Transnationalism and Women of Color Courses: Diversity, Curricula, and New Pedagogies of “Race”

This essay argues for new pedagogies of “women of color” courses in light of the “transnational turn”1 of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGS) departments in the U.S.2 I use the transnational turn in WGS to refer to the increased presence of scholarship about/on contexts outside the U.S.—specifically, a narrowly defined “third world”—and, by extension, the hiring of faculty from these contexts.3 These contexts, as they stand in WGS, include South and Southeast Asia, most of Africa, Central America, and parts of the Middle East and of Latin America that are understood as non-Western in their cultural and political ecologies.4 Broadly, the transnational turn in academic disciplines can be best understood as methods and theoretical frameworks that introduce new ways of understanding subject formation, cultural production, and political engagement. These revisions challenge the presumption of the West’s centrality in academic research questions by complicating traditional Western comparative methods, models, and theories that produce/d limited West-centric views. Within WGS more specifically, the transnational turn has led directly to interrogations and re-theorizations of what constitutes feminism, who the feminist subject is, whether universal gender oppression and universal patriarchy are viable conceptual models, and whether certain feminist research methods are liberatory, or, in fact, deeply implicated in uneven power relations. Initially, women of color courses addressed the absence of race as a crucial factor in considerations of gender within WGS (Moallem); since the 1990s, transnational inquiries entered the curriculum to introduce the “non-West” as yet another epistemological corrective to feminist inquiries of race that were, up to then, West-centric, as we see in the case of women of color inquiries. However, just as “women of color” came to be associated with nonwhite women5— not a stretch given the identity political history of the term in the U.S.—transnational scholarship, too, has come to be explicitly and implicitly marked as “race” research, and transnational women faculty6 as “women of color” faculty. This