues appeared as an entity in the program, sponsoring a number of activities, including workshops on building anti-globalization alliances against fundamentalisms and feminist movement building, and organized a wonderfully dynamic Women’s Rally which attracted hundreds of women in a noisy march through the WSF grounds. Many of the marchers sported the cardboard lip masks of the AFM’s campaign against fundamentalisms. The World March was notable in its absence.

             The World March of Women sponsored a number of events: on migration and violence against women; on food sovereignty and the need for alliances between rural and urban women; on women and work; on the March’s Global Charter. In addition to these, the WMW worked in coalition with other feminist and non-feminist groups in a variety of ways. The March co-sponsored the IV Social Forum on Sexual Diversity with LGBT Dialogo Sur-Sur and its allied Latin American feminist organizations, although notably not AFM. It collaborated with a diverse group of organizations to host two events on labour and globalization, including Transform Italia, Focus on the Global South, Campaign for the Welfare State, G10 Solidaire and several other Italian labour groups and took the lead in organizing the WSF’s Social Movements Assembly.

            Based on a sampling of both these groups of events, I observed some differences. The FD events attracted almost exclusively female audiences, many of them self-identified feminists that I recognized from the pre-WSF Feminist Dialogues event.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]-->} The March’s events were more mixed in terms of gender and class. Both sets of events attracted international, multi-lingual and racially-diverse audiences but the women of the FD events, especially the African women, appeared to be largely professional or upper class women. One of the March’s events, focused on their Global Women’s Charter, began with the activists displaying the March’s giant, multi-story quilt and succeeded in attracting a different constituency, including lots of men and some of the women vending fruit and drinks, in addition to featuring women activists from poor people’s movements in Kenya in a public effort to build the WMW in Kenya. 

            The substantive foci of the two groups of events are at first glance broadly convergent, certainly not at odds. However, based on direct observation, I would say that the WMW is doing what the FD is talking about: building the feminist movement and cultivating anti-globalization alliances.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]-->} In contrast to the FD’s more abstracted, academic, and often place-less discourses, the March is proceeding in practice to build a new kind of feminist movement through its 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, agree on abortion rights, or share the same discourse on sexual rights.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]-->}  The March is also placing itself squarely in the ambiguous spaces of the anti-globalization movement, actively and concretely building trust and partnerships in practice with non-feminist but broadly emancipatory movements in and beyond the WSF, including through its involvement in international campaigns and mobilizations. The discourses of the FD are more analytically sophisticated but its rhetoric outshines its practice. With the WMW, the opposite is true: it’s practice is far more advanced than its theory. The largely descriptive discourses that the WMW produces about itself  focus on its organizing and mobilizing practices.

            The feminist and inter-movement dialogues are communicative practices that are critical in fostering intelligibility across difference. However, they proceed largely in the terms set by their feminist organizers. The AFM and some other networks comprising the FD are actively constituting the WSF, including through participation in its governing bodies, as is true of the WMW. However, the March 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. In sum, I suggest that the FD is more analytically coherent but the March is more advanced politically.   

            The different status of ‘place’ and ‘the local’ in the practices and discourses of both the WMW and the FD is a central axis of difference between them. The March 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. The Feminist Dialogues 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 as they instantiate the FD largely eschew 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 anywhere.

            While the FD is thoroughly international, its leadership in Nairobi especially in terms of who facilitated and spoke in its WSF events was far more Latin American and South Asian than African or Kenyan. 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.^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]-->}  The World March of Women, on the other hand, engaged in a thorough-going place-based internationalism:

We knew from the outset that the absence of a World March National Co-ordinating Body in Kenya would be problematic for the organization of our activities at the Forum. Fortunately, we were assisted by a young woman who belongs to a feminist theatre troupe that treats various issues of importance to Kenyan society...Thanks to their hard work, the March delegation included women from the poorest neighbourhoods of Nairobi and we now have the foundation to form a March coordinating body in Kenya...

            We wanted to use the opportunity presented by the WSF to give a voice to the women’s movement of Africa and reinforce its leadership within the World March of Women. Women from some 10 African countries who are active in the March attended the WSF (World March of Women 2007)..

