Feminisms of the Global South: Critical thinking and collective struggles: An introduction

Although single articles about gender in the Global South have been published once in a while in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, this is the first special issue dedicated entirely to feminisms in and of this part of the globe. It is based on a lecture series organised by the editors in the summer of 2018 at the Cornelia Goethe Centre in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Germany is not the only European country where contributions from the Global South are almost completely missing from the academic feminist discourse and even debates on transnational feminisms may include only very few feminist postcolonial thinkers – mostly situated in the Global North.

This blank space constituted one of the starting points of our initial reflections. A second one was our aim to highlight feminist responses to the multiplicity of global crises of capitalism and their economic, ecological and political articulations. Long before the beginning of the COVID crisis, global inequalities have been increasingly widening and worsening and authoritarian, nationalist, racist and anti-feminist culminations of neoliberalism have put increasing pressure on alternative practices and emancipatory ideas for the future. All over the world, feminists have produced new concepts and practices of solidarity to design political, economic and ecological alternatives and feminist concepts of justice, whilst much of longstanding experience, and fundamental critical knowledge in this field stems from the Global South.

Radical feminist movements and thinkers from the Global South have provided crucial analyses of how gender inequality, interlocking forms of oppression and exploitation are entangled in local and global realities of contemporary capitalist social formations. Most prominent for such an approach are the multitude of contributions from the feminist South–South network DAWN (see Antrobus, 2015). They show how unequal living and working conditions are constitutive of the development of global economic and ecological conditions and question the dichotomy between the local and the global as well as between the North and the South. How important local dimensions are to the analysis of (world) development(s) as well as to politics and practices of resistance(s) and solidarities also lies in the focus of the debate on ‘politics of location’ (Mohanty, 2003). Historically, feminist movements in the Global South most often have been closely intertwined with anti-colonial movements (Jayawardene, 1986) and feminist activists have established transnational networks and movements to fight racism, capitalist exploitation, imperialism and militarism (Boyce Davies, 2014; Desai, this issue). This transnational activism from the beginning was informed by what we call today an intersectional perspective, meaning an understanding of power relations and oppression operating along gender, race and class lines in which these central axes of inequality and discrimination not only add up, but overlap, mutually reinforce, intertwine and co-constitute each other in specific historical and geopolitical contexts.

Accordingly, our take on the concept of ‘Global South’ is not geographically fixed or tied to a specific group of nation states. Following Dados and Connell (2012), we rather understand ‘Global South’ as a specific – historically grown, geopolitically shaped – power relation:

[The term Global South] references an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained. (Dados and Connell, 2012: 13)

In other words, the emergence and development of ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ have to be seen as unequal but mutually dependent and co-constitutive entanglements (Randeria, 2014). These entanglements form the epistemic starting point for many kinds of postcolonial studies as well as for all projects of decolonising and decentring hegemonic knowledge production(s) that answer ‘epistemological inequalities’ (Byrne and Imma, 2019) and hegemonic knowledge relations in which Eurocentric perspectives dominate and over-write insights from formerly colonised parts of the world. All too often, feminisms were and still are not an exception to this phenomenon.

As huge as the task still lying ahead of us, as modest and inevitably fragmentary is our present contribution to highlighting feminist perspectives of and on the Global South, in the midst of the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, this attempt has certainly become anything but easy.

The meaning of Global South and Global North and what analytic gain these concepts provide is today, on the one hand, more obvious and, on the other hand, less clear than ever. For the pandemic not only carves out inequalities along the North–South divide in all their sharpness, it also brings conflicts and ambivalences about these categories more clearly to light. This applies the more to an adequate conceptualisation of the relations between Global South and Global North.

Immediate effects on the health of millions of people, but also political, economic and ecological long-term effects all contribute to an increase in inter- and intra-state inequalities, which are attached to the already established makers of inequality in gender, race and class relations. Nadje Al-Ali’s contribution to this issue discusses the whole range of consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on living and working conditions for women* in the Global South and at the same time questions the possibilities of collective feminist action.

