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Area studies, transnationalism, and the feminist production of knowledge

Signs; Chicago; Summer 2001; Ella Shohat;

Volume: 26
Issue: 4
Start Page: 1269-1272
ISSN: 00979740
Subject Globalization
Terms: Feminism
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Abstract:
Sholat argues that a viable multicultural feminist practice is needed to address the divisions and inequalities produced by mainstream
feminists, area studies, and other academic fields in relation to the study of globalization.

Full Text:
Copyright University of Chicago, acting through its Press Summer
2001

While one can study the position of feminism in the context of the Middle East and Middle Eastern studies, I want to examine some of the
dangers of studying women and gender in isolation, within ghettoized and geographically defined discursive spaces such as area studies.
Throughout my work, I have argued for a relational understanding of feminism, that is, for a nonfinalized and conjunctural definition of
feminism as a polysemic site of contradictory positions. Yet Eurocentric versions of global feminism (not unlike the paradigms that inform
the sociology of modernization, the economics of development studies, and the aesthetics of postmodernism) assume a telos of evolution
toward a reductive identity practice. Performed within the discursive framework of development and modernization, the study of broad and
in some ways fictive entities such as "Middle Eastern women" and "third-world women" reproduces Eurocentric notions of culture under
the sign of global feminism. This approach, to my mind, has become a malady in feminist studies, even in relatively more multicultural and
transnational analytical frameworks. Any serious analysis has to begin from the premise that genders, sexualities, races, classes, nations,
and even continents exist not as hermetically sealed entities but, rather, as part of a set of permeable, interwoven relationships. This kind of
relationality is particularly significant in a transnational age typified by the global traveling of images, sounds, goods, and populations. In
arguing for a multicultural/transnational feminism that is alive to the conditions and concerns of this new moment, I would ask us to rethink
the Eurocentric identity designations, intellectual grids, and disciplinary boundaries that have produced such figures and discourses as third-
world women and Middle Eastern studies.

Eurocentric definitions of feminism have cast "third-world" women into a fixed stereotypical role, in which they play the part of passive
victims lacking any form of agency. Within standard feminist historiography, for example, "third-world women's" involvement in
anticolonialist struggles has not been perceived as relevant for feminism. Since the anticolonialist struggles of colonized women were not
explicitly labeled "feminist," they have not been "read" as linked or as relevant to feminist studies. A certain strain of feminism has
privileged a specific narrative that revolves exclusively around European and Euro-American feminist trajectories and that is cast
exclusively around terms of sexual difference. Yet, the participation of colonized women in anticolonialist and antiracist movements did
often lead to a political engagement with feminism. However, these antipatriarchal and even, at times, antiheterosexist subversions within
anticolonial struggles remain marginal to the global feminist canon. In my work, I have reread the activism of third-world women
throughout the period of colonization and decolonization as a kind of subterranean, unrecognized form of feminism and, therefore, as a
legitimate part of feminist historiography. Recognizing invisible feminist histories works against the Eurocentric legacies of area studies
and global feminism to rearticulate the spaces, moments, and subjects of feminist studies.

These legacies have led to the well-intentioned but problematic women's studies curricular response to "international" or "multicultural"
lacunae within what I call the sponge/additive approach. In this approach, paradigms that are generated from a U.S. perspective are
extended onto "others" whose lives and practices become absorbed into a homogenizing, overarching feminist master narrative. This kind of
facile additive operation merely piles up newly incorporated groups of women from various regions and ethnicities -- all of whom are
presumed to form a separate and coherent entity, easily demarcated as "difference." This form of multiculturalism and internationalism
undergirds most global feminism.