            For all its internationalism, the FD is strangely monocultural, a product of the particular transnational circuits of feminist activism produced of the UN processes in the 1990s. In an interview at the pre-WSF FD event, Fatma Aloo of FEMNET, a co-sponsor of the FD, had this to say:

I was in the process toward Beijing. I hear the same things here. The biggest challenge for the feminist movement is to link with grassroots, the not-privileged. The feminist movement has not even started... they’re (gesturing to the room where the event was underway) still stuck in NGOism... also, it’s the way this is organized...you would think that being in Kenya -- as if there are no feminists in Kenya! -- that it would be led by the Kenyans...I am sitting here with Wahu [Kaara, head of the Kenya Debt Relief Network]. Did you see her on a panel (Aloo 2007)?^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]-->}

            In a recent article, Ara Wilson (2007) comments on the “traces of the UN-NGO experience” on the World Social Forum and its feminisms, particularly on the 2005 FD in Porto Alegre. She suggests that  although the geographic history of transnational feminism points to multiple geographic and institutional sites, scales and strategies, its travel through the UN orbit has indelibly marked it, particularly through NGO-ization. Wilson also notes the preponderance of critique over alternative visions or concrete strategies in the 2005 and 2006 Feminist Dialogues in Porto Alegre and Bamako respectively and which I also noted in Nairobi in 2007. She proposes that this may be an effect of years of working in the highly politically constrained world of the UN and its NGOs. Many of these feminist organizations are now turning to alternative transnational political spaces like the WSF. According to Wilson, this is not despite but because of their trajectory through the UN-NGO orbit. Analyzing the nature of these histories and their contradictory effects in the present is critical for understanding the emerging plural forms of transnational feminism, relations among them, and with other emancipatory movements and the WSF.        

            While the World March has had its own points of contact with the UN system, its historical roots are quite different. The origins of the World March were in a successful popular mobilization of localized groups across the Québec territory in the early 1990s. On the strength of this, Québec feminists proposed a world march to those gathered at the UN conference on women in Beijing. 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-globalization movement, especially through its involvement with the World Social Forum, the March represents novel developments in the field of transnational feminist politics (Dufour 2005, 3; Conway 2007b). 

            In sum, through an ethnographic study of the practices of these two expressions of transnational feminism at the 2007 WSF, numerous axes of difference have come into view. 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. The WMW, on the other hand,  is rooted in the place-based survival struggles of poor women and is clearly aligned with mass grassroots economic justice movements like Via Campesina. Despite a discourse of openness,^{<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]-->} many participants in the FD seem reluctant to engage with non-feminist movements, fearful of having the specificity of feminism diluted or losing ground on contentious issues like reproductive and sexual rights. The militant focus of many in the FD on women’s control of women’s bodies is absolutely essential; it remains a truism that if feminists don’t insist on this, no one else will.However, feminists who stay in safe and shrinking feminist spaces risk irrelevance and sectarianism.

            The two networks evince a different imbalance between theory and practice. In the WMW, practice leads while theory remains woefully underdeveloped; in the FD, the opposite seems true. 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 tacit. On the other hand, 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. Methodologically, this observation of different and uneven relations between theory and practice in movements should serve as a warning about the limits of relying exclusively on textual representations to read the politics of any particular movement. There is no replacement for participant-observation. It also points to a diverse array of knowledge practices in movements, many of which remain unstudied as such.

            The status, or lack thereof, of place and the local in theories and practices of the transnational has emerged as another critical axis of difference between the WMW and the FD. This raises questions about the varying geographic content of claims to the transnational, the possibility and importance of identifying place-based transnationalisms as particularly relevant to movement-building transnational feminists, and the particular political challenges of negotiating place-based difference.

            Finally, different expressions of transnational feminism are rooted in plural and distinct political and geographic histories with implications for practice and positioning in the present. In particular, the long shadow of the UN’s influence on developments in feminist politics world-wide needs to be interrogated for its trace in the present.      

Transnational feminisms and the World Social Forum: plural and shifting positionalities

            Commentaries produced by activists in these networks recognize the importance of the WSF as a space for feminists. In the wake of the growing contradictions and limits associated with the UN, the WSF has created conditions of possibility for feminists that they could not produce alone. Women active in the Feminist Dialogues and the World March of Women both testify repeatedly to the increased internationalization of their encounters in WSF contexts.

