Transnationalism: the face of feminist politics post-Beijingn

Manisha Desai
movements around the world, since the UNs fourth Womens World Conference in Beijing. By transnationalism I mean both organising across national borders as well as framing local, national, regional, and global activism in transnational discourses. Is this move to transnational feminism just the latest incarnation of international and global feminisms as some scholars argue (Basu The 49th CSW, whose aims were to review the 2004; Mackie 2001; Mendoza 2002); or does it implementation of Beijing Platform For Action have the potential to be the basis for a transformatory politics as articulated and current challenges and by others (McLaughlin forward-looking strategies for Manisha Desai is Associate Professor of 2004; Mohanty 2002; advancement and empowerSociology, Acting Director of Women and Sampaio 2004)? To answer ment of women and girls, Gender in Global Perspectives, and Associate Director of the Program in South these questions, I review attracted 1800 government Asia and Middle Eastern Studies at the two sites of transnational delegates, among whom were University of Illinois in Urbana Chamfeminism, the UN and the 80 ministers and 7 rst ladies, paign. She worked as Senior Programme World Social Forum, espeand 2600 NGO representaSpecialist in GED/HRS/SHS UNESCO cially the emergence of the tives. Despite such impressive from January to April 2004. She has written extensively on womens moveFeminist Dialogues from presence, its most signicant ments in India and globally and has edited the Forum. I argue that achievement was the reafrtwo books, one on Womens Activism and the changed socio-political mation of the Declaration and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles to context following Beijing the passage of 10 new resoluTransnational Politics (Routledge 2002) in particular the continuing tions.1 Not that the reafrmaand Womens Issues in Asia (Greenwood hegemony of the neo-liberal tion and the commitment of 2003). She is currently completing a book on Gender and Globalisation for the economic agenda, the enthe worlds governments to Gender Lens Series. trenchment of religious funaccelerate their efforts for Email: mkdesai@uiuc.edu damentalisms, and the post womens equality are unim9/11 wars and focus on portant. But the emphasis on the discursive without enough attention to the terrorism in the US and around the world has structural and material resources and power is highlighted the limitations of transnational one of the primary reasons for womens continu- activism, for both internal movement politics ing inequalities around the world despite 30 years and social transformation. Transnational feminism fragments movement politics as tensions of UN commitments to womens equality. And this focus on the discursive is also emerge between movement organisations evident in transnational feminist practices which that can actually cross borders and those have become the dominant modality of feminist2 that cannot and reproduces inequalities among
A Declaration reafrming the commitments made ten years ago in Beijing and calling for further action from governments was adopted at the end of the rst week. This was the most signicant outcome of the meeting, which was held as part of the 49th session of the Commission on the Status of Women from 28 February to 11 March at United Nations Headquarters in New York (UN Press Release, 11 March 2005).
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activists within and between countries in the North and South. More importantly, however, given the spaces within which transnational feminists operate and the modalities of transnational activism, the strategic focus of movements shifts from redistribution to policy and discursive changes. As Rai (2004) notes, policy and discursive changes highlight process over outcomes and emphasise empowerment without shift in material resources. Thus, the ironic state of the feminist movements post Beijing, I argue, is that (some) womens agency is visible everywhere even as (most) womens lives remain mired in multiple inequalities. The paper is divided into three sections. The rst reviews theoretical debates in the literature on transnational social movements, the second focuses on the UN and the Feminist Dialogues as sites of transnational feminism and the nal section offers reections on transnational feminism and feminist politics.

Transnational social movements

With the exception of feminist scholars, most social movement scholars relate transnational social movements to contemporary globalisations.3 As Seidman (2000) notes, today there has been a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of social institutions and social relations. Most social analysts argue that contemporary globalisation has not only led to a reorganisation of the economy on a global scale, but has also shaped a new social imaginary in which we are expected to rethink social relations and identities as uid, exible, and de-territoralised rather than conned to bounded spaces (Guidry et al. 2000; Hamel et al. 2001). While most theorists recognise that globalisation is uneven and affects men and women in various parts of the world differently, we are nonetheless all urged to understand how the local and global, both uid categories, inform each other and how the interplay of the two shapes both. For social movements this has meant going beyond the usual nation-state based movements, theoretically and methodologically. Yet the term transnational is still bound to the nation even as the perspective seeks to transcend it. Thus, the

