Troubling the Southern turn in feminisms

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation (SANGAT) to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial, and recent global forces, as well as in conversation with discourses and practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and draws upon local as well as transnational feminist theories and methodologies to enable sustainable collaborations for social and gender justice in the region. Thus, rather than reproducing the North/South binaries with its attendant erasures SANGAT seeks to go beyond them to develop place-based yet connected ‘solidarities of epistemologies’ and praxis.

Keywords

Beyond North/South feminist imaginaries SANGAT Southasian transformatory feminist praxis

Even as some feminists from and located in the Global North attempt to decenter the hegemony of their knowledge and power by turning to radical possibilities in the Global South, they often do so by reproducing binaries and erasures in both the North and South. For example, the Call for Papers for this special issue says:

It is therefore not by coincidence that a broad variety of radical feminist ideas and activities emerge from the Global South, where transformation has always been central to theories and praxes of feminisms. Southern perspectives on global capitalism and world politics provide pivotal analyses on how unequal gender relations and intersectional oppressions are enmeshed in local and global realities. They bring to the forefront fundamental questions of global justice that tend to be disregarded in Western feminisms.

Yet, the emergence of Indigenous feminisms and Black Lives Matter shows that radical feminist ideas also emerge in the Global North, cautioning against monolithic conceptions of both the North and the South. Nor is transformation central to all Southern feminist theories and praxes and neither do they all grapple with gender and intersectional oppressions enmeshed in local and global realities. The challenge of Adivasi and Dalit feminisms in India and Afro-Latina feminists in Latin America are just two cases that call into question such a premise. Similarly, claims of global justice are not universally disregarded in Western feminisms.

Even prior to Black Lives Matter and Indigenous feminisms, women of color in the United States had foregrounded global justice in their work. For example, the Third World Feminist Network in the 1970s linked the race and class oppression of Black and Brown women in the United States as tied to the imperialist oppression of subaltern women in the geographic Third World. Disregarding their struggles means ‘Western’ feminisms are understood as white feminism. Similarly, the recent International Women’s Strike in the US, inspired by the feminist strike in Argentina (e.g., De Souza, 2019) was explicitly about global justice and solidarities. Moreover, as Suchland (2011) has asked, where does the East figure in this North/South configuration? And if the South is meant to gesture subalternity as Conway (2018) suggests, then what about the North in the South and the South in the North?

To avoid such metaphors that implicitly divide power and privilege in the North from precarity and powerlessness in the South, we might be better served by drawing upon feminist place-based metaphors and theoretical frameworks that connect rather than divide. A prime example of that is Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘borderlands’ – that in between space which bridges otherwise divided spaces and demonstrates their imbrications. More recently, Grewal and Kaplan (1994), Moghadam (1995), and Mohanty (2003), among others, conceptualized transnational feminism to bridge activism across national borders in the era of contemporary globalization. Yet, as Fernandes (2013) shows, transnational feminism produces its own regime of visibility, which highlights the more globalized spaces and discourses and overlooks the local. More importantly, given its emergence in the US academy, it is defined in part by a ‘territorially bound concept that interacts with and marks the world in particular ways’ (Fernandes, 2013: 122–123).

Nira Yuval-Davis’s transversal politics (1999) and Connell’s (2015) solidarities of epistemologies try to avoid such spatial and hierarchical limitations by framing epistemologies and politics as conversations of mutual learning across borders. Yuval-Davis (2015) notes that the aim of transversal dialogues is:

. . . to create a common epistemology of particular practices, often conflictual, across borders and boundaries. . . . Using the tools of what Italian feminists have called ‘rooting’ and ‘shifting’, i.e., being self-reflective regarding one’s own positioning and yet attempting to understand the situated gazes of the other participants, the resulting common transversal epistemology is used as a basis for a political solidarity. (Yuval-Davis, 2015: para 18)

According to Connell (2015), solidarity-based epistemologies move away from centering either the North or the South and articulate a conversation between different knowledge systems, each with its own specificity. She defined this as an alternative to current models that are in her view either pyramidal with Northern theory at the top in which scholars from the South can participate but on terms set by the North or the Mosaic in which separate knowledge systems coexist, where each is recognized as valid but there is no conversation between them. Her solidarity-based epistemologies, by contrast, are mutual learning based on critique because ‘education always requires active engagement and evaluation’ (Connell, 2015: 61).

