Abstract
Gül Çalişkan’s edited volume Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender: Postcolonial Perspectives is an interdisciplinary anthology that offers theoretical insights and case studies at the intersections of gender and global studies, guided by decoloniality as its lens. In centering Black, Indigenous, and queer of color feminisms, it crucially interrupts the modernist, monocultural logics that typify the ever-emerging and evolving field of globalization studies, and it takes feminist studies in a decisively antiracist and anti-imperialist direction.
Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender is divided into six parts that include twenty-three chapters and an introduction to the volume. I recommend this anthology for use in upper-division undergraduate courses. Its conceptual frameworks are rich, and chapters do assume basic knowledge of feminism, racism, imperialism, and transnational capitalism. Each chapter begins with a “Learning Objectives” box and concludes with a “Call to Action” box, discussion questions, suggestions for further readings, and multimedia, the latter of which will enhance classroom learning, discussion, and collective action. The volume also includes a glossary of key concepts.
Part I (“Global Studies, Feminism, and Gender Analysis”) offers strong theoretical grounding for the anthology. Its decolonial pulse is conveyed powerfully in the first chapter by Anna M. Agathangelou, who unsettles Eurocentric conceptual systems within global studies (e.g., capitalism, modernity, and the nation-state) by unmasking the racial, gender, and colonial violence that produced them. In interrogating the making of “global studies,” Agathangelou reviews the work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who argued that lynching was fundamental to the making of white supremacy, global capitalism, and U.S. empire and that protecting white femininity was its imperial alibi. She then examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s scholarship in a further excavation of the racialized and gendered violence of colonization and enslavement that underlies the creation of global modernity and thus global studies. This opening chapter invitingly upends liberal/imperial logics within feminist and global studies by reintroducing readers to the importance of both Wells-Barnett and Du Bois’s ideas for rethinking “the global.”
By focusing on settler colonialism, Lina Sunseri argues that for Indigenous peoples, modernity has been created through centuries of land dispossession, cultural genocide, and gendered colonial violence. Sunseri exposes readers to the effects of settler colonialism on Indigenous women and points toward Indigenous peoples’ pursuit of healing journeys rooted in movements to decolonize policies, laws, and western patriarchal culture within settler societies. Analyses of queerness, homonationalism, whiteness, and white supremacy in the next two chapters in Part I of this volume further equip readers with theoretical tools for moving through the subsequent examinations of religion, militarization and war, climate change and injustice, governance, extractive capitalism, sterilization, identity, belonging, and more.
Part II (“Gender, Christianity, and Modernity”) offers readers historical grounding in religion, racism, and gender relations. Laura Stokes presents an understanding of the rise of witch hunts from early modern Europe up to the contemporary moment, as forms of collective persecution of an imagined evil other. Ruth A. Clowater sketches how Christianity became a religion of empire, complicit in the colonization of the Americas, and an instrument of white supremacy and patriarchy, aided by such myths as the Doctrine of Discovery and the Curse of Ham. As with all chapters in this collection that point to alternatives, Clowater calls for the construction of decolonial, inclusive theologies.
In Part III (“Gender and Development”), a triad of chapters examine Indigenous feminism, gender and development discourses, and precarity and resistance among migrant domestic workers. Deborah McGregor reviews how anti-colonial, indigenous feminism is practiced via three case studies: the 1995 Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women; the 2010 Mandaluyong Declaration, on how Indigenous women are impacted by climate change; and the 2013 Lima Declaration of the World Conference of Indigenous Women. Fariba Solati provides a primer on the history of gender and development studies in its various iterations and shows how postcolonial feminism challenges developmentalism. Denise L. Spitzer analyzes neoliberal globalization, precarity, and resistance, as experienced by migrant domestic workers in Canada and Hong Kong.
Part IV (“Gendering Politics: Militarism, Violence, and Security”) explores crises of militarization across the world. Jasmin Hristov traces how capital accumulation has been secured over centuries through racial, gender, and class violence in Latin America. She then explores sexual violence, femicide, and the subversive organizing of women, from Berta Cáceres to the Zapatistas. Vanessa Lynn Lovelace and Heather Turcotte analyze the coloniality of surveillance and call for abolitionist imaginaries and an antiracist feminist concept of “freedom trails,” sites where the colonized create their own place-making and conditions of freedom. Tia Dafnos offers a critique of security studies and criminology, arguing that security discourses, rooted in the colonial encounter, suppress resistance and increase carcerality. Writing that “[A]cademic knowledge production is deeply entangled with practices of imperialism and global capitalism” (p. 223), Dafnos invites readers to critique security discourses by asking, “Security for whom?” Similarly, Colleen O’Manique examines global health security in the context of the Ebola and Zika viruses and asks, “Whose bodies matter?” (p. 232).
Part V (“Bodies of Activism”) traces iterations of decolonial feminist activism—for Black liberation, for intersectional and intergenerational climate justice, and for reproductive justice. These chapters present hopeful, medicinal elements of an anthology that traces the daunting brutalities that persist in our heteropatriarchal, racial-colonial-capitalist societies. This section of the volume ends with a powerful coauthored chapter (by Aleyda Marisol Cervantes Gutierrez et al.) that will be of interest to student activists, as it details student-led movements on university campuses today, emphasizing students’ power to build movements rooted in collective liberation and connected to larger genealogies of antiracist feminist struggle, from Ferguson (United States) to Ayotzinapa (Mexico), Chile, South Africa, and beyond.
To conclude the collection, Part VI (“Narrative as Activism”) examines how literature and storytelling by Black, Indigenous, queer, and diasporic writers and artists respond to gendered colonial violence and thus create social change. Chapters explore how Arab women filmmakers use film as a decolonial force, even as they contend with colonial structures of access and funding (May Telmissany); how academics of color experience and resist the racialized structure of academia (Clelia O. Rodríguez); and a poetic narrative of experiences of colonialism and slavery in Canada (El Jones).
The final chapter in Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender, Sara Ahmed’s “A Killjoy Manifesto,” provides its closing argument, an artful invitation into the discomfort and refusal that are required of decolonial feminist praxis. Ahmed writes, “Manifestos are often disagreeable because they show the violence necessary to sustain an agreement. It is not just that the feminist killjoy has a manifesto. The feminist killjoy is a manifesto” (p. 361). Ahmed’s manifesto reflects the ethos of this collection: one that refuses violence, including that of normative scholarly paradigms. As a whole, the volume’s authors offer feminist analyses of the global that are rigorously antiracist and anti-colonial, making this a collection that moves feminist scholarship in a necessary direction and is in line with contemporary abolitionist movements that increasingly contest liberal, colonial, and carceral feminisms.
Ahmed writes, “There are so many ways to cause a feminist disturbance” (p. 367). Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender, a killjoy manifesto in its own right, disturbs mainstream traditions in global and feminist studies brilliantly. I hope sociologists teaching about globalization, gender, and racism assign it, study it carefully with students, and support their efforts to translate its insights into radical praxis.