analytic aim is to understand how the local in terms of issues, identities, strategies, methods, targets of protest, and world-views becomes global and how the global is evident in the local. Movement analysts assume that identities, networks, and communities are as likely to be global as local and that global dynamics and audiences constrain and facilitate movements. A major consequence of this transnational understanding of social movements has been the rethinking of the concept of social movement itself. As many scholars have indicated, there has been a conation of social movements, NGOs, and networks in transnational social movements. Thus, some analysts like Keck and Sikkink (1998) and Moghadam (2005) prefer to use networks as the unit of analysis as they have become the organisational expression of transnational social movements, while Tarrow (2003) would like to differentiate social movements from other categories not by the goal of social change but methods used, i.e., social movements use contentious methods while NGOs and networks tend to use routine means of social change. Piper and Uhlin (2004) prefer to use the concept of transnational activism instead of social movements. They dene activism as political activities based on a conict of interest that challenge or support power structures, that are carried out by non-state actors, and that take place outside formal politics (Piper and Uhlin 2004: 4). Such a move blurs distinctions between NGOs and social movements and indicates the difculties of using categories like social movements that derive from state-centred sociology for transnational politics. Guidry et al. (2000) redene movements as practices of resistance rather than organised efforts at collective change and suggest that in the context of globalisation we need to focus on the relationship of movements with public spheres, modalities of power and resistance, identity formation, and their normative penumbrae. These denitional issues have been central in the current analyses of womens movements as scholars have moved away from global or international feminist movements to transnational feminist practices and solidarities (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty 2002), or debated the use of feminist versus womens movements (Basu 1995), and lamented the NGOisation of womens movements (Alvarez 2000; Desai 2002). As I will show

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below, these conceptual issues are important both because they construct movements even as they describe them and also because they show a discomfort with the shift in political terrain that has not led to greater equality for women. Despite the diversity of opinions on what constitutes a transnational social movement, there is consensus on the modalities of transnational social movements. Most analysts agree that the dominant protest repertoire of transnational activism includes education and mobilisation, symbolic framing, and strategic use of information. Advocacy, lobbying, support, and direct action are secondary. Furthermore, the major targets of most transnational movements have been policy mechanisms of local, national, regional, and multilateral international institutions. Finally, while a lot of transnational activism is cyber based, it also involves travel to sites of protests and gatherings. Such a modality, I argue, privileges educated, middle class activists or popular intellectuals (Baud and Rutten 2004) over other movement activists and participants. Baud and Rutten (2004) dene popular intellectuals, as distinct from organic and public intellectuals, as knowledge experts who often are formally educated and not from the constituency/class on whose behalf they make claims and frame issues, but are usually from the middle classes. Moghadam (2005) also emphasises the rise of educated women around the world in the emergence of transnational feminist networks. Waterman (2000) sees transnational activism as globalisation from the middle as it is middle class educated people moving around the same circuits. In the case of feminist, womens movements, activists seem to circulate from the academy to UN agencies to international NGOs. It is this discursive modality and the dominance of popular intellectuals within transnational social movements that have led to what I call transnational social movement (TSM) sceptics even as there are many transnational social movement (TSM) boosters. The TSM sceptics focus on the unevenness of transnationalism and its impact on internal movement dynamics as well as consequences for the project of social transformation. For example, Basu (2004: 1) wonders, Is transnational feminism after 1985 another form of Northern-based feminism in disguise? Or is it like the feminism of 1970s dominated by Northern

groups and their understandings. She is concerned with the representation of Southern organisations in such networks. As I will show below, there are Southern women and NGOs represented in these networks; the question is, do they focus on issues of womens inequalities in both the North and the South? Seidman (2000) argues that transnational activism is not inevitable or irreversible as suggested by the experience of the international labour movement which had its heydays in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but received major setbacks after the Second World War and also because tensions between local needs and international concerns are often hard to reconcile. Wiest et al. (2002) argue that the geography of TSM is pretty uneven with most Northern countries still overrepresented and with few collaborative relationships among social movements across geographic divides as Northern movements still fund most Southern movements. Furthermore, education is a necessary cultural capital in TSMs and this has led to friction between those with formal education and those without, reproducing other inequalities within and across countries. Based on his research on the transnational environmental movement, Pollack (2001) discusses how there is still little epistemological openness among the major transnational movements. He shows how women and indigenous people are conned to their specic contribution but not seen as central to redening the agenda, most of which he sees as re-interpretations of the western/modern vision. He argues that transnational movements are a political empty box with a lot of participation but little change. Others have focused on issues of accountability of networks (Smith & Johnston 2002). TSM boosters, on the other hand, see it as an effective response to a globalised world. Writing about transnational feminist networks, Moghadam (2005) argues that they are an innovative feminist response, participatory and non-hierarchical, and the most effective form of organising in an era of globalisation. The question is: effective for what? They have been effective in generating critique and policies but not necessarily in advancing alternatives for womens emancipation. Batliwala (2002) raises the important issue of differentiating between transnational actors, such as DAWN, WIDE,

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WEDO, AWMR, the feminist networks that Moghadam (2005) describes, which are primarily educated middle-class women who intervene in policy debates and sometimes in direct action, and those grass-roots networks that are composed of people affected directly in their homes and communities by the process of globalisation. She discusses two innovative transnational networks, Women in Informal Economy Globalising and Organising (WIEGO) and Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SID), in which local communitybased movements have formed partnerships with NGOs and academic institutions (WIEGO is based at Harvard University), to gather data and research to propose people-centred solutions at international, institutional levels and are also engaged in local organising. While the communitybased movements in these networks do work on issues of livelihood at the local level, their focus too is policy based rather than redistribution per se. However, such networks have been successful in changing perceptions about the poor and marginalised people and their right to participate in decisions that affect their lives as well as their abilities to generate solutions to their situations. Batliwala (2002) argues that because such networks represent people and are accountable to them, they are more legitimate than other elite and middle class networks and NGOs that have no connections to the constituency on whose behalf they make claims. It is within this complex terrain of transnational social movements that I locate the two sites of transnational feminism.

Transnational feminism at the UN and the feminist dialogues

Women organising across national borders, as many scholars (Rupp 1998) have pointed out, are neither new nor specic to contemporary globalisation. The phenomenon is at least a century old, emerging within the context of the old abolitionist, suffragist, and socialist movements. Yet transnational feminism emerged in academic discourse in the US (Desai 2004) and has been responsible for shaping the movement as much as describing it. It emerged to describe womens solidarities across the world, primarily in response to their participation in the UNs

International Decade for Women (19751985), with its four world conferences 1975 in Mexico City, 1980 in Copenhagen, and 1985 in Nairobi, with a follow-up conference in Beijing in 1995 and preparatory national and regional meetings. The term transnational feminism was seldom used by the womens movements and INGOs until after the Beijing conference. Today it is widely used but remains contested as I found at the Feminist Dialogues in Brazil in 2005 where the Latin American feminists were uncomfortable with the term. To them it was too reminiscent of transnational corporations. I use it to represent both a theoretical perspective, a` la Grewal and Kaplan (1994) and a descriptive term. The four world conferences, and accompanying NGO Forums, were contentious events with women from the South, not all of whom identied as feminists, challenging Northern womens conceptions of womens issues based solely on gender and sexuality and insisting on bringing in issues of development, nationalism, and neo-colonialism. These differences among women began to be acknowledged and solidarities of difference (Desai 1997) were forged as they continued to meet over the decade and shared experiences of inequalities and struggles for justice. It was the 1985 conference in Nairobi that marked a shift from contention to solidarity and by the fourth conference in Beijing women despite their differences had found a common language in the human rights framework. Womens rights are human rights emerged at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 but became paradigmatic in Beijing. Thus, the UN conferences and then specialised agency meetings, such as the Convention on Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Committee on the Status of Women, became the prime sites of this new phase of transnational activism. Most women who attended the NGO Forums accompanying the UN conferences, which are for government delegations though increasingly many governments include activists and NGO members among their ofcial delegates, were middle-class educated women from INGOS, donors, academics, and activists. At the Hairou/Beijing Forum, in which I participated, the grass-roots women were present as well but most participated in their own Forum outside the main workshops in tents sharing, performing,

