Rethinking Transnational Feminisms: Political Economy, Geopolitics, and Feminist Solidarities Across Borders

The 2027–28 Pembroke Seminar

Seminar leaders: 
Nadje Al-Ali, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies 
Lingzhen Wang, Professor of East Asian Studies 

This seminar places transnational feminisms at the center of critical inquiry into both historical and contemporary global power structures. Unsettling U.S.-centric theories and dominant conceptualizations, it advances a materially grounded and politically engaged transnational feminist framework that underscores the constitutive role of political economy, geopolitics, and sociocultural formations in producing various forms of inequality across borders. Over the course of the year, the seminar will attend to diverse genealogies, political struggles, and sites of knowledge production to conceive of broad social coalitions capable of challenging entrenched structures of power and (neo)imperial geopolitical arrangements. 

The seminar revisits the theoretical and political histories of transnational feminism, which emerged in the early 1990s amid the expansion of transnational financial capitalism, neoliberal globalization, U.S. Cold War triumphalism, and the rise of global mass culture. Drawing on postmodernist and postcolonial theory, early formulations of transnational feminism concentrated on a critique of dominant narratives of modernity, particularly the modern nation-state, universalism, Eurocentrism, and binary frameworks such as center/periphery and global/local. This orientation casts feminism as a transborder, heterogeneous, and destabilizing set of practices that contest forms of hegemony understood as increasingly diffuse, decentered, and dispersed. 

Despite its continued influence, early transnational feminist frameworks have faced sustained critique. Scholars have questioned the adequacy of postmodern emphases on difference, fragmentation, and decentralization for grappling with the global division of gendered labor, the persistence of structural inequalities under neoliberal capitalism, the enduring force of U.S. imperialism and militarism, and the difficulties of forging political solidarity across national boundaries, particularly across Global North–South divides. Locating capitalism as a central terrain of feminist struggle, Chandra Talpade Mohanty advances an “anticapitalist transnational feminist practice.” Foregrounding material conditions, colonial and imperial histories, and the global organization of labor, wealth capital, and governance, this approach emphasizes the co-constitution of gender with capitalism, racism, militarism, and state power. In Mohanty’s understanding, the “transnational” signals an analytical and political orientation that tracks how power operates across borders while remaining grounded in specific locations, social relations, and historical trajectories.

Highlighting cross-regional perspectives, the seminar interrogates Eurocentric universalism by focusing in particular on Asia, not as a fixed entity but as a historically produced, internally differentiated, and globally conditioned formation. Shaped by overlapping histories of colonialism, Cold War militarization, proxy wars, developmentalism, neoliberal restructuring, and authoritarian governance, Asia offers a vital lens for analyzing the uneven, contested, and often violent processes of global modernity. Asia has played a central role in generating alternative political imaginaries, modes of organizing, and cultural interventions, including anti-colonial internationalisms, Third Worldist solidarities, socialist revolutions, postcolonial developmental experiments, mass cultural formations, and a range of South–South alliances. These histories and practices serve as critical resources for transnational feminist thought, solidarities, and political struggles.

At the same time, the seminar engages with Latin America, Africa, and diasporic populations, as well as North America and Europe. It foregrounds transnational feminisms not only as a method (working across and beyond nation-states), but as a relational and intersectional political project that connects struggles over labor, violence, migration, and bodily autonomy to broader global processes. Engaging cultural practices as sites of both reproduction and contestation, transnational feminism is a site of ongoing conceptual innovation, including speculative, imaginative, and critical work that expands the horizons of feminist inquiry beyond narrowly empirical approaches. Artistic and cultural production—film, visual arts, performance, and digital media—are thus taken up as central sites for reimagining embodiment and political futures. 

A set of guiding questions will orient the seminar’s collective inquiry: What does it mean to theorize feminism today in light of intensifying environmental degradation, geopolitical conflict, religious extremism, and authoritarianism? How do feminist movements navigate tensions between local struggles and transnational frameworks, particularly in relation to state power, NGOization, and imperial rights discourses? The seminar’s dynamic and critically grounded approach to such questions mobilizes empirical, theoretical, and speculative work to inform one another.