SWS 2015 Feminist Lecture

Gender and Social Movements

Like the gendered divisions in the WSF, most scholarship on gender and social movements is primarily by female, feminist scholars and is based on studying women’s movements (e.g., Bahati Kuumba 2001; Einwohner, Hollander, and Olson 2000; Taylor and Whittier 1998, 1999; Whittier 2007; Yulia 2010). For the most part, this scholarship is also by scholars located in the Global North and based on movements in the United States, in particular, and the Global North in general, reproducing unequal geographies. Scholars in the Global South or who study movements in the Global South often do not work within the theoretical frames of social movement literatures in the United States. Their analyses are embedded in literatures of national liberation, revolution, and coloniality and decoloniality, among others. Among them, for example, is the now classic analysis of Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. In it she analyzed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s movements in several countries in the Middle East and South Asia. She demonstrated how women, both elite and subaltern, mobilized around issues ranging from suffrage to safety and poverty within the context of nationalist struggles. The nationalist struggles, primarily led by men, on the one hand sought women’s participation but on the other implored them to focus on independence first. Women, often but not always, acquiesced and found that when freedom came the leaders did not address their issues. Maxine Molyneux’s (1985) analysis of women’s role in the Sandanista revolution in Nicaragua is another such example. She too found that, despite women’s active participation, their issues were subordinated to the revolution and not always accorded primacy even after the revolution. Both attributed this to the nationalist and revolutionary leaders’ and members’ patriarchal assumptions and ideologies about women in society, or the “deep structure” (Rao and Kelleher 2005) of movements and organizations.

More recently, scholars in the Global South and North have observed three other gendered patterns in social movements. First, traditional gender roles are replicated within movements, where women do the “domestic” work of the movement while men do the political work of the movement. For example, in the case of the new left and civil rights movement in the United States, it was the confining of women to the housekeeping work of the movement that led many women to question their role in the movements and to start the second wave of the women’s movement (e.g., Evans 1980). Second, women’s issues are outsourced to women activists and considered secondary, as women activists found in several African, Asian, and Latin American countries and which led them to form autonomous women’s movements (e.g.,Ferree and Tripp 2006; Gandhi and Shah 1991; Maier and Lebon 2010; Tripp et al. 2009). Third, women are marginalized in representation and leadership. For example, Robnett (2000) showed how black women were prevented by the gender hierarchy of black churches and the civil rights movement from taking on formal leadership positions. In response, they developed their own informal or “bridge” leadership, which was key to mobilization and solidarity within the civil rights movement. Similarly, scholars have also noted the marginalization of women in the WSF (e.g., Conway 2013; Eschle and Maiguascha 2010; Karides 2013; Moghadam 2012).

A large-scale collaborative project on gender and global justice movements across the Global North and South undertaken by BRIDGE, a gender and development research and information service based at the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom, identified other challenges and tensions in global justice movements that are committed to gender justice like the WSF (Horn 2013). Among them were integrating feminist perspectives in mission statements and governance structures; implementing these even when they are integrated on paper; creating a culture of women’s rights that addresses the deep structure of patriarchal assumptions and behaviors; continuing the debate about cultural rights versus women’s rights, or the hierarchy of rights, especially in movements that highlight cultural diversity; male defined organizational styles and methodologies; and, most importantly, the resistance of men to participating in feminist workshops and sessions. The gendered geographies of struggles captures some of these challenges, as I show in the next sections.

Never the Twain Shall Meet? Parallel Epistemologies

The WSF has been defined as the movement of movements, globalization from below, counter-hegemonic globalization, and a laboratory of practices for other possible worlds, among others. Most of these monikers highlight its important contributions in terms of new ways of thinking about and working for global justice. From a historical perspective, scholars such as Conway (2013) and Santos (2006) locate it within the emancipatory traditions of Western modernity, an interplay of liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and feminism. While such a perspective often highlights the class struggles of the nineteenth century in Europe, more recently, as Conway (2013) notes, decolonial scholars locate it within the five centuries of indigenous struggles against European colonial rule, as well as within various independence struggles.

