inappropriate(d) difference: notes on transnational feminist encounters

Abstract

How to foster feminist coalitions across various borders, without flattening out crucial differences that matter? The problem of difference has exercised much critical attention in the field of transnational feminist studies. On the one hand, transnational feminism foregrounds differences and multiplicities, and challenges the exclusion and marginalisation of the other. On the other hand, the investments in certain difference sometimes run the risk of fixing its location and meaning, and producing a seeming impasse for transnational feminist collaboration. As M.J. Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2010, p. 27) ask, ‘can transnational feminist lenses push us to ask questions that are location specific but not necessarily location bound?’.