Informed by these scholars I show how the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation (SANGAT) is one example of organizing beyond the North/South divide. It does so in two ways. One, as the name suggests, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of colonial and recent global forces in the region, as well as in conversation with discourses and practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and avoids celebration of any particular location or perspective. Hence, SANGAT’s imaginaries and practices reflect what Menon (2019) advocates, theorizing from specific locations without making universal claims yet sharing one’s work with feminists elsewhere to connect and engage in a plurilogue (Sohat, 2001) rather than as universal possibilities for social transformation.

South Asian Network for Gender Transformation (SANGAT)

Concretely, SANGAT emerged from a workshop in 1998 for ‘like-minded’ feminists organized by Kamla Bhasin, an Indian feminist, who at the time worked in the FAO-NGO South Asia Program and the Institute of Development Policy Analysis and Advocacy, Bangladesh. But its roots are much deeper. Given the shared colonial context from which the nations of India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh emerged, Gandhi (2006) has demonstrated the existence of a history of affective and political ties in the anti-colonial struggles of the late 19th and early and mid-20th centuries. Solidarities were also forged in the leftist, anti-imperial feminisms in the 1930s and 1940s and later via the Non-Aligned movement beginning in 1955 (Armstrong, 2016).

But the ensuing nationalist struggles and the resulting hostilities among the countries meant that most contemporary feminists, particularly from India and Pakistan, had not met with each other or visited their countries. Yet, they were aware of and often in conversations with women’s movements in the region. However, as Chhachhi and Abeysekera (2014) suggest, there are no direct or linear linkages to this earlier history. Rather there are residues or what they call ‘molecular’ and ‘capillary’ processes through which more sustained formations ensued. The United Nations International Women’s Decade from 1975 to 1985 and the ensuing gender focus of the United Nations and its agencies provided new openings for feminist encounters in the region.

It was such residues and new interactions that inspired 38 women from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan to come together in 1986 in a feminist encounter (Chhachhi and Abeysekera, 2014). For most of them, it was the first time of meeting women from the other nations in the region as travel therein was often restricted due to wars and hostilities, especially between India and Pakistan.

The methodology of sharing personal stories, of including dance and song, and sharing the labor of cooking and eating together facilitated affective ties and the sense of shared histories and struggles leading to a collective consciousness beyond national identities. Over the decades, there have been several such thematic workshops ‘with like-minded women of different generations for our own clarity on common issues in the region.’¹ It was at the 1998 workshop that participants decided to launch SANGAT to address the declining space for gender justice in the age of neoliberal globalization, when gender was being coopted not only by the state and UN agencies but also multinational corporations.

Earlier in 1983, Kamla Bhasin and her colleagues had also launched a South Asian Feminist Capacity Building Course on Gender, Sustainable Livelihoods, Human Rights and Peace to engage local activists, trainers, scholars, and journalists. This course has become SANGAT’s signature program and has been offered annually since then. Over the decades, 750 women have participated in this course. Along with the month-long course, SANGAT also offers two-week courses in Bangla, Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu. Additionally, SANGAT has also engaged in regional and global campaigns over the years to address a variety of issues, some specific to the region such as Women’s Manifesto for Political Parties in Bangladesh and India, while others more global such as the One Billion Rising campaign against violence against women.

Below I show how SANGAT’s Southasian feminist imaginaries and the courses and campaigns go beyond the North/South divide to provide an example of place-based yet connected feminist organizing.