            However, ambivalence haunts the discourses of feminists about the WSF, marked by

ongoing debates about feminists’ meeting as feminists within this space, creating their own autonomous spaces, and feminists intervening in and over the WSF itself as a whole (Alvarez, Faria, and Nobre 2004). Similar ambivalence is evident in debates over the character of the Feminist Dialogues: how preoccupied should they be with the WSF; should they only be convened around the WSF. Even as some feminists increasingly stress the need for dialogue and collaboration with other movements, histories of women’s movements being co-opted, marginalized, and repressed by male-dominated movements haunt the present conjuncture and extend beyond debates about the WSF.

            Ghandi and Shah contend that in the context of the anti-globalization and anti-war movements and the WSF, the Feminist Dialogues signal a return to movement activism. For them as organizers of the Feminist Dialogues, what is underway is a recuperation of feminism understood as “an ideology [that] attempts to understand the oppression and agency of women within a patriarchal structure and in the present neo-liberal economic, social and political systems (...) that is against fundamentalism, global capitalism, and imperialism (...) which allies itself with the marginalized, dalit and indigenous peoples (...) which unfolds its practice every day in our lives and continues the quest for collective and democratic functioning.” (Gandhi, et al. 2006b, 6–7)

            In the communications of the World March, there is consistent recognition of the value of the WSF, its strategic importance for the March,  its effectiveness in building convergence across different oppositional movements, and the synergies between the aims of the WSF and those of the WMW. However, it is an ongoing question for the March about whether to continue struggling over the organizational structures of the WSF or to simply exploit the spaces of the WSF as fully as possible (Matte 2005). For the WMW, because its orientation is so clearly activist, its long term commitment to the WSF is contingent on those of other combative social movements and their strategic choices.

            Differences in emphasis among feminists on the meaning and strategic import of the World Social Forum mirror larger tensions:

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->

For some actors, the WSF is a space of convergence of the anti-globalization struggle to coordinate an agenda of global mobilization; for others, it is a plural space to share and articulate democratic alternatives and democratic projects (democratizadoras).

            For us, as Articulación Feminista Marcosur, the WSF is a space whose principal challenge is the development of new political cultures which guarantee the expression of a full range of actors emerging from the diversity and plurality [of the social reality] and which creates the possibility of dialogue among different movements, identities and agendas (Celiberti and Vargas 2003, 587–88). (my translation)

            These distinct feminisms, WMW and AFM, both heavily invested in the struggle over the WSF, also have differing discourses regarding the specificity of feminist contributions to the movements and the Forum. For Matte and the World March, feminism’s unique contribution has to do with “questions at the heart of capitalism, about the basic relationship between men and women and between individuals and our collective societal relationship.” (Matte 2005) Feminists insist on attention to women’s oppression as a fundamental feature of contemporary social order, central to capitalism even as it predates it. Feminist understandings of the omnipresence of violence against women and old and new forms of commodification of women’s bodies and lives shift and stretch critical analyses of capitalism.

            For the WMW, it has been important to be at the forefront of the WSF organizing process, where “it has been a struggle to get feminism recognized 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. “The central analysis [operating at the WSF] is still Marxist.” (Matte 2005) In this view, feminism is itself a radical and egalitarian project of social transformation. It has its own specific and essential analytical and mobilizational resources to bring to a heterogeneous field of social struggles. In the anti-globalization movement and the WSF, feminists “have helped expand the anti-neoliberal agenda into an equality agenda.” (World March of Women -- Globalization and Alliances Collective 2005) The discourses and practices of the World March, with their strong emphases on anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, coalition-building with other movements of the left, draw clearly on the legacies of socialist feminism.

            The radicality of the feminism of the FD lies in the centrality of the body as a site of politics, giving the FD a more radical feminist appearance (Gouws 2007, 29). The inter-related axes of neoliberal globalization, militarism and war, and fundamentalisms are integrated through a focus on the body as a mediator of social relations (Vargas 2005, 110). 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, most recently through a declaration following the WSF in Nairobi (Articulación Feminista Marcosur 2007). In some tension with the World March, feminists of the Articulación Feminista Marcosur 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.

