Transnational

The scholarship of transnational feminisms is organized by arguments about even its most basic terms and ethical orientation. Some scholars write that it is an exciting, positive intervention that replaces a hackneyed and unsustainable notion of international female sameness as “global sisterhood” (i.e., Morgan 1984), restores socialist feminism to its rightful place in feminist thought, re-centers US Third World feminism and internationalist solidarity for decolonization, and draws attention to the often brilliant activism of feminists in the global South focused on issues like food justice and water (Mohanty 1984; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kaplan and Grewal 1994; Basu 1995; Das Gupta 2006; Swarr and Nagar 2010; Blackwell 2014). Others mistrust it on opposite grounds: it is liberal, Western, white, and through nongovernmental organization (NGOs), private foundations, and even explicit alliance, linked to international organizations (IGOs) such as the World Bank, to globalizing capital, and imperial militaries (Spivak 1996; Alvarez 2000; Fernandes 2013). These two positions, although sometimes opposed to each other, might also both be true: global capitalism and imperial ambition could be the conditions of possibility for transnational feminisms, from below or even alongside (Naples 2002)