Southasian feminist imaginaries

Chhachhi and Abeysekera (2014: 5) ‘use the term Southasian (merging the two words) to refer specifically to processes and interventions articulating this new identity,’ differentiating it from South Asian used by most feminists who write about the region from a national perspective. In this they are inspired by Himal, the ‘first and only’ news and analysis magazine, which notes:

South Asia signifies a geographical placement of the region, a name given to us by others. We can convert this to our own purpose by keeping the spelling of our region as Southasia – a name we can clutch closer to our hearts and an identity we can all create together. (Himal, 2011 cited in Chhachhi and Abeysekera, 2014: 5)

The regional, as an epistemically and politically generative space akin to ‘borderlands,’ has been central to feminist thinking in many parts of the world as evident in the works of Anzaldúa (1987), Alvarez et al. (2016), and Suchland (2011). Anzaldúa defined her experience of traversing the Texas–US Southwest/Mexican border as a process of negotiating differences. This spatial identity becomes a metaphor for the possibilities and the challenges underlying feminist solidarity projects. Anzaldúa observed that while these borderlands create spaces of confluence, they are not devoid of cultural and racial hegemonies, which leads to disharmony, discontent, and disillusionment. Similarly, the Latin American Encuentros that began in the 1980s were for decades a site of both contestations and solidarity for connections and struggles beyond the nation-state.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, feminists and other international scholars saw the regional as representing earlier colonial and later Cold War configurations and starting in the early 1990s conceptualized transnational feminism, which continues to hold sway. But as many scholars, e.g., Conway (2018), Desai (2015), Fernandes (2013), and Mendoza (2002), have shown, while it was meant to critique the problematic of the nation-state and forge solidarities of difference across borders, it has contributed to its own biases and limitations, what Fernandes (2013) calls a regime of visibility, where only certain cross-border sites and spaces – such as export processing zones and multinational corporations – gain legitimacy not only for feminist analysis but also for praxis and action, thereby producing a ‘limited geographical imagination,’ which downplays the role of the state and local forces.

SANGAT’s Southasian, then, recuperates those earlier feminist imaginaries but also avoids the limitations of transnationalism that Fernandes highlights and gestures to future possibilities, based on the millennial long flows in the region. This regional framework emerged concretely from a workshop held in 1989 in Bangalore, India that brought together 23 women from South Asia to reflect on feminism in the region, its relationship to other movements, and to develop a Southasian perspective (SAFD, 1989: 1). Thus, as Chhachhi and Abeysekera (2014) note, even before the formation of SANGAT, there was the development of a Southasian consciousness among feminists in the region and since then there have been many such regional, feminist networks.

This Southasian imaginary can be traced through three declarations – the South Asian Feminist Declaration (1989), the South Asian Feminist Re-Declaration (2006), and the Feminist Vision for a People’s Union of South Asia (2010) (www.sangatnetwork.org) – one that precedes the formation of SANGAT and two that follow it. The first declaration emerged from the workshop in Bangalore in 1989, mentioned above, that was organized specifically to develop such a regional perspective. The second one was a response to the seismic changes of neoliberal globalization, entrenchments of religious fundamentalisms, and increased militarization in the region, while the last one was a response to regional activists’ call for a People’s Union of South Asia in contrast to the primarily trade and economics-based intergovernmental body, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Thus, Southasian is not a fixed imaginary but is responsive to the changes in the region and in the world.

