Richa Nagar

Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization

Abstract The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we identify several key exclusions in that literature and propose parallel inclusions that a feminist reading of globalization suggests. Our suggested inclusions relate to the spaces, scales, subjects, and forms of work that research on economic globalization has largely neglected. The second section takes up several key themes in the large body of feminist research on global economic processes, which is also largely absent from the economic globalization literature: the gendering of work, gender and structural adjustment programs, and mobility and diaspora. In the final section, we address the implications of feminist epistemologies and methodologies for research on economic globalization. Here we argue for grounded, collaborative studies that incorporate perspectives of the south as well as the north and that construct understandings of place and the local, as well as space and general global processes; we point to the coconstitution of different geographic scales and highlight the need for studies that cut across them. The article demonstrates how a feminist analysis of globalization entails far more than recognizing the importance of gender; it requires substantial rethinking of how to conceptualize, study, and act in relation to economic globalization.

Footloose Researchers, 'Traveling' Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis

When feminist scholars from Western countries come here to do their research, they often try hard to do everything in our local language and idiom. But why is it that when they return to their institutions, they frequently write in ways that are totally inaccessible and irrelevant to us? ... The question of access is not just about writing in English. It is about how one chooses to frame things, how one tells a story ... [Suppose] you tell my story in a way that makes no sense at the conceptual level to me or my community, why would we care what you have to say about my life? (Group discussion with three feminist scholaractivists in Pune, India, July 27, 2000)

Collaboration Across Borders: Moving Beyond Positionality

Discussions about collaborative spaces in postcolonial feminist and geographical analyses have often hinged on questions of positionality, reflexivity and identity, largely in relation to the politics of representation. Such approaches have often led to an impasse, especially in fieldwork-based feminist research, where reflexivity has mainly focused on examining the identities of the individual researcher rather than on the ways in which those identities intersect with institutional, geopolitical and material aspects of their positionality. This kind of identity-based reflexivity does not distinguish systematically between the ethical, ontological and epistemological aspects of fieldwork dilemmas; it also fails to adequately address how our ability to align our theoretical priorities with the concerns of communities whose struggles we want to advance is connected to the opportunities, constraints and values embedded in our academic institutions. This article takes this discussion forward by arguing for a postcolonial and transnational feminist praxis that focuses explicitly and deliberately on (a) conceptualising and implementing collaborative efforts that insist on crossing multiple and difficult borders; (b) the sites, strategies and skills deployed to produce such collaborations; and (c) the specific processes through which such collaborations can find their form, content and meaning. To ground this discussion, I draw upon two collaborative initiatives that I have begun recently in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India.

Women, NGOs and the Contradictions of Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conversation

For the last few years, both of us have grappled with difficult andcomplex issues of empowerment and disempowerment in relation toour respective research projects on women’s grassroots organizationsin several states of India, including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradeshand Uttaranchal. As we exchanged notes over time, we noticed somerecurring themes in our concerns—for example: the ways in which co-option of feminist and empowerment discourse(s) by the main-stream forces have become increasingly vexed questions for thewomen’s movement in India; the problematics associated with “doing”empowerment on the ground at a time when “Southern” women’snongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are becoming increasinglyprofessionalized and globalized; the entanglement of empowermentand disempowerment in poor women’s lives; and the politicalcomplexities associated with engaging in critiques of NGOs that aretrying to empower marginalized women.We thought it would be productive to co-author a paper on theseissues, largely because of the striking silence in academic circles onthese questions at a time when they are being felt and discussed sourgently within women’s NGO networks. However, as we began to putour thoughts on paper, we were struck by the enormous contra-dictions these projects are fraught with, as well as by the ways in whichour own sociopolitical locations as researchers and our ethical andpolitical commitments to different kinds of groups made it impossible

Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating 'Lesbian' Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa

These accounts from India and South Africa demonstrate that contemporary politics of intimacy and survival cannot be approached through frameworks that create a simple binary between the proverbial First and Third Worlds. At the same time they foreground the limitations of feminist theories emerging from Northern academic institutions. Can our existing frameworks adequately represent the struggles of women in same-sex relationships who are located in the most socioeconomically peripheralized areas of the world? Can we analyze the politics of sexuality and intimacy in their lives without diminishing the centrality of neocolonial histories and geographies and their everyday struggles over access to material resources? How if at all can we integrate insights from critical development studies and lesbian studies to address these contradictions and questions? (excerpt)

Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography

As multiple norths emerge in the so-called souths (and vice versa) and non-government organizations (NGOs) become important partners in knowledge production, it becomes imperative for feminist actors to envision new collaborative methodologies that can simultaneously resist the ‘deradicalization of feminist politics’ in the increasingly corporatized academy as well as in the increasingly donor-driven, professionalized, and state-identified NGO sector. Based on an extensive reading of literature on oral history and critical ethnography, this viewpoint identifies four interrelated areas where reflexive interventions by feminist collaborators working across geographical, sociopolitical and institutional borders can advance such a project: rethinking the relationships between processes and products of collaboration; more conscious interweaving of the collaborative theories and methodologies; producing knowledges that can travel across the borders of academia/NGOs/peoples movements; and reimagining reciprocity in collaboration. ¿Colaboración como resistencia? Reconsiderando los procesos, productos, y Posibilidades de una etnografía y Historia oral feminista Mientras que emergen ‘nortes’ múltiples en los así llamados ‘sures’ (y viceversa) y que los organismos no gubernamentales (ONG) se hacen parejas importantes en la producción de conocimiento, resulta imperativa para que los/as actores/as feministas prevean nuevas metodologías colaborativas que puedan resistir simultaneo la ‘de-radicalización de las políticas feministas’ en la cada vez más corporatizada academia así como en los ONGs que son cada vez más profesionalizados y influido por el estado y donantes internacionales. Basado en una lectura extensiva de historias orales y etnografías criticas, ésta punta de vista identifica cuatro áreas entrelazados donde intervenciones reflexivas por colaboradoras feministas a través de fronteras geográficas, institucionales, y sociopolíticas puedan adelantar tal proyecto: repensando las relaciones entre los procesos y los productos de colaboración; más entretejiendo consciente de las teorías y metodologías colaborativas; la producción de conocimientos que puedan viajar a través de las fronteras de academia/ONG/movimientos sociales; y una reimaginación de reciprocidad en colaboraciones.

Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): Women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)

Focusing on an ongoing grass-roots campaign of rural women in North India, this article examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways in which grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visions of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. The article demonstrates how a serious engagement with social spaces in grass-roots activism can enable us to overcome the conceptual gaps in feminist theorizations of empowerment and violence, and to apprehend more adequately the nature, content, and meanings of womens political actions.

Communal Discourses, Marriage, and the Politics of Gendered Social Boundaries among South Asian Immigrants in Tanzania

ABSTRACT Focusing on communal discourses among South Asian groups in Tanzania, the author highlights the manner in which discourses around religion, caste and race shape gendered patterns of migration and marriage and the everyday politics of social boundaries in an immigrant community. The article demonstrates how discursive processes operating at the community level mediate between the household and the broader political economic processes. It also illustrates that although discourses, boundaries and social relations are easily modified in response to changing circumstances, new narratives and ideologies frequently emerge to ensure that the predominant balance of power in a community is not disturbed significantly.

Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism

aWomen’s & Gender studies, university of massachusetts, Boston, mA, usA; bDepartment of American studies & ethnicity, university of southern California, los Angeles, CA, usA; cGeography, university of Georgia, Athens, GA, usA; dohio student Association, ohio state university; eDepartment of Geography, ohio state university, Columbus, oh, usA; fDepartment of politics, ithaca College, ithaca, ny, usA; gGender, Women and sexuality studies, university of minnesota, minneapolis, mn, usA

Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: reflections from a journey

If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their own visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise. This article draws upon 16 years of partnership with activists in India and with academic co-authors in the USA to reflect on how storytelling across social, geographical, and institutional borders can enhance critical engagement with questions of violence and struggles for social change, while also troubling dominant discourses and methodologies inside and outside of the academy. In offering five ‘truths’ about co-authoring stories through alliance work, it reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions.