Feminisms in Asia : introduction

The contentious global history of modernity, and `our’ (call it `Asian’ for the moment) difficult and unequal relationship with the `West’, impinge on the claim to international solidarity made by post-1970s feminism, a claim articulated both in and out of western locations, although for different reasons. Often, even a radical internationalist claim has led, in non-western societies, to the branding of local feminisms as alien and intrusive by hostile forces on both left and right. A com- mon response by feminists was to trace the indigenous genealogies of contemporary feminism; but such an enterprise, focusing as it did on the subject of `women’, tended not to address the complex formation of gender-identity in its relation to class, caste, race, ethnicity, religious community, etc