The first declaration focused on the need for a Southasian perspective. It begins:

Divided by geopolitical boundaries, we are all bound together by a common South Asian identity. This identity expresses itself in the linkages we have with each other and in the struggles each of us is involved in within the women’s movement in our respective countries. These links have strengthened us individually and have led to a growing sense of regional identity. Today in the context of the contemporary sociopolitical environment we feel it is imperative to develop and further strengthen a South Asian perspective for women’s liberation in the region. This declaration is an expression of our personal/political commitment to a broad based South Asia feminist platform and a call for support to strengthen such a platform. (SAFD, 1989: 1)

This regional identity has emerged over millennia as people, ideas, and goods moved and mingled in the region, leading to shared ways of eating, dressing, singing, and storytelling as well as kinship and social structures. Added to these flows are also histories of imperial and colonial rules that have imposed common institutional and legal structures. Despite these commonalities, each nation-state is also extremely diverse, despite the efforts of recent political and religious leaders to portray a monolithic culture. What SANGAT’s Southasian imaginary highlights is the need for linkages to strengthen feminisms in the region embracing the diversities in their efforts to work for gender transformation.

The primary impetus for this imaginary is not only the common history but also the common issues and struggles, which can best be addressed by collective collaborations across borders that seek to divide people across national borders. And it is these efforts at divisions in the context of neoliberal globalizations, religious fundamentalisms, and increased military spending across the region that led SANGAT to rededicate themselves to this common regional imaginary through cross-border linkages and connections.

Thus, the 2006 Declaration states:

Our situations have changed significantly since we first came together as South Asian feminists to create a common platform for our activism . . .

A new configuration of power relations at international, national and local levels has emerged in the last two decades. Globally the US imperial design has led to the breakdown of the UN system and undermining of national sovereignty. Domination by global capital has reinforced the dependence of nation states which have become increasingly brokers for international capitalist interests. . . . Given the present socio-economic-political environment, we feel it is imperative to further strengthen a South Asian perspective for equality and justice for all in the region. This (re-)Declaration is an expression of our political commitment to a broad based South Asian feminist platform. It is a call to all feminists, women’s activists and progressive movements to reaffirm and share this vision for social transformation. (SAFR, 2006: 1)

Recognizing the new corporate global realities, which impinge on all the countries in the region, the Southasian feminist imaginary becomes more expansive, seeking to include all progressive movements who share the vision of social transformation.

Finally, the Feminist Vision for a People’s Union of South Asia bridges the oppositional positions of an intergovernmental Union of South Asia versus a non-governmental People’s Union of South Asia by calling for newer institutional structures that are shaped by ‘Our commitment to radical democracy, participatory and consultative processes of decision-making and to non-violent and negotiated processes of conflict resolution’ (FVPUSA, 2010: 10) for a ‘sustainable, redistributive model of development’ (p. 9).

Beyond a regional spatiality, another important way that SANGAT’s Southasian imaginary goes beyond the Global North/South divide is not only the ways in which they are unapologetically feminist – a ‘label’ that in all the countries in the region is used to target people and activists as ‘Western, anti-men, and anti-national’ – but also the ways in which their understanding of feminisms brings together local and translocal definitions of feminisms reflecting solidarity-based epistemologies. For SANGAT feminism is first and foremost an ‘expression of women in struggle,’ particularly one that is about defining alternatives: ‘alternative ways of living, of building relationships, of an alternative decentralized economy and polity’ (SAFD, 1989: 5).

These alternatives borrow from the region and across the world. For example, their alternative to what they call the ‘political economy of death’ represented by neoliberal globalization, is a sustainable and redistributive model of development informed by local and global struggles from the earliest ecofeminism of Vandana Shiva (1989) and Maria Mies (1986) to more contemporary local Adivasi and peasant conceptions of eco-swaraj such as those articulated by Kothari and Joy (2017). Central to this model are protecting subsistence economies and agriculture as well as recognizing women’s contributions to the care economy and encouraging men and boys to participate in it. It also seeks to resist privatization and monetization of land, water, and other natural resources and emphasizes ‘the right to the commons, resisting new colonization with food as a weapon and ensuring social and economic citizenship-based entitlements’ (SAFR, 2006: 11). Local producer and consumer cooperatives are also part of this vision, which ‘demands that women and other marginalized groups be empowered not to adapt to or serve the present system but to challenge it’ based on local knowledges as well as Western science.