Contextually, scholars understand the WSF as a response to the particular political economic realities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the supposed “end of history,” neoliberal capitalism that had been taking shape since the late 1970s spread all around the world, leading to Margaret Thatcher’s infamous “TINA” (There Is No Alternative). It meant a renewed role of the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the newly formed World Trade Organization (WTO). The focus of these institutions was to promote free trade and free movement of capital across national borders, though those borders were intact when it came to the free movement of people. The WB, IMF, and WTO formulated Structural Adjustment Programs that emphasized free trade along with privatization and marketization, which became the conditions for providing loans to countries in the newly independent countries of the Soviet bloc as well as in the Global South.

Such policies were discussed and negotiated at intergovernmental gatherings such as the G-8 summits and at the annual meetings of the WTO, WB, and IMF. Hence, these intergovernmental gatherings became the sites of protest in the 1990s. “The battle of Seattle” in 1999 was a response to the trade negotiations of the WTO. Most of these protests were in cities of the global North and brought together new political actors with new protest repertoires and political cultures savvy in the use of new information and communication technologies, along with the old labor and environment movements (e.g., Conway 2013). In addition to protests at global gatherings, there were also protests in many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America against the Structural Adjustment Programs and the free trade agreements. Among them were the Zapatista uprisings in 1995 in Chiapas, which specifically targeted the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Scholars thus trace the WSF’s genealogy to the protests of the 1990s, primarily the Zapatistas and the Battle of Seattle, and in Brazil locate it within the left movement in general and the Brazilian Workers Party in particular. A recent analysis (Pena and Davies 2014) contends that given the role of the Brazilian businessman Oded Grajew in its founding, the WSF could be seen as “globalization from above” rather than “globalization from below,” and, in fact, it is seen as a product of the very neoliberalism that it opposes. Grajew was trying to introduce social responsibility to the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the economic and political titans, in opposition to which the WSF is modeled. His contacts within the Brazilian left and the Workers Party in particular resulted in the first WSF being organized in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which was controlled by the Workers Party. By this time, however, the party had morphed from its radical movement origins into a more reformist party. Pena and Davies (2014) note that this might explain the contradictions within the WSF between its radical rhetoric and reformist practice.

This genealogy pays little attention to the contributions of women’s movements. Before the protests of the 1990s against neoliberal globalization, in the 1980s women in the Global South were already protesting the impact of Structural Adjustment Programs, which I would argue is not only an important precursor but also a more direct one. Since the advent of Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s, women have been particularly active in opposing them all across the world (e.g., Afshar and Dennis 1993; Beneria and Feldman 1992; Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987; Elson 1988). Their protests, in part, were a consequence of their caregiving roles or “practical gender interests,” which were heavily compromised as a result of these policies. For example, women protested the rise in food prices as government subsidies were eliminated and the public food distribution systems were being privatized. In India there were anti–price rise protests in most major cities during which women took to the streets beating empty thalis (metal plates) with rolling pins; these protests were captured evocatively in Gandhi’s When the Rolling Pins Hit the Streets (1996). These protests brought together poor and lower-middle-class women and often were organized by left parties. In South Africa and the Philippines, these took the form of “bread riots” as people took to the streets demanding basic sustenance (e.g., Tripp et al. 2009). In Argentina and Brazil as well, women protested their inability to feed themselves and their families (e.g., Maier and Lebon 2010).

In addition to such protests, women employed in the “informal sector” also protested their precarious work and pay and often organized into cooperatives and unions, as evident in the example of the Self Employed Women’s Association in India (Rose 1992) and women’s cooperatives in Mexico (e.g., Beneria and Feldman 1992). These poor women already were constructing alternatives to the capitalist formal economy, which was unable to provide a livelihood to poor women without formal education who were considered “unskilled.” Even today there is a large presence of women in global justice movements, in part because neoliberal capitalism has used prevailing patriarchal ideologies to re-create poor women as the ideal worker of the global assembly line who does not have to be paid a family wage.

