Transnational Feminisms Overview

Principles

Definition

Transnational feminisms is a research field, theoretical framework, and methodological approach that examines gender, power, and inequality as shaped by interconnected global processes and local specificities across national borders. It critically analyzes the diverse experiences of women and gender non-conforming individuals within global systems, challenging Western-centric perspectives and emphasizing the intersectional nature of oppression. This concept investigates how global capitalism, colonialism, militarism, migration, and other transnational forces intersect with gender, and highlights diverse forms of feminist resistance and activism worldwide. Its significance lies in providing a more complex, inclusive, and globally informed framework for understanding and addressing gender injustice and fostering solidarity across geographical boundaries.

Ontological type

Core Theorists

Key Debates

Methodological Approaches

Key developments

Key Figures

Transnational Feminist Political Economy era

Cynthia Enloe [1], affiliated with Clark University [3] and École Centrale d'Électronique [4], emerged as a leading figure in transnational feminist political economy during this era. Her 1993 paper Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [5] reframed how scholars connected gendered oppression to global power dynamics in international politics, elevating cross-border analysis of labor and militarized economies. María Lugones [2], active across multiple academic and activist spaces in this era, offered foundational critique of coloniality and global epistemologies. Her 1987 paper Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception [6] articulated the method of world-travelling to examine perception, difference, and relationality, a contribution that helped shape transnational feminist political economy debates of the period.

Global Reproductive Governance era

Gillian Rose [1], associated with the University of Edinburgh [2] and the University of Warwick [3], exemplifies the transnational feminist analytic within the Global Reproductive Governance era (1996-2009). Her key contributions in this era center on reflexive methodologies and questions of positionality, as articulated in the paper Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics [4], which helped foreground how researchers' standpoints shape knowledge about cross-border reproductive labor and gendered inequalities. In shaping scholarly practice, Gillian Rose [1] emphasized reflexivity and tactics of knowledge production, guiding subsequent analyses of transnational feminist interventions in governance contexts. Gillian Rose [1]’s approach has continued to influence debates on global norms, vernacular claims-making, and the negotiation of reproductive rights across borders within the era’s transnational feminist scholarship.

Decolonial Relational Feminisms era

María Lugones [1] stands as a central figure in transnational feminism during the Decolonial Relational Feminisms era (2010-2023), with affiliations linked to the State University of New York [2] and New York University [3]. Her key contribution in this era is articulated in the 2010 paper Toward a Decolonial Feminism [4], where she develops a decolonial, relational framework that unsettles Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies. In this framework, Lugones [1] argues for participatory fieldwork and activist-research practices that center shared authority and relational ethics. These contributions matter for the era because they operationalize decolonial aims into a durable toolkit for transnational critique and solidarity across Afro-diasporic and Global South epistemologies.