Finally, in anchoring this feminist union of South Asia in human rights values and institutional framework, SANGAT again demonstrates the ways in which its regional imaginary is located in discourses from the North and South. ‘As feminist activists, we would struggle to ensure that this framework is imbued with the principles of human rights, committed to equality and non-discrimination and focused on the achievement of human security and human dignity’ (FVPUSA, 2010: 10).

Borrowing from African, European Union, and Latin American examples, it calls for a South Asian Charter of People’s Rights, a South Asian Court of Justice, and mechanisms to ensure full participation of all at all levels of decision making in processes based on substantive equality.

Most critically, regional integration can lead to the establishment of shared human rights standards and values enshrined in a regional human rights treaty. Other regional bodies have created their own agreements on human rights and fundamental freedoms – the European Union through the European Convention on Human Rights, the African Union by the Africa Convention on Human and People’s Rights (the African Charter incorporates the right to work, to housing and food and also recognises ‘people’s rights’ which are absent in European or Inter-American regional human rights instruments) and by the Organization of American States through the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights – and created structures and mechanisms to ensure that the rights set out in the Conventions are justiciable. (FVPUSA, 2010: 11–12)

Given that most of these regional bodies are fraught, particularly in the context of Brexit, their optimism might give us pause. Yet,

What is exciting about our dream of People’s Union of South Asia and is that we are in it together to turn the dream into reality. This is a collective project that connects us across borders. It is a dream whose time has come. It is historically grounded and already partly actualized in the ongoing efforts of millions of South Asians who want a peaceful South Asia and who are actively working towards it. (FVPUSA, 2010: 3)

SANGAT is among those in the region working towards this dream based on a praxis of connection and mutual learning through its courses and campaigns.

Feminist transformatory praxis

One site of SANGAT’s feminist transformatory praxis is their annual course that brings together activists from across the region to continue the development of a Southasian feminist perspective but more importantly a network of activists committed to collectively working for gender justice and social justice. The first such course was offered in 1983. Over the years 750 women from 17 countries have participated in what most call ‘a life changing experience’ (SANGAT, 2019: 5). Chhachhi and Abeysekera (2014) in their analysis of the formation of an affective Southasian feminist community in the 1980s, a precursor to SANGAT, highlight the processes that were key to the formation of a Southasian feminist consciousness. Specifically, they note the methodologies of ‘personal, historical, and conceptual as well as physical mind/body learning’ (2014: 9). The first course in 1983, which brought 38 women from the region together, was held in Koitta, Bangladesh. The life histories women shared resonated with each other and were informed by the political events of partition. Along with life stories, women also engaged in writing and singing poems and songs, and performing skits. The workshop also included the physical labor of cooking and cleaning, all of which enabled deep conversations across borders through what Chhachhi and Abeysekera (2014) call ‘interactive analysis.’ ‘We wished to explore, on the one hand, our national (and other) subjectivities within the context of a shared historical meta-narrative of colonialism (except for Nepal), and on the other hand, to understand and respond to the postcolonial context’ (2014: 12). As Yuval-Davis (2015) notes about transversal praxis, these workshops were also fraught with tensions about the hegemony of India in the region, and between Pakistani and Bangladeshi feminists about their painful histories. Yet, the methodology of listening and sharing facilitated shifts in consciousness which Chhachhi and Abeysekera describe as ‘epistemic rupture’ (2014: 12) and forged affective ties and lifelong friendships.