Beyond genealogy, epistemic gender divisions are visible in two other ways: first, the place of feminist analysis in the WSF charter and texts and in the non-feminist scholarship of the WSF; and second, the intellectual division of labor by gender (i.e., who writes about gender issues in relation to the WSF). In the texts of the Forum and the non-feminist scholarship on the WSF, feminist theories are seldom central. For example, in the Charter, its founding document made up of 14 principles, the first principle begins with gendered language:

The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth. (www.wsf2016.org)

Women do not make an appearance until the fourth principle that addresses the issue of the human rights of all citizens, men and women, and feminist and other movements do not make an appearance until the ninth principle that addresses diversity and plurality of struggles. On one hand, the WSF charter emphasizes its polyvocality by highlighting the struggles of women and racialized peoples including indigenous groups, but on the other hand it segregates them from the capitalist processes of globalization, which continue to be discussed without being informed by these struggles. Thus, its rejection of panciementos unicos, or the monocultural logic of neoliberalism (Santos 2006) rings hollow. And while scholars like Santos and Escobar celebrate the WSF as harbingers of Southern Epistemologies or as an ecology of knowledges, in practice it continues to be dominated by non-feminist Marxist theories.

The place of women, gender, feminism, and women’s movements is uneven and arbitrary in other texts of the WSF. In an analysis of English language public texts produced by the WSF, which are often contested, Wilson (2007) found that engagement with feminist politics was not deep and that often gender, women, and sexuality were subsumed under larger categories, and the language often reflected United Nations non-governmental organization (NGO) liberalism at best. This is ironic in a Forum opposed to neoliberalism.

Given that the major focus of the WSF is the fight against neoliberal globalization and the abundance of anti-racist feminist and queer scholarship on the subject, its integration and absence in the texts of the WSF is incomprehensible. Karides (2013) notes that even if unacknowledged, feminist epistemologies are evident in its commitment to, for example, intersectionality in principles 3 and 14. Why then do they go unacknowledged? Like women’s unpaid labor, feminists’ intellectual labor continues to go unrecognized in non-feminist scholarship. In this literature, scholars such as Arturo Escobar, Boaventura de Souse Santos, Jai Sen, and Immanuel Wallerstein are recognized as theorists of the WSF. Feminists such as Sonia Alvarez, Janet Conway, Nandita Shah, Virginia Vargas, and others, some of whom are even part of the IC, and who have also theorized extensively about it, are seldom mentioned as theorists of the WSF. Their work is cited as a critique of the WSF but is rarely seen as a theoretical intervention about the WSF itself.

With a few exceptions (e.g., Santos 2006), it is feminists, primarily women, who have highlighted this invisibility since the beginning. For example, at the WSF in 2003, fifty women held a “women’s strategy meeting” “under a tree” (Feminist Dialogues 2005, 1) for lack of a better space to discuss this marginalization. This is also true in scholarly literature. For example, in the April 2007 special issue of International Journal of Women’s Studies on “Women’s Bodies, Gender Analysis, and Feminist Politics at Forum Social Mundial,” all 14 articles were written by women. Often, the response to this by members of the IC is that the WSF is self-organized, nonhierarchical, and structureless, and so no one is responsible, but they forget their own role in organizing plenaries and other events, reminding us once again of the tyranny of structurelessness. As an activist from the World March of Women—one of the most prominent and visible feminist presence (http://www.worldmarchofwomen.org)—noted, “We are still a long way from achieving genuine dialogue on the role of women and feminism in the construction of another world (World March of Women 2003, 234, cited in Latoures 2007, 165). Beyond the epistemic realm, such gendered divisions are also visible in the actual spaces of the WSF.

A Room of One’s Own

Pooniah (2009) rightly observes that space is a political actor at the WSF. Given its self-definition as “open space,” one of the debates that has dominated discussions about the WSF is whether it is a space for dialogue and sharing or a movement that seeks to transform capitalist globalization. Therefore, how space is organized and who occupies those spaces not only matters but is also a political act. At the WSF one can think of space in two ways: one is the intellectual/political space of plenaries, workshops, and events; and the other is the organizational space.

