Where Feminist Theory Meets Feminist Practice: Border-Crossing in a Transnational Academic Feminist Organization

Abstract

This paper focuses on our four years of involvement with a feminist organization within academia that brought `Third World' women activists from a variety of fields as visitors to our US university campus. Based on our experiences as white, US-born feminist sociologists committed to political change, we analyze the challenges and contradictions that we confronted in the daily processes and activities of this organization. By exemplifying complex power dynamics, which often are unacknowledged and unarticulated, our case highlights the need for new theoretical perspectives that take into account power differences that exist along various axes - including axes of domination among women. Transnational processes, we argue, further complicate such power differentials. Serious analyses of the processes and outcomes that are recreated in transnational, international and local feminist development organizations constitute an important political step towards bridging existing gaps between feminist theory and practice.

Intersections: The Simultaneity of Race, Gender and Class in Organization Studies

“…One of the major contributions of transnational feminists is to study the role of the state in circumscribing the daily lives and survival struggles of women of colour, which reveals its co‐implication as an important institution in a complex nexus of power and domination that is gendered, patriarchal, racialized and (hetero)sexualized (Mendoza, 2002; Mohanty, 1997). Additive models captured in arithmetic metaphors like ‘double oppression’ and ‘multiple jeopardy’ (King, 1988) give way to more nuanced images like a ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 2000a; Martinez, 2000), ‘border crossing’ (Anzaldúa, 1987, 1990; Mendez and Wolf, 2001) and ‘cross‐border’ existence (Hurtado, 1999). These metaphors signal an attempt to dismantle hierarchies of oppression and instead articulate and explore complex positionalities and contradictory subjectivities.…”

“…Locating organizations and their actors in their particular social contexts may also require explicating how that context and history show up in everyday practices (Bredström, 2006; Britton, 2000; Chesler and Moldenhauer‐Salazar, 1998; Marks, 1999; Meisenhelder, 2000). For example, Mendez and Wolf (2001) engage in this type of analysis by reflecting on their experience as directors of an academic feminist programme that brought ‘Third World’ women activists as interns to the USA. They found that, despite their progressive agenda and best feminist intentions, neo‐colonial relations exerted a major impact on the programme, reproducing unequal power relations among participants and replicating organizational micro‐practices that manifested and fed such inequality.…”

Review Article: Looking Back, Looking Forward. Mapping the Gendered Theories, Voices, and Politics of Organization

“…Instead, I would agree with Mendez and Wolf (2001) who argue for new frameworks for globalizing gender research. They state 'the complexities of emerging power differentials stemming from globalized and gendered processes as they play themselves out within specific local development organizational settings' demand new theoretical organizational frameworks that can account for transnational processes (pp.…”

“…In addition to examining multiple scales of organizing, new tools for examining the multiple power relations that constitute the processes and practices of globalizing gender are necessary. Mendez and Wolf (2001), for example, take up the concept of borderlands to explore transnational feminist efforts in academe. As they reflect on a 'Gender and Global Issues Visitors Program' they show a less than rosy view of the 'global village.'…”

“…For instance, the appropriation of Foucault's theories of history, discourse, and ethics has provided interesting reflections on the politics surrounding the production of organizational knowledge (Rowlinson et al, 2002). Furthermore, notable analyses of international development (Fernández Kelly, 1994), transnational feminist organizing (Mendez and Wolf, 2001), and academic institutions (J. Martin, 1994) have expanded our notions of what and whom constitutes organization.…”