The methodology at that first workshop became the basis of the month-long course that followed. The main purpose of the course is ‘to create a pool of activists’ and

. . . to build the feminist consciousness and capacities of course participants so that they can meaningfully challenge patriarchies, casteism, capitalism, heteronormativity, and other systems of oppression. It is our firm belief that our participants graduate from our courses equipped to turn the tides of injustice to justice, inequality to equality, and war to peace in the region and beyond. (SANGAT, 2019: 1)

Most of the course participants are activists, professionals such as lawyers, journalists, doctors, development workers, working with NGOs, political parties, government, and UN agencies in the region. The course is facilitated by resource persons most of whom are long-time activists and/or academics in the regions. While the language of training and resource person echoes that of neoliberal development projects that have long been critiqued by feminists, what sets apart SANGAT’s course is its feminist praxis that seeks to build and sustain connections among activists committed to social justice. Recent feminist work has recognized the importance of such praxis and feminist subjectivities in differentiating neoliberal projects of governmentality from those that enable social transformation. For example, Alvarez (1999), who was among the earliest critics of the boom of gender experts and trainings in Latin America, recognized that those with linkages to social movements avoided such depoliticization. Similarly, Bernal and Grewal’s (2014) work found that NGOs are not a monolithic category and there is increasingly a movementization of NGOs rather than just NGOization of movements. More recently, Lakkimsetti (2020) has shown that in the context of HIV/AIDS in India, sex workers, transgender, and Kothis, or men who have sex with men, who engaged in government mandated programs but had support of social movements, were able to harness the political subjectivities for social transformation.

The number of participants in the annual courses have increased from 30 to 40, with 37 participants at its last course (SANGAT, 2019), representing anywhere from 10 to 12 countries across class, caste, and religious divide, most of whom are committed to social justice broadly defined, though not always through a feminist lens. The course is restricted to women, as SANGAT has found it enables free engagement of participants, who are selected by core group members based on commitment to gender justice, three years of experience, and working knowledge of English, which limits who can participate. To overcome this SANGAT developed bi-country courses in languages spoken in at least two countries such as Hindi/Urdu for India/Pakistan, Bengali for India/Bangladesh, and Tamil for India/Sri Lanka. Thus, the courses build what Yuval-Davis (2015) calls translocal, transspatial, and transtemporal connections.

The last course was held in September 2017 at a feminist retreat center in Nepal that utilizes sustainable farming, incorporates and empowers local farmers and women in Nepal. Cross-border collaboration and solidarity is emphasized throughout as the means to social transformation. It becomes both an epistemic and methodological commitment actualized through embodied practices of self-care such as yoga and performances of song, dance, and skits as well as daily reflection sessions, and weekly debriefing or evaluations. Music and dance become means of learning about culture and struggles in other countries in the region, which are then furthered through interactions and visits with local women’s movements. Participants are housed with women from other countries and roommates are changed every week to facilitate connections with more women. Thus, both the formal content of the course and the living arrangements and informal activities of play and fun focus on building connections and solidarities for struggle.

Like any feminist theory course, it provides a theoretical foundation and analytical skills or learning, but unlike most, the course objectives also include personal growth, commitment, and connections (SANGAT, 2019). The focus of the course in not just on gender equality but social justice broadly defined with particular attention to peace, human rights, democracy and sustainable livelihoods, issues crucial to the region. The methodology also emphasizes ‘walking with two legs of theory and action to bring about a just and equitable world’ (SANGAT, 2019: 2). Given the residential nature of the course, support and solidarity through daily lived interactions facilitate solidarity and commitment to struggles when they return home. The personal growth component focuses on health and wellbeing through yoga, dance, massages, self-awareness, and confidence building (there are also sessions with psychiatrists about mental health in general and about dealing with trauma that many have experienced) along with developing analytical and communications skills through presentations, analysis of documents, and facilitating sessions.

Connections are the heartbeat of the course. As ‘Without connections, the monumental task of bringing down the walls of communalism, casteism, patriarchies, and the many other systems of oppression that plague the region are impossible’ (SANGAT, 2019: 6). They are achieved through dialogue and sharing, to build networks for future advocacy and action around the issues of gender justice, peace, democracy, and sustainable livelihood. Even the closing ceremony builds in connection with each participant tying a rakhi, a friendship bracelet common across the region, to symbolize ties of connection.