The intellectual/political space at the WSF consists of plenaries organized by the IC (and the LOC) and then a myriad of self-organized workshops, panels, and sessions proposed by individuals, organizations, or NGOs. Despite their commitment to alternative methodologies, each WSF is organized like an academic conference. As such, there are the formal events and then the informal and impromptu “spaces of encounter” (Brand 2011), which are equally if not more generative of dialogue and solidarities. The format, however, is one more familiar to middle-class and educated academics and activists conversant in European languages.

In these spaces there are clear gender patterns. In the plenaries and opening and closing sessions organized by the IC and the LOC, most if not all the speakers are men, primarily white and Mestizo in the case of Brazil or elite in the case of India, Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia. Even in declarations and statements emerging from the WSF, most of the signatories are men and, in the case of the Manifesto released in Porto Alegre in 2003, the only woman signatory was a government official not associated with feminist organizing (Wilson 2007). The WSF in Mumbai in 2004 was the most gender equal, with nearly equal representation of women speakers in the plenaries as well as in the number of self-organized sessions that focused on gender issues. As I have noted before (Desai 2008), this was a result of the active participation of women activists in the LOC, some of whom went on to become members of the IC. But this gender parity did not travel with the WSF as it moved to other countries.

Women and women’s issues, however, are much more visible in the self-organized sessions, although as Karides (2013) found, this was not always the case. In the first two WSF, economic themes dominated the program. In 2002 transversal or cross-cutting themes were included to demonstrate commitment to social inequality and diversity. These included patriarchy, casteism, racism, and social exclusions, and religious sectarianism, identity politics, and fundamentalisms. In 2006 transversal themes were reduced to gender and diversity. Sessions that explicitly addressed issues of gender increased from 0 percent in 2001 to 4.8 percent in 2004 (Karides 2013). And even in sessions on gender, the focus was on how women are impacted by globalization rather than a gendered analysis of the political economy and how it impacts men and women in specifically gendered ways. Moreover, an analysis of session titles shows that gender issues are limited to domestic violence, forced migration, trafficking of women, war crimes, and labor market inequalities rather than gender as integral to all issues. Hawthorne (2007) makes a similar observation about lesbian issues based on her experience in Mumbai in 2004, where her attempt to introduce those issues was met with silence. She found the culture of the WSF to be reminiscent of the heterosexist male culture of politics of the 1970s in the United States, leading her to wonder if there had even been a women’s movement.

As the WSF traveled to different places, the spaces for women and women’s issues also changed. For example, Kasinsky (2007) showed how the Forum in Caracas in 2004 included many sessions with an intersectional perspective that brought together issues of gender, class, race, and indigeneity, including an International Tribunal against the patriarchal violence of neoliberalism. At one of the polycentric fora in Bamako, Mali, in 2006 there was a specific site called the Women’s World, which became the focus for discussing women’s issues. But most of the presenters and participants in this space were women. Similarly, in Belem in 2009, which is located at the entrance to the Amazon rainforest, the entire first day was devoted to issues of indigenous rights, which included a focus on indigenous women, though again most of the speakers were men.

Given the academic format of most workshops, the large numbers of poor peasants and urban poor who participate often create their own space outside these sessions. For example, in Mumbai some dalit and hijra groups took over the entire site with their drumming and performances. Usually such performances are confined to specific spaces. In Nairobi, the WSF was held outside the city in a gated sports area and the entrance fee for Africans was set at US$7, where 56 percent of the country exists on less than a dollar a day. Enraged by this exclusion based on ability to pay, youth from the largest slum in Nairobi one day stormed the gates. In both Mumbai and Nairobi, alternative social fora were held in protest of the WSF. Thus, the WSF does not only produce gendered geographies, but, in an ostensibly open space, it also reproduces spatial segregation based on class, language, and abilities.