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and selling handicrafts. Ironically, the Chinese authorities saw this as a conference of foreigners and restricted the participation of most Chinese women. Only women from the major INGOs and donors were involved in interacting with the ofcial conference in Beijing. Following Beijing, most womens movements, including religious women and fundamentalist movements and governments, were using the rights framework to claim rights both at home and in global spaces. Thus, violence against women, reproductive rights, livelihood, housing, education, and sustainable development were all framed in terms of womens rights. The state is the protector, promoter, and enforcer of these rights even as non-state actors are held accountable for some womens rights violations. As I have argued elsewhere (Desai 2002), the rights discourse coincided with the domination of the neo-liberal discourse and structural adjustment policies and both can coexist as rights can be articulated without challenging neo-liberalism as is evident in the work of most UN agencies. Thus states were expected to meet their obligations to the international nancial institutions and privatise and cut public expenditures at the same time as they were to ensure womens and girls right to education, health, and livelihood. As Molyneux and Razavi (2002) argue, there is a consensus that since Beijing, most governments have fullled their trade treaties rather than their human rights agreements. Further, fundamentalist movements and governments have used the same rights approach to deny rights to women based on cultural claims. Thus, despite the discourse of human rights, which claims that all rights are universal, inalienable, and indivisible, political and cultural rights take precedence over economic and social rights. The increasing militarism post 9/11 has also shown the inadequacy of the rights framework to protect the rights of communities suspected of links with terrorism. In addition to these contextual contradictions, the adoption of a rights-based approach to development by international aid agencies and by the multilateral nancing institutions has led to the cooptation of the language and principles of human rights. Scholars and activists alike have criticised the human rights framework for not problematising the state, depoliticising womens

issues, focusing on individual rather than collective rights, and establishing a regulative rather than are distributive framework (Molyneux & Razavi 2002). Thus, even the major gains of the feminist activists at the 1993 Human Rights Conference in Vienna, when violence against woman was seen as a human rights violation and non-state actors were also identied as guarantors of rights, have been eroded in the contemporary juxtaposition of neo-liberalism, fundamentalism, and militarism. In recent years, there have been many attempts, few successful, to hold non-state actors (such as armed militant groups and transnational corporations) accountable for human rights violations caused by their actions. Most importantly, human rights discourse in transnational feminism has privileged UN and other international institutions as the sites of activism. There are several structural and ideological reasons for the limitations of transnational feminism around the UN. (1) Born in the aftermath of the Second World War, the UNs original mission of peace and promotion of trade soon became secondary to development as countries in Africa and Asia were becoming independent from colonial rule. Development has been seen by many scholars as a neo-colonial discourse, and a neo-colonial stance is reected in the structure of the Security Council, the veto power for the victors of the Second World War, and its ideology and language of development which identies countries based on their level of economic development. (2) The UNs functioning is based on inter national rather than trans national relations among member states, which centres the nation as the primary site of action. (3) Many member states, particularly the US, see it is as a space for the developed countries to aid the developing countries, rather than a place for nations to come together as equals around common issues. (4) Participation by non-state actors is conned to registered NGOs, which furthers the NGOisation and depoliticisation of movements. These inequalities of the UN system and its location in New York and Geneva, Switzerland, have meant that womens NGOs in the US and Western Europe have easier access to and familiarity with it. Furthermore, most of the US based womens INGOs, whose activists are primarily white women and middle-class,

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World Forum of Women Against Violence, Valencia, Spain, November 2000. The slogan reads A world without violence is possible. AFP/Alberto Estevez

educated women from the South, focus on womens issues in the Global South and reproduce the sense of the UN as a space for helping women of developing countries rather than for seeking gender justice for women in their countries. Thus, structural inequalities within the UN are reproduced among the womens NGOs participating in transnational activities at the UN. The domination of womens NGOs from the US and Europe in the transnational space around the UN has been shown by many scholars who have analysed the international womens decade and activism around the four womens world conferences as well as the other UN world conferences (Desai 2002; McLaughlin 2004; Mendoza 2002). Yet, as Chan Tiberghien (2004) shows, within the space of UN conferences you see a shift in the construction of gender from invisible equality, of 19451975, to visible equality 1975 1985, to difference from men in the early 1990s and nally differences among women following the Beijing conference. Thus, she argues, academic feminist post-structuralist undermining of