It is in this context, then, that I resist the temptation of asserting the "Middle East" as a unified category of analysis about which the expert
intellectual is expected to produce knowledge that adds her "other" culture to a preexisting nucleus. I am critical of the move to
gerrymander knowledge into categories of imagined spaces corresponding to isolated regions and areas of the globe. We should pay
attention in particular to the ways that universities erect disciplinary borders to maintain conceptual boundaries that continue to reproduce
the discursive quarantine of fields of inquiry. The majority of women in the world can only be found in the margins of most curricula,
fenced off into the Bantustans called area studies. Middle Eastern studies often implies that women in the region are somehow not affected
by U.S. agendas and policies or that there are no women from the region who live in the United States. That is, area studies erases the
historical and discursive links between regions. Elsewhere (1999) I have argued that the "Americas" and the "Orient" are connected prior to
the formation of contemporary geopolitics; that American colonial discourse did not add on orientalist discourse but was itself constituted
by it; and that the colonial discourse of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East and South Asia generated a specific form of orientalist
discourse directed at North Africa and West Asia during the later part of the imperial era. My point in making such spatial and temporal
links is to reimagine the study of regions and cultures in a way that transcends the conceptual borders inherent in the global cartography of
the cold war.

Feminist studies is diacritically defined by its relation to the various disciplinary configurations with which it engages. On the one hand, it
engages with area studies, whose origins lie in cold war containment policies. On the other hand, it engages with ethnic studies, whose
origins lie in minority activism in a single nation-state -the United States. Yet, ironically, despite the progressive genealogy of ethnic
studies, it too has neglected to engage with transnational analysis. Even within the critical space of ethnic studies, we tend to find an
implicit and almost invisible U.S. nationalism. Although nationalism is often seen as a specifically third-world malady, it is no less relevant
to ethnic studies as well as to feminist and queer movements in the United States. If one reviews most women's studies curricula, one can
easily detect a submerged North American nationalism. In this context, ethnic studies and women's and gay and lesbian studies can deploy a
largely unconscious, nationalist exceptionalism. While I have no quarrel with the idea of U.S. uniqueness, I do quarrel with the idea that
uniqueness belongs to the United States alone. And such an approach erases the historical parallels and global links among different
national formations. The implicit nationalism of many multicultural, feminist, and gay and lesbian curricula can lead us to miss numerous
opportunities for relational analyses and for cross-disciplinary and transnational connections.

The concept of relationality that I am calling for should not be confused with cultural relativism. Although the concept of relationality goes
back to structuralism, I am using it in a translinguistic, dialogic, and historicized sense. The project of a relational multicultural feminism
has to be situated historically and geographically as a set of contested practices. Thus, one of the challenges facing relational feminism has
to do with the translation of ideas from one context to another. For example, questions of race have historically been less central in the
Middle East and North Africa, where the operative terms have tended to concern religion. A feminist scholar has to negotiate responsibly
these diverse contexts of reception to intervene in the interstices of conjunctural semantics.

Relational, multicultural feminism goes beyond a mere description of discrete regions and cultures. It transcends the additive/sponge
approach, which simply parades the women of the globe in a UN-style "family of nations" pageant. Thus, to have a truly relational analysis,
we would have to address the operative terms and axes of stratifications typical of specific contexts along with the ways these terms and
stratifications are translated and reanimated as they travel from one context to another. Issues of class, nation, religion, gender, and sexuality
all meet and contest at these intersections. But, rather than lead us into immobility, such articulations of contradictions help us chart the
conflictual positioning of women in the contemporary world. We must look for ways in which our variegated pasts and presents parallel and
intersect, overlap and contradict, and analogize and allegorize one another to place contested perspectives in dialogical relation within,
between, and among cultures, ethnicities, and nations. In sum, it is crucial to place the often-ghettoized histories, geographies, discourses,
and disciplines in the political and epistemological synergy of relational feminism.

[Reference]
Reference

[Reference]
Shohat, Ella. 1999. "Taboo Memories and Diasporic Visions." In Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink, 131-56.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[Author note]
Ella Shohat

[Author note]
About the Contributors

[Author note]
Ella Shohat (shohat@postbox.csi.cuny.edu) is professor of women's studies and media studies at the City University of New York Graduate
Center and Staten Island. She has lectured and published extensively on the intersection of postcolo

[Author note]
nialism, multiculturalism, and gender. Her books include Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1989), the award-winning Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, coauthored with Robert Stam (New
York: Routledge, 1994), (as coeditor) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Post-colonial Reflections (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), and Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). Her
work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, and Turkish.

[Author note]
Women's Studies Program
Media Culture Program
City University of New York

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