In response, feminists created alternative spaces. They, however, reproduced a modified academic structure of the WSF. In Mumbai, seven feminist networks ⁴ from around the world organized Feminist Dialogues a few days before the WSF. ⁵ The Feminist Dialogues took place over three days, first with only invited participants and then via an open call for participation. They consisted of plenary sessions, break-out group discussion sections or buzz groups, with a large report back and discussion session. These initially were a response to feminists’ frustration with the lack of feminist representation and visibility at the WSF. Its objectives were

to facilitate interaction between diverse global feminist organizations for strategizing on key issues; to plan an autonomous event around the WSF to raise feminist concerns within the WSF; to build up collective and transparent ways of functioning together as groups and networks; to deepen analysis regarding neo-liberal globalization, fundamentalisms, and militarism from a feminist lens; to learn from one another what feminists are doing; to explore dynamics, contradictions and limitations within global feminism, such as issues of funding, race, class, professionalization; and to highlight diversity of approaches and strategies. (Feminist Dialogues 2005, 6)

Such an ambitious agenda is bound to be fraught given the diverse motivations and objectives of those who attended. Much has been written about these dialogues and their contributions to the WSF (e.g., Conway 2007, 2013; Desai 2008; Moghadam 2012). Here I only want to highlight it as a response of feminists to the gendered geography of the WSF. In this space, activists debated not only how to ensure representation of women and feminist issues in the WSF but also whether the Feminist Dialogues should serve as an autonomous space of dialogue rather than a space to strategize about the WSF. The Feminist Dialogues were conducted at three WSFs in Mumbai, Porto Alegre, and Nairobi. After 2007 these dialogues were discontinued, in part because of lack of funding, but they also were discontinued because the discussions did not seem to serve the original intent. Thus, autonomy has been a pervasive and understandable, but perhaps problematic, response of women’s activists to exclusions in social spaces, as it often reproduces parallel rather than overlapping spaces of struggle. Beyond the Feminist Dialogues, feminists also organized other spaces to highlight the importance of gender issues. For example, in 2005 in Porto Alegre Latin American feminists organized a diversity boat as a space for women activists to socialize and build solidarities.

The organizational space of the WSF is another site where a gendered pattern is visible. Although it sees itself as an open space without hierarchies or an organizing body, to hold large global events does require organization. The primary organizational structure of the WSF consists of the International Council and the Local Organizing Committees. The former makes larger decisions about the site for the next WSF, and engages in fund raising and selecting themes and plenary speakers of the WSF. The initial IC was a self-appointed committee of mostly Brazilian and European men who initially came up with the idea. From the beginning, feminists challenged this male-only club and, given the personal and political connections of Latin American feminists with the Brazilian left, they were able to get some representation for women. When it went to Mumbai, the IC increased its women’s representation in response to the strength of the local women’s movements. Over the years it has sought representation from other countries in the Global South. But it is still a self-selecting group of educated and privileged middle-class men and a few women who have the means to fund their attendance at four annual meetings, held in different parts of the world. Given these and other contradictions and debates about the role of the IC, there was a resolution to dissolve it in 2016. The WSF in Montreal this August was organized by a coalition of local movements and networks. Like the IC, the LOC in various sites has also been dominated by male activists, with the exception of Mumbai, where the LOC had fairly equal representation of women activists. This also represented a successful collaboration between feminists in left movements and autonomous feminists. These spatial divisions are also reflected in the practices of the WSF.

Outsourcing Gender Issues

From the beginning the gendered culture of the WSF, evident in the practices of the “Porto Alegre Men” (Correa 2002), was a source of concern to feminists. As Correa (2002, 70) warned:

Recapturing the imagery of the Davos Man, constructed by the Spanish economist Lourdes Beneria, to portray the subjectivity and politics of globalized capitalism, we fear that in the absence of critical self-reflection, our collective efforts to collectively democratize and transform globalization, may inadvertently result in the materialization of the Porto Alegre Men.

The Porto Alegre Men have materialized and, in my view, that is not from the absence of critical self-reflection, of which there is a fair amount, but from the lack of critical praxis. In particular, my focus here is on the practice of intersectionality in organizing plenaries, events, and workshops. Since most of the events at the WSF are self-organized it is easy for the IC and LOC to cite them as reasons for the lack of intersectional practice, yet that should not have prevented them from organizing such plenaries on their own. In the four WSFs that I attended, none of the plenary speakers, who were not women, addressed in meaningful ways how and why gender issues are integral to global justice. The task of addressing women’s issues always fell to women speakers, and masculinities and men’s issues were seldom presented through a gender lens.