            Emerging from post-dictatorship Latin America, the feminists of AFM are preoccupied with the question of democratization, in their societies and in the movements. For them, defense of diversity and the fostering of a political culture respectful of pluralism is foundational. In the Forum, they recognize the tensions and contradictions arising from the different priorities, discourses and logics of the various movements that are sharing the space. Their insistence on the multiplicity of oppressions and social subjects and the cross-cutting character of feminist issues has placed them at the centre of efforts to build relations across movements. In its leading role in organizing the Feminist Dialogues, the AFM made the recognition of the multiplicity of struggles and strategies foundational. “Acknowledgement of the political differences and of the strategies [among feminists] is part of a process of growth of the movements that, undoubtedly, enriches the political plurality we defend for the whole society. Hiding those differences within a feminist sisterhood is de-politicising...” (AFM quoted in Santiago 2004, 5) And with respect to the WSF: “neither organizational centralisation nor an agenda of mobilisation can shorten the distance that must be walked to further the dialogue between the diverse priorities that movements have.” (Celiberti 2002, quoted  in Vargas 2004, 230;)

            Vargas, also associated with the AFM, argues for the importance of the movements all committing to multiple democratizations, forms of justice, ways of constructing freedom...These dynamics, once assumed, also result in the transformation of subjectivities, and lead also to the recognition of the vital roles of diversity.

            To have a space to struggle for recognition, it is necessary to politicise difference, ‘to celebrate... the advancement of the idea of solidarity and the protection of differences as the political capital of democracy.’ (Vargas 2004, 230 citing Rosemberg 2002)

            In its convening a stunning array of emancipatory activists while affirming their irreducible diversity, the WSF is a privileged site for critical subjectivities in democratic dialogue, for processes of transformation of those subjectivities through contact and collaboration with others, and for the production of new practices and knowledges relevant for emancipatory political struggle and for constructing more democratic forms of life. The AFM in particular and feminists more generally are in the lead, in the WSF and elsewhere, in constructing cross-cultural and cross-movement dialogues and politics. They bring substantial political and organizational knowledge, experience and resources to this undertaking from three decades of transnational and transcultural feminist organizing.

Conclusion

            In focusing on some specific practices of transnational feminism, it has become evident  feminist encounters in, over and around the WSF involve contestations not only over the WSF but over the character of feminism itself.  Emerging from this study, a central question for the future of feminism is how open, plural, dialogical and coalitional feminist movements will be, not just vis-a-vis each other, but in relation to movements which are recognized as broadly emancipatory but in terms other than feminist. This includes “grassroots” women’s movements that eschew the label feminist as much as the array of social movements worldwide converging against neoliberal globalization.

            There are different feminist positionalities vis-a-vis the WSF, and its constituent movements, which are shifting over time in relation to each other and to WSF processes. While some important feminist networks wage struggles over the feminist character of the WSF and the politics of its constituent movements, other feminists, also significant and numerous, have been reluctant to engage very fully in/over the WSF. Depending on their readings of the WSF, they have argued variously that: feminists should use the occasion of the WSF to organize 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; and or that 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.

            Several factors seem to be operating in these varying feminist positionalities vis-a-vis the WSF and its constitutive movements. The most obvious is long-standing feminist concerns  borne of bitter experience about the importance of political and organizational autonomy of women’s movements vis-a-vis male-dominated movements of the left. A number of feminist commentators testify to this. However, as Vargas (2003) observes, the meaning of autonomy for feminist movements is shifting historically.

             A second factor is the much-observed “NGO-ization” of feminism world-wide as an effect of the UN Decade and associated development strategies. Alvarez et al.(2002) argue that this has had contradictory political effects for feminist movements, including growing class, cultural and strategic divergences between highly professionalized, internationalized feminist policy experts and advocates and grassroots women’s, poor peoples’ and indigenous movements who have grown more combative in the face of aggressive neoliberalism. How feminist networks position themselves on the activist-femocrat continuum (recognizing that many move back and forth more or less successfully between these poles) is an essential question to pose in exploring feminist positionalities vis-a-vis the Forum and its constituent anti-globalization movements.

            A third factor to contemplate is the significance of the persistence of older streams of feminist difference and the merits of naming these differences in the terms of the second wave. Both “socialist” and “radical” feminisms of the WSF have significantly mutated beyond their 1970s expressions and are converging in significant respects. Both are transnational, acutely conscious of their own internal diversities, exclusions and inequalities, and are aligned with each other and other movements of the WSF against neoliberal globalization. Both recognize the importance of sustaining autonomous feminist movements. However, 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.