gender has inuenced feminist activists as well though this is not incompatible with modern articulation of feminist politics for human rights. She argues that gender as equality has given way to gender as intersection which opens up more important ways to address womens inequalities even though the documents themselves do not reect this discursive recognition. For example, most documents insist on two genders, male and female, and do not talk of gender identities. The activism around the UN, however, raises the relationship between intellectual representation, judged in terms of coherence of discourse, and political activities, evaluated based on success for the people (Baud & Rutten 2004). Feminists, most of whom are committed to womens equality but have few connections with mass based womens groups, can end up in a vanguardist position. As Baud and Rutten (2004) argue, they may become too intellectual or too constrained by the international institutions. The NGOisation of the movement has provided many educated women with good employment opportunities in INGOS and opportunities for travel and

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interaction with other feminist activists and for framing the position of the transnational feminist movement. While they speak for their constituents, most are removed from them except as service providers or gender experts. Clearly, there is need for engendering knowledge and institutions and transnational feminist networks like DAWN, WEDO, and others have played an important role in advancing the feminist research and policy agenda at the UN and other international spaces as shown by Moghadam (2005). The problem is that increasingly such networks have become the dominant face of the womens movements. Another major site for transnational feminist activism since the 1995 conference in Beijing has been the World Social Forum (WSF). The rst WSF was held in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil organised by the Workers Party (www.worldso cialforum.org). It was a response to two contradictory tendencies in Latin America in the 1990s: increasing democratisation and the spread of neoliberal globalisation. The latter generated structural crises and inequalities while the former provided a space to address these growing crises. The protests against corporate globalisations that began in Seattle in 1998 and continued through the end of the decade created new networks and led to the consolidation of the global justice movement. It was in the name of the global justice movement and as an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where leaders of corporate globalisation meet, that the rst WSF was called in January 2001 in Brazil. The WSF was organised as a democratic space for people from around the world to share their struggles and reect on alternatives. The language of the WSF stresses process and autonomy from state and parties, even though it was an initiative of the Workers Party. Feminists were active in the WSF from its inception and gender equality was stressed as one of the important aspects of global justice. Yet the rst two WSF, however, did not have as many sessions on gender nor were women in prominent positions in the International Organising Committee. It was to address this lack of attention to feminist issues that womens groups from Latin America, Asia, and Africa met informally at the 2003 Forum to discuss the idea of Feminist Dialogues, which would engender the WSF and make it feminist in its focus, method, and participants.

The rst Feminist Dialogues (FD) were held at the 2004 World Social Forum in Bombay, India (http://feministdialogue.isiswomen.org). Given the contentious debates within womens movements and the debates within academic feminist discourses around the term feminist, their selfidentication as feminist is remarkable. I think this identication reects two realities. (1) All the networks that coordinated the FD Development Alternatives with Women For a New Era (DAWN), Womens International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ), Articulacion Feminista Marcosur (AFM), National Network of Womens Autonomous Groups (NNWAG), African Womens Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), INFORM-Sri Lanka, and Isis International-Manila come from urban, autonomous tendencies in their respective countries, which are more likely to identify as feminists; and (2) the rise of religious fundamentalisms, their cooptation of the human rights framework, and the participation of a large number of women in those movements has necessitated differentiating feminists, committed to gender equality, from other womens movements. So even as the FD emphasised the variety of feminisms and the diversity of womens experiences in particular local/global contexts, they clearly articulated their feminist identity. The FD focused on four themes: womens human rights (tensions at the intersection of globalisation and fundamentalism); reclaiming womens bodies (the struggle for reproductive rights); challenging sexual borders and frontiers (afrming sexual rights); and beyond the localglobal divide (resistances in current geopolitics) (Santiago 2004). The FD were organised autonomously from the WSF; they met a couple of days before the WSF, and were a fairly closed gathering restricted to feminists from the 7 networks. According to the Coordinating Group (CG) of the FD and participants who were present at the 2005 FD, the 2004 FD in Mumbai were a disaster as the two day workshops were not well organised, facilitators were identied at the last minute and hence were not clear about their role, and logistics and the facilities were neither comfortable nor handicap accessible. But their efforts to change the WSF, however, succeeded. The 2004 WSF in India was vastly different from its predecessors in Brazil. Feminists from India were on the International