This pattern of outsourcing gender issues is also evident in the self-organized workshops and events. Most of the workshops that had gender in its title were primarily organized by women and focused on women’s issues, and most of the audience also consisted of women. While women participants could be found at other workshops that were not focused on women, that was seldom the case for men. Even in the sessions organized by the World March of Women, which is committed to intersectional organizing of the urban and rural poor, the gender representation is skewed in favor of women.

This was even the case when feminists at the WSF in Mumbai organized the first inter-movement dialogue between feminist, LGBTQ, labor, and anti-racism/dalit movements. It was an effort to practice and encourage intersectional politics. Its aim was to encourage activists of each movement to reflect on how they had impacted and were impacted by the other three movements in their theorizing and praxis. I attended all three inter-movement dialogues in Mumbai, Porto Alegre, and Belem. It is worth observing that it was feminists who organized these dialogues, rather than the IC or other radical non-feminists committed to polyvocality. At all the three inter-movement dialogues the speakers were primarily women, though in two of the three cases there was also one male speaker. But in each country, each with different activists, the outcome was unfortunately the same. Activists spoke about their movement and its history and challenges rather than addressing the questions they were given at the beginning, which involved reflecting on the intersectionality of their theorizing and practice.

At all three sessions, the format was meant to facilitate dialogue as each activist was asked to first present their movement and then to respond to the presentations of the other activists. But in most cases each activist focused more on the first part than the latter. In Porto Alegre, the one male activist cancelled at the last minute leaving the activists to scramble to find another male activist, which they succeeded in doing. Since several of the invited activists were “stars,” often they had to leave after their presentations and hence could not participate in the dialogue. And while the speakers represented more than one gender that was not the case for the audience. In all three dialogues, it was primarily women.

The outsourcing of gender issues to feminists also happens beyond the formal sessions. For example, protests against the instances of sexual harassment and sexism at the various WSFs have primarily been raised by women. An exception to this pattern were the protests initiated by men in Porto Alegre in 2005 when a woman taking an outdoor shower in the youth camp was harassed by police for public nudity. In response, many male activists organized a nude protest. As Sutton (2007) notes, while female public nudity is objectified and part of the patriarchal capitalist culture, male nudity is shocking and the protesters were immediately arrested.

Beyond outsourcing of gender issues, activists and scholars alike have been critical of its purportedly egalitarian open space praxis. A survey of activists from four southern African countries who had attended various African Social Forums and the WSF revealed an important insight. They described the practice of “open space” as a reflection of neoliberal globalization itself with its unaccountable decision making, profound inequality and access to resources, and an imposed and uniform organizational form that fails to consider local conditions (Larmer, Dwyer, and Zeilig 2009). Rigon (2015) and others have similarly noted the lack of internal democracy within the IC and the oppressive consequences of a consensual methodology and structurelessness. They note that it is in the WSF praxis, its modus operandi of apparently decentralized and egalitarian decision making, that it reflects and reproduces aspects of neoliberal globalization. Some even call its practices, particularly of conflict resolution, managerial (e.g., Caruso 2013) and wonder if the WSF, a transnational network of activists, can produce emancipatory global justice.

Towards Emancipatory Global Justice

No one movement, not even a movement of movements, can produce emancipatory global justice. But activists and scholars alike can work towards democratizing our struggles and addressing their gendered geographies. While the gendered geographies help us to see the ways in which gender continues to be problematic for the WSF, there are other inequalities, such as class, that are also at play within the WSF and global justice movements in general. As Doerr (2007) notes about the European Social Forum (ESF), even among women such fora in fact reproduce and normalize hierarchies and inequalities based on class, race, and migration status. She identified four categorizes of women at the ESF: highly educated, professional activists; young and educated anarchist women; activists of migrant networks; and grassroots activists. Not all of these women had the same access to decision-making structures within the ESF. Furthermore, she argues there are “women without”—primarily poor and migrant women—who are unable to even travel as a result of financial or visa and border restrictions. This again affects activists from the Global North differently than those in the South, as a majority of the former either do not need visas or can get them easily while the latter often have to undergo time-consuming and costly efforts to get them. One of the chief criticisms of the recently concluded WSF in Montreal was the denial of visas by the Canadian government to activists from the Global South.