            A final set of questions has to do with the meaning of the “transnational” in contemporary

feminism and to what extent it is taken seriously as a geographic signifier and a signifier of geographic difference. One of the axis of difference appearing among transnational feminist networks of the WSF is their uneven geographic composition, their vastly different levels of  critical self-consciousness about the specificity of their own geographies, and ambivalence about the  relation, analytically and politically, between transnational and place-based or more localized feminist practices. To what extent does the ubiquitous use of the transnational to describe any feminism working across cultural difference obscure geographic difference, within and among transnational feminist networks? Furthermore, to what extent are many iterations of transnational feminism actually metropolitan feminisms, now thoroughly internationalized and multicultural, which are projecting themselves globally? Or to what extent are they constituted by activists rooted in and defined by the specificities of different world regions and the struggle for communicability and collaboration across difference? Exploring the question of the relation of  place-based “women’s” movements and women’s/gender/feminist activism in mixed movements to  transnational feminisms of the WSF would be one way to identify, analyze and assess different emergent practices and understandings of the transnational in contemporary feminism and their political import.

            Feminisms manifest themselves across the myriad issues and sectors apparent in any single Forum event, appearing in many guises and languages, in regionally- and culturally-specific ways, and in a vast array of “grassroots” as well as institutionalized, localized as well as transnationalized, expressions. Developments at the WSF signal a deepening and widening diffusion of feminist concerns, broadly conceived, through the groups and movements  arrayed against neoliberal globalization and for another possible world. We feminists can “generate new dialogues across our differences and ... explore the possibilities of common projects and larger coalitions--both among ourselves and with other progressive movements.” (Santiago 2004, 9). The World Social Forum needs feminism and feminists need initiatives like the World Social Forum to make another world possible.

References

Aloo, Fatma. 2007. Interview with author. Nairobi, Kenya, 19 January.

Alvarez, Sonia, Nalu Faria, and Miriam Nobre. 2004. “Another (Also Feminist) World is Possible: Constructing Transnational Spaces and Global Alternatives from the Movements.” In World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman. New Dehli: Viveka Foundation.

Articulación Feminista Marcosur, et.al. 2007. Another World is Possible in Diversity: Affirming the Struggle for Sexual and Reproductive Rights. An open letter to the International Council of the World Social Forum. Nairobi and Lima: Programa de Estudios sobre Democracia y Transformacion Global. Http://www.cadtm.org/article.php3?id_article=2473

.

Articulación Feminista Marcosur. 2002. Declaración Política Sobre los Fundamentalismos.

Burrows, Nancy. 2005. “World Peace is Possible.” In Women in Resistance: Experiences, Visions and Proposals, ed. Irene Leon. Quito, Ecuador: Agencia Latino Americana de Informacion.

Celiberti, Lilian. 2002. Metaforo, Documento de la Articulación Feminista Marcosur. Montevideo: Articulación Feminista Marcosur.

Celiberti, Lilian, and Virginia Vargas. 2003. “Feministas en el Foro.” Revista Estudo Feministas 11(2, julho-dezembro): 586–98.

Chejter, Silvia, and Claudia Laudano. 2003. “Feministas y Feminismos en el II Foro Social Mundial de Porto Alegre.” Revista Estudos Feministas 11(2, juilho-dezembro): 576–85.

Conway, Janet. 2004. “Place Matters: India’s Challenge to Brazil at the World Social Forum.” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 36(3, June): 357–60.

Conway, Janet. 2005. “The Empire, the Movement and the Politics of Scale: Considering the World Social Forum.” Towards a political economy of scale. York University, Toronto, Canada, 3–5 February. Http://www.carleton.ca/polecon/scale/conway.rtf.

Conway, Janet. 2007a. “Reflections on the 3rd International Feminist Dialogues: Notes from a Newcomer.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8(3, April): 211–13.

Conway, Janet. 2007b. “Transnational Feminisms and the World Social Forum: Encounters and Transformations in Anti-Globalization Spaces.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8(3, April): 49–70.

