Global feminisms is a burgeoning field of scholarship struggling to catch up with a century of feminist and women’s interests and activism. Global feminisms is an important area of inquiry in feminist research in all disciplines where feminism has a presence. Why feminisms? Global feminisms is the study of feminisms from around the world, of feminisms transnationally, and of global politics through feminist lenses. Some feminisms defy geography; some are hyperconscious of geopolitics. The field is dynamic and at its best transdisciplinary. But it is a field with its own history of power. By referring to “feminisms”, we mean to be committed to noting the potential for power to obfuscate or silence difference.
Scholars in the field work on boundaries associated with sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, geography, identity, and membership. They are attentive to silence and marginalization, to citizenship politics (including migration, refugees, rights, and participation), to political economy (formal and informal), to society and culture, and to the environment (understood as the places where we live, work, play, and pray). Global feminist scholarship is making important contributions to many fields of study and to many ways of living.
In this course we will focus on theoretical insights – some coming explicitly from women thinking theoretically themselves, others coming from our theoretical reflections about the empirical insights of feminists. More specifically, we will focus on the ways in which systems of power – race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, imperialism, genocide, slavery, and health – are interrelated. We will do our best to challenge our own epistemologies and to use epistemology that is self-consciously reflective of its own incompleteness. (This is humility as scholarship and, combined with attentiveness to silences and marginalization, the core of a global feminist research ethic.) We will seek out ways of making ourselves know that which we cannot see or hear. We will challenge ourselves to find the empirical evidence for or against the generalizability of certain observations. And we will challenge ourselves to know the stories of people who are otherwise lost in statistics.
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