As these inequalities grow, it becomes increasingly unclear to what extent the analytical concept of North–South relations contributes to an appropriate description of geopolitical power relations. Even before the pandemic, developments like the rise of the so-called BRICS states China, Brazil, India and South Africa, the different processes of deprivation in the Southern European states after the financial crisis of 2008, and the neoliberal transformation of Eastern European countries after 1990, have definitely called into question the dichotomous positioning of these states on one side or the other. Manisha Desai resumes this point in her contribution to the issue by asking to what extent it can be helpful to start out from North or South perspectives as monolithic, when she asks how gender relations are always interwoven into local and at the same time global relations of power and domination.

Last but not least, the pandemic has brought to the fore the severe loss of influence of multilateralism and especially the United Nations’ apparatus. WHO’s inability to steer global health policy against the newly emerging bi-polarity between the US and China is only one of the most obvious proofs of this trend. Even if multilateralism as such has certainly never been a guarantee for fair South–North relations and has always been at the centre of postcolonial feminist critique of transnational solidarity rhetoric, its loss in significance is certainly not good news for feminisms worldwide. With the arenas of multilateralism, women’s movements around the world are losing important spaces of public debate and struggle for transnational norms, not only but also for gender justice.

Against this background of global crises (in a pandemic), this issue, as indicated above, is only able to cast spotlights on discourses about feminisms in various countries and regions that are commonly connected with the Global South. It is, therefore, no coincidence that one focus of the contributions lies on questions of feminist epistemology and knowledge production. To ask which epistemologies and methodologies drive feminist knowledge production, which knowledge is disseminated and how is it disseminated is central to our concern, not least because we have posed questions about feminisms of the Global South from the Global North – from where we are also publishing the answers and from where we aim to foster dialogue and practices of solidarity.

The issue starts with Nadje Al-Ali’s article on the pandemic’s impact on feminisms of the Global South. Using four key areas of analysis (crisis of reproduction, gender-based violence, vulnerable communities and authoritarian and nationalist politics), Al-Ali shows the gendered impacts of COVID-19 in many parts of the globe where the pandemic worsens the already existing pressures on health, food and economic resources. Al-Ali discusses visions, tensions and dilemmas faced by feminist initiatives in the Global South and concludes that in response to this situation more than ever transnational feminist solidarities are required to participate actively in exchange and support activities.

Sherine Hafez’s article sheds light on the transformations and reconfigurations of gender politics and women’s activism in the revolutionary processes of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. The relationship between revolution, gendered and violent state politics and the experiences of women from very different social positioning in Egypt is explored. The contribution sheds light on feminist strategies and collective revolutionary practices developed to expose and combat authoritarian rule and the forms of violence that are deployed to counter these forms of contestation.

Amina Mama’s article presents approaches to feminisms, freedom and justice in African countries as a ‘constant struggle’ of networks of women thinkers, writers, activists and women’s movements. Taking a comparative perspective on Ghana and Uganda, she follows women’s organising, feminist writing and research over four decades to show how women in both countries have worked together after independence to resist the persistence of male supremacy both on a local and global scale. Mama thereby also demonstrates how important locally grounded approaches that archive the thinking and movements of women are to come to an adequate understanding of what feminism means in diverse contexts.

Manisha Desai’s article asks how epistemological foundations constrain the possibilities for understanding contemporary feminist struggles and solidarities. She argues that theorising feminisms requires overcoming spatial and hierarchal dichotomies that are inherent in North–South or global–local divides. Answers can be found in the collective practices and political imaginaries of feminist movements like the South Asian feminist network SANGAT. The article explores the ‘epistemologies of solidarities’ in the collective struggles of this network and highlights its discourses and practices.

We finish the special issue with Sumi Madhok’s thought provoking article in which she argues that feminist debt should be used as a central metaphor for critical analysis and politics of location. Her central request is that feminist theory needs to acknowledge the necessity of producing knowledge from different locations. This would imply the provincialisation of knowledge production by highlighting imperial colonial entanglements of these specific epistemologies with hegemonic geographies and prevailing political economies. ‘Naming the ground’ from where one speaks would then become a starting point to question the location of knowledge production in connection with the respective claims and circuits of power and authority.