Correa, Sonia. 2003. “Abortion is a Global Political Issue.” A DAWN Supplement for the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 23–28 January 2003, January.

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). 2003. DAWN Informs: World Social Forum.

Duddy, Janice. 2004. “How is a Gendered Perspective Being Placed on the Agenda of the 2004 World Social Forum? An Interview with Carol Barton, Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ).” Association for Women’s Rights in Development.

Dufour, Pascale. 2005. “The World March of Women: First Quebec, Then the World?” Claiming Citizenship in the Americas, 27 May.

Gandhi, Nandita, and Nandita Shah. 2006a. “Inter Movement Dialogues: Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges.” Development 49(1): 72–76.

Gandhi, Nandita, and Nandita Shah. 2006b. “An Interactive Space for Feminisms.” Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

Gouws, Amanda. 2007. “Ways of Being: Feminist Activism and Theorizing at the Global Feminist Dialogues in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2005.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8(3, April): 28–36.

Jones, Rochelle. 2005a. “The Feminist Dialogue: ‘Multidimensional Identities and Internal Diversities’.” Association for Women’s Rights in Development, 18 February.

Jones, Rochelle. 2005b. “Feminist Dialogues: Multidimensional Identities and Internal Diversities.” Development 48(2): 53–56.

Jones, Rochelle. 2005c. “What Opportunities and Challenges Have Emerged from the Recent 2005 Feminist Dialogues? An Interview with Lydia Alpizar, Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID).” Association for Women’s Rights in Development, 18 February.

Kinoti, Kathambi. 2006. “The Feminist Dialogues at the Bamako Social Forum: An Interview with Roselynn Musa, African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET).” Association for Women’s Rights in Development, 10 February.

Kirk, Alejandro. 2007. “Left, Right, Old and New: Time to Get Real?” Terraviva 1 (22 January):3.

León, Irene. 2002. Challenges for Feminism in a Globalized World. Quito, Ecuador: Agencia Latinoamericana de Información.

León, Irene. 2005. “World Social Forum: Discussions and Gestures of Diversity.” In Women in Resistance: Experiences, Visions and Proposals, ed. Irene Leon. Quito: Agencia Latino Americano de Información.

Matte, Diane. 2005. Interview with author. Montreal, Quebec, 28 November.

Mtetwa, Phumi. 2007. Interview with author. Nairobi, Kenya, 24 January.

Santiago, Mari M. 2004. “Building Global Solidarity Through Feminist Dialogues.” Women in Action. Http://www.isiswomen.org/pub/wia/wia2–04/mari.htm.

Sen, Jai. 2004. “How Open? The Forum as Logo, the Forum as Religion: Scepticism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will.” In World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman. New Dehli: Viveka Foundation.

Vargas, Virginia. 2003. “Feminism, Globalization and the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement.” Cultural Studies 17(6): 905–20.

Vargas, Virginia. 2004. “WSF 3 and Tensions in the Construction of Global Alternative Thinking,” ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman. New Dehli: Viveka Foundation.

Vargas, Virginia. 2005. “Feminisms and the World Social Forum: Space for Dialogue and Confrontation.” Development 48(2): 107–100.

Vera-Zavala, America. 2004. “The World Women’s Forum.” Open Democracy, 31 January.

Wilson, Ara. 2007. “Feminism in the Spaces of the World Social Forum.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8(3, April): 10–27.

Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice. 2003a. “A Dialogue for Building Movement for Economic Justice, Peace and Women’s Rights.” World Social Forum Reports: Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID).

Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice. 2003b. Women’s Voices from Porto Alegre, 25 January. Http://www.wicej.addr.com/wsf03/ accessed 24/2/03.

World March of Women -- Globalization and Alliances Collective. 2005. “Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement: A Strategy Debate.” In The World March of Women in the Social Forum Process--CD ROM. Montreal, Quebec.

World March of Women. 2003a. World March of Women Newsletter, August.

World March of Women. 2003b. World March of Women Newsletter 6, no.1 (February).

World March of Women. 2004. “Perspective of Women of the World March of Women: Declaration at the 2003 World Social Forum.” In World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation.

World March of Women. 2007. “World Social Forum -- Nairobi 2007: Change Women’s Lives -- Change the World.” World March of Women Newsletter 10, no.1 (May).