Thus gendered geographies only capture the politics of women who are able to attend the WSF. Like their male counterparts, many of them come from privileged backgrounds or have accrued privilege by being part of institutions that make them familiar with the intellectual, cultural, and political forms of expressions and practices of the cosmopolitan Global North. As Gokal (2013, 1) noted about the 2013 WSF in Tunisia:

Indeed the WSF offers an unique opportunity to hold a mirror up to our movements. . . . What’s reflected back is an immense energy, unyielding hope and incredible diversity. But also uneven power dynamics, patriarchy, conflicts, and historical and contemporary tensions and traumas held within.

The persistence of this is cause for concern as well as for analysis and action. I have offered three possible reasons for this political reality (Desai, forthcoming). First, radical politics in the Global North and elsewhere have yet to find a meaningful way to practice its changing understanding of oppression and emancipation. Most on the left accept the multiplicity of oppressions, that there is no hierarchy among them but rather each constitutes the other. Yet, in practice most movements tend to prioritize one over the other. Similarly, there is a recognition of the importance of process, of nonhierarchical and democratic decision making. Yet, in practice power dynamics reproduce inequalities based on class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability among others. Second, given this history of radical politics, feminist and women’s movements have also chosen the path of autonomy, focusing primarily on women’s issues and thereby inadvertently contributing to this division. The hope for most autonomous women’s movements was that from a position of strength they would be able to better integrate a feminist perspective in other movements. However, that has not always been the case. Third, contemporary neoliberal globalization has co-opted many demands of social movements through the NGOization of politics. This has meant that funding is provided for specific social groups and projects, which also contributes to the gender division of political labor.

But there are also signs of hope. The transnational women’s movements that were galvanized by the United Nations via its Women’s World Conferences from 1975 to 1995 did result in what Kardam (2004) calls a global gender equality regime of laws, policy machineries, and discourses and a global consciousness around gender justice. This consciousness has led many transnational global justice movements to address issues of gender justice. For example, at the behest of internal colleagues and feminists from outside, Amnesty International, one of the major human rights organizations, began to incorporate gender justice in its work (Bhattacharjya et al. 2013). In 1994 it published its first report on women’s rights and set up a division in the organization on gender and human rights. Since then they have increased the number of women in leadership and staff positions and provide all staff with training on gender justice. Such attention to gender justice is also evident in Via Campesina (https://viacampesina.org/en/), which began as a peasant movement of small farmers, indigenous communities, and landless and agricultural workers in Brazil and is now a global movement focusing on access to land, territory, water, and seeds. From incorporating women’s rights in its mission statement to working on women’s rights and issues and ensuring gender parity in organizational structures and decision making, it takes the task of gender justice seriously. It recently launched a global campaign that included men to end violence against women. Yet as Bhattacharjya et al. (2013) note, there is still a resistance among men to participate in gender conscientization.

Closer to home, the various Occupy movements in the United States included feminist general assemblies organized to discuss women’s role in economic justice and issues of patriarchy, heterosexism, and transphobia. In Great Britain, Maiguascha, Dean, and Keith (2016) found that within the new left-wing politics formed in response to austerity—specifically within the Left Unity Party, the People’s Assembly, and Occupy London—there was a “partial and contested” feminist turn in terms of composition, ideas, and practices. They thus challenge the view expressed by Nancy Fraser and Hester Eisenstein, among others, that in the West there has been a disarticulation of socialism and feminism (Rottenberg 2014). In the Global South as well, the collaborative Bridge project mentioned earlier found many attempts to incorporate gender justice within global justice, albeit with varying degrees of success (Horn 2013).

Yet, attempts to move beyond gendered geographies of struggles and toward democratizing global justice movements are already happening. With concerted effort by all to transform the culture, power dynamics, and hierarchies within movements and to develop a politics and praxis that is truly intersectional, perhaps we might achieve timeliness or kairos, “the brief interval in which human freedom may express itself as praxis” (Gatans cited in Voela and Guaraldo 2016, 19).