Transnational FeminismPapers

Roxanne Douglas reconstructs journals, salons, correspondence, and organizing across Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon to place Arab feminist networks inside - not after or outside - the history of feminism’s first wave.

Hochschild explains global care chains through the story of a Filipina migrant nanny: wealthy countries receive care while sending communities absorb care drain and emotional displacement.

Pessar and Mahler move migration studies away from neutral accounts of households or labor flows toward a gendered analysis of power, asking how transnational spaces shape resources, obligations, belonging, and agency.

This 2000 article by leading feminist sociologist Sylvia Walby challenges the dominance of standpoint epistemology and the 'politics of location' in feminist theory. Walby argues that in an era of globalization, feminism needs to move beyond location-based knowledge claims and embrace the power of reasoned argument to make effective universal claims about gender justice. The paper engages critically with postmodern and postcolonial feminist theories that privilege particular standpoints over universal reasoning.

Parreñas's classic article makes global care chains concrete through migrant Filipina domestic workers, showing how care crises in middle-class households are displaced onto women from the Global South while creating new care gaps in sending communities.

Sassen theorizes the feminization of survival, analyzing how debt, restructuring, migration, remittances, and cross-border informal economies shift survival burdens onto poor women.

Gwendolyn Mikell examines how African women’s political struggles are distorted when Western feminist categories or nationalist narratives claim to represent them without attending to material survival and local institutions.

This groundbreaking article critiques Western feminism's discursive construction of 'Third World women,' revealing colonialist tendencies in feminist scholarship. Mohanty demonstrates how Western feminism homogenizes non-Western women as victims, ignoring their agency and diversity, laying the foundation for transnational and decolonial feminist theory.