Transnational feminist practice is involved in activist movements across the globe that work together to understand the role of gender, the state, race, class, and sexuality in critiquing and resisting structures of patriarchal, capitalist power.
As such, it resists utopian ideas about "global sisterhood" while simultaneously working to lay the groundwork for more productive and equitable social relations among women across borders and cultural contexts.
Currently, "transnational feminism" is the term that feminists like Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan claim has political power and can discard essentialist binaries like First World/Third World, or heteronormative gender constructs.
This is the attempt to understand what factors make up their identities and struggles and a way of acknowledging that these experiences have their own complex natures, unique geographically and how this is interpolated by those examining and theorizing.
[13] This provides more job opportunities for the Third World women but also detracts from the migrants' ability to care for their own children and increases the gap in human capital between the two spheres.
Because of this global demand for outsourced labor, women in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia who would otherwise not have a job now do, and studies have shown that this improves their sense of empowerment and reduces likelihood of domestic abuse.
After the war ended, Irene Tinker says (oxford transnational), these jobs were taken away but women were no longer satisfied going back to their previous gender roles.
Liberal feminists propose that women break this oppression by leaving their traditional roles in the household, becoming educated, and entering the labor force.
Scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty plays an integral role in articulating concerns about Western feminism's failure to account for non-Western subjects.
This text, building on Grewal and Kaplan's, focused more on the ways in which a new theory of transnational feminism could help foreground feminist activist practices in global contexts.
The practice of transnational feminism networks, in which feminists started exchanging ideas and collaborating across nation-state borders, originated from the United Nations conferences in the 1970s.
[16] The United Nations conferences were not the only factors leading to the transnationalization of feminism as mentioned, WID and GAD played important roles and so did other global events.
This articulation of feminist theory is a revision to the field of postmodernism, which the authors argue is powerful in its critique of modern global capitalism, but inadequate because it does not explore gender or reflect on the consequences of theorizing with a Western background.
Postmodern does not exemplify the realities of transnational feminism and its relation to developing countries, Mohanty states "postmodernist critique that is skeptical of a systematic analysis of institutionalized power and of decolonizing methodologies that center marginalized experience (women of color epistemology) in struggles for justice is seriously off the mark".
Grewal and Kaplan express this sentiment when they say: In working to construct such a terrain for coalition and cooperation, however, we have to rearticulate the histories of how people in different locations and circumstances are linked by the spread of and resistance to modern capitalist social formations even as their experiences of these phenomena are not at all the same or equal.These modern capitalist social formations can include "humanitarian" wars waged on behalf of the supposed oppressed women.
Transnational feminists argue that banning burqas forces women to conform to "Euro-patriarchal notions of femininity and dress",[18] stripping them of their agency to make their own choices.
Issues of gender, languages, imperialism, colonialism, economics, human rights, race, psychology, and nationalism encompass many areas of concern.
Transnational feminisms examine how powers of colonialism, modernity, postmodernity, and globalization construct gender norms, or normative conceptions of masculinity and femininity among the subaltern, Third World, and colonized.
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan talk about how colonialism has created situations of gender inequality that continue to disadvantage the lives of women today.
These ways of talking do not consider colonialist histories and tend to portray Third World women as isolated from flows of global capital and information, and therefore passive, helpless, and uninformed.
Some transnational feminists argue this kind of imperialistic nature has led to the increased fundamentalism and extremism in Pakistan, which can be seen in the Zina laws.
In her essay "Postcolonial Legacies", Geraldine Heng shows how feminism in almost all Third World countries arose as part of nationalistic agendas that were reacting against colonialism and imperialism.
[26] Some transnational feminist are antagonistic to nationalism because of its history of being a tool of control "the retrospective activity of nation-building in modernity is always predicated upon women as trope".
Furthermore, the actions of non-state actors, especially those of international organizations, of the governmental and non-governmental varieties, have huge impacts on the lives of women without consideration of state borders.
Arnett (2008) pointed out that psychologists have no grounds for assuming psychological processes are universal and generalizing research findings to the rest of the global population.
[29] Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) noted that although only 1/8 of people worldwide live in regions that fall into the WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societal classification, 60–90% of psychology studies are performed on participants from these areas.
The formation of Transnational Feminist Network organizations requires methods for approaching the conflicts that arise based out of cultural and personal differences of women across the globe.
Since 2006, inspired by theorists like Chandra Mohanty, AF3IRM has set out to practice a feminism that builds deeply in local communities and horizontally across national borders.
Falcón reminds scholars to be mindful of the social location of identities that lie within the area of Western feminism while utilizing a transnational feminist lens.
"[45] One key critique to transnational feminist research and literature is the obtainment of resources to accurately represent the masses and marginalised people.