The supportive atmosphere of the course enables participants to see through false notions of nationalities, and they soon begin calling themselves ‘Regionals of South Asia’. In time, friendships blossom into solidarity, networks, and a life-long commitment toward a peaceful South Asia and world. (SANGAT, 2019: 6)

The course starts with discussions on gender and patriarchy, which allows them to think about their personal experiences in the family, workplace, and community. At the last course, participants also discussed feminisms and the women’s movements in their countries and region; globalization, neoliberalism, and people’s movements; right to information and strategies for grassroots mobilization; care economy and household work; communalism and aggressive nationalism; health, women’s wellbeing and sexualities; and connecting to global movements such as One Billion Rising and regional ones like South Asia and Property for Her. The evaluations of the course also focus on how likely participants are to connect and collaborate with their fellow participants. Over 75% of the participants at the last course noted that they were likely to do so. Six months later, an equal number noted that they had indeed collaborated in some ways with their fellow participants (SANGAT, 2019). Strengthening and expanding the network is emphasized even before participants get there and is built into all activities and reiterated when they return. Over the decades, solidarities continue and participants become core members and resource persons. The course might be the oldest and longest running in the region. SANGAT is based in New Delhi, but over the past decade they have decentralized and opened offices in Nepal and Pakistan.

In addition to the course, regular campaigns become another way that SANGAT consolidates connections in the region to sustain feminist activism around their core issues of gender transformation, peace, democracy, and sustainable livelihoods. In 2002, it started celebrating 30 November as the South Asian Women’s Day for Peace, Democracy, Justice and Human Rights. Additionally, they have launched other regional or two country campaigns such as Women’s Manifesto for Political Parties in Bangladesh and India, or thematic seminars on Property Rights for Her or Involving Men and Boys in Unpaid Care Work. They have also been active in global campaigns such as One Billion Rising, to end violence against women. In these campaigns SANGAT reaches out to men and boys to engage them in preventing gender-based violence.

Beyond the North/South divide

SANGAT’s Southasian imaginary and praxis are one example of solidarities of epistemologies or feminisms across borders that do not reinforce the North/South divide or reproduce the hegemony of Northern feminist knowledges. Their Southasian imaginary does this by articulating a regional, place-based configuration that unlike North/South or even transnational, identifies a historically specific formation that is not only informed by colonial and postcolonial realities but also by precolonial encounters. Hence, rather than centering the nation-state, as many regional configurations do, SANGAT’s Southasian goes beyond the nation-state. What animates the network are the common struggles and movements for liberation and social justice. At the same time, it is also connected to and in conversation with feminist and human rights struggles beyond the region. As such it is dynamic and reimagined in relation to changing local, regional, and global geopolitical and ecological realities.

What remains constant in the reimaginings, however, is the commitment to feminism as a collective process of struggle for alternatives in the region, building on local and global feminist theories and praxis. In the context of increasing misogyny and violence against women in the region, reclaiming feminism, a so-called Western import, demonstrates their commitment to build bridges across North/South divides. Moreover, by linking feminism to human rights and other movements for social justice in the region and globally, SANGAT and its participants are able to challenge the states and religious elites in the region who use religion and culture as easy shorthand to target women and minorities.

Similarly, the pedagogies of their month-long training course seek to build transformatory praxis beyond the North/South divide. Drawing upon local practices of yoga, singing, poetry, and storytelling as well as translocal ones of personal growth and communication, the course fosters epistemic and methodological collaborations. Most importantly, the focus of the course is to build and sustain a ‘pool of activists’ for gender and social justice in the region. Thus, the feminist solidarities that generated the Southasian imaginaries in the early 1980s are reproduced with a new generation through the month-long course, in support of gender and social transformation in the region, informed by local and translocal struggles and discourses of liberation. Thus, SANGAT’s imaginaries and praxis are an example of both transversal politics and solidarities of epistemologies, which highlight the need for connections and mutual learning across differences that are place-based and specific.

Finally, their everyday practices of living and caring and conversations across differences, silences, and hostilities, go beyond epistemologies and methodologies to generate passion for liberation and alternatives, as Kamla’s song powerfully states:

Tumhara saath milne se ehsaas-e-quwwat aayaa hai,

Nayi duniyaan banaane ka junoon phir hum pe chaayaa hai

Your companionship has given me a sense of confidence,

I am again gripped with the passion to create a new world.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclose receipt of the following financial support for the research, and/or publication of this article: The author undertook some of the research for this article while on a Senior Research Fellowship funded by the American Institute of India Studies.

ORCID iD

Manisha Desai

Notes

References

Alvarez

(1999) Advocating feminism: The Latin American feminist NGO ‘boom.’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(2): 181–209.

Alvarez

Caldwell

Lao-Montes

(2016) Translations across black feminists diasporas. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 14(2): v–ix.

Anzaldúa

(1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Armstrong

(2016) Before bandung: The anti-imperialist women’s movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Signs 41(2): 305–331.

Bernal

Grewal

(eds) (2014) Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chhachhi

Abeysekera

(2014) Forging a New Political Imaginary: Transnational Southasian Feminisms. New Delhi: SANGAT.

Connell

(2015) Meeting at the edge of fear: Theory on a world scale. Feminist Theory 16(1): 49–66.

Conway

(2018) When food becomes a feminist issue: Popular feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women. International Feminist Journal of Politics 20(2): 188–203.

De Souza

NMF

(2019) When the body speaks (to) the political: Feminist activism in Latin America and the quest for alternative democratic futures. Contexto int. 41(1): 89–112.

10.

Desai

(2015) Critical cartography, theories, and praxis of transnational feminisms. In: Baksh-Soodeen

Harcourt

(eds) The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 116–130.

11.

Fernandes

(2013) Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power. New York: NYU Press.

12.

FVPUSA (2010) A Feminist Vision for a People’s Union of South Asia. Available at: www.sangatnetwork.org/publications/ (accessed June 2020).

13.

Gandhi

(2006) Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

14.

Grewal

Kaplan

(eds) (1994) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

15.

Kothari

Joy

(eds) (2017) Alternative Futures: India Unshackled. New Delhi: Authors Upfront.

16.

Lakkimsetti

(2020) Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India. New York: NYU Press.

17.

Mendoza

(2002) Transnational feminisms in question. Feminist Theory 3(3): 295–314.

18.

Menon

(2019) Feminism, Marxism, and caste in contemporary India. In: Satgar

(ed.) Racism After Apartheid: Challenge for Marxism and Anti-Racism. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 137–156.

19.

Mies

(1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.

20.

Moghadam

(1995) Gender and revolutionary transformation: Iran 1979 and East Central Europe 1989. Gender and Society 9(3): 328–358.

21.

Mohanty

(2003) Feminisms without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

22.

SAFD (1989) South Asian Feminist Declaration. Available at: www.sangatnetwork.org/publications/ (accessed June 2020).

23.

SAFR (2006) South Asian Feminist Re-Declaration. Available at: www.sangatnetwork.org/publications/ (accessed June 2020).

24.

SANGAT (2019) Walls Turned Sideways are Bridges: A Report of the XX11 South Asian Capacity Building Course on Gender, Sustainable Livelihoods, Human Rights, and Peace. Available at: www.sangatnetwork.org/publications/ (accessed June 2020).

25.

Shiva

(1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

26.

Sohat

(2001) Area studies, transnationalism, and the production of knowledge. Signs 26(4): 1269–1272.

27.

Suchland

(2011) Is postsocialism transnational? Signs 36(4): 837–862.

28.

Yuval-Davis

(1999) What is ‘transversal’ politics? Soundings Summer 12: 94–98.

29.

Yuval-Davis

(2015) Situated intersectionality and social inequality. Raison Politiques 2(58): 91–100.