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Organising Committee, major plenaries all had equal numbers of men and women participants, and gender was integrated in most of the workshops and most importantly issues of caste/race and fundamentalism were added as important aspects of global justice. Despite the limitations of the 2004 FD, the CG decided to meet again in 2005 in Brazil where the WSF would be held. I participated in the second FD as a facilitator. This time the coordinating group had expanded to 18 networks from the initial seven and participation was through an open application process. The CG had raised money to bring women from countries that could not afford to send them to Brazil. About 230 women gathered for a 3-day workshop that was run more or less like an academic event. Not only were most women at the FD middle-class and educated, there were also regional imbalances. Both in the CG and among the participants, women from Latin America and Asia were a majority. Part of this reects the location 80% of the 155,000 participants at the 2005 WSF were Brazilians and part of it reects the abilities of women to mobilise funds. A concept paper had been circulated ahead of time to set the framework for discussions. It outlined a very complex, feminist analysis of the contemporary context within which feminist struggles are taking place around the world and the need to focus on the body as an important political site.
We would like the feminist dialogue to interrogate the body, recover its complexities, and examine the ways in which we can regain control over our bodies as a strategic element of our collective agency and our vision of alternatives. This is in relation to the inter-linkages of the multiple oppressions arising from the consolidated and yet autonomous forces of: neo-liberal globalisation, war, conict, militarism and militarisation, fundamentalisms (FD 2005: 12).

The FD were organised to facilitate collective reection and used buzz groups, small group workshops, and plenaries to facilitate participation. Translation remained a key impediment to interaction. While there were simultaneous translations in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French for the plenaries, the group discussions were based on language groups and thus undermined the ability of those who spoke only

one language to interact with women from regions who were not bilingual. The language that framed the questions for discussion reected a mix of academic and activist agendas. The small group workshops focused on two questions: the particular and general dilemmas of the feminist movements and the new strategies that can be developed in relation to us and to other movements, including the World Social Forum. Yet, it seemed that the CG did not want to be seen as developing a call for action and so we were instructed not to come up with specic actions or plans of actions but to think of strategies as a vision or a framework. This tension between reection and strategising was evident throughout the three days as women from different parts came with different expectations, with different experiences of organising, and different agendas. So while all the plenary speakers, some of whom were members of the CG while others were facilitators and academics like Maxine Molyneux and Maria Betania, emphasised the need to revive and revitalise the feminist movement as a political project, the CG did not want to make any specic call to action. Partly, this reected their position: that local situations are so varied that a unied call did not make sense; that there are a diversity of feminist perspectives, many not in the room; and the FD were not a space for specic strategies. To avoid making claims on behalf of women in general, they seemed unwilling to make claims even on behalf of the FD. As a result, at the end of the FD despite enriching discussions and their intention to think of new strategies, there were no strategies, general or specic, to work with other movements or the WSF. As one facilitator from Paraguay noted it is a privileged space for privileged feminists. There was a clear division in the CG between those who saw it as a space for reection and dialogue and those who saw it as a place to reinvigorate the feminist political project which they felt had been undermined and fragmented with the onslaught of globalisation, fundamentalisms, and militarism post 9/11. Those who saw it as a space for reection focused on process issues and tried to make the dialogue as open and participatory as possible. For example, there were daily evaluation sessions; when language-based workshops seemed too regional

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with not enough transnational discussion, they reorganised the groups. But the focus on process undermined outcome. Those who wanted it to be more political did not succeed in reframing the FD. Another divide revolved around the relationship of FD to the WSF. Some CG members saw it as an autonomous space, even though it meets at around the time of the WSF, while others saw the main role of the FD as not only inuencing the WSF but also linking with other global justice movements. Despite such differences, at the closing plenary, the CG members hoped that there would be another FD meeting in 2007 when the WSF convenes again in Africa and that during the year in between there would be multiple feminist dialogues like the multiple local and regional social forums. One of the sessions that the FD had organised at the WSF in India and that was continued at the WSF in Brazil this year was an inter-movement dialogue between the feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender, labour, and dalit/anti-racism movement. The inter-movement dialogue at the WSF was an example of taking intersectional politics seriously. Its aim was to enable each movement to re-conceptualise its vision in relation to those of other movements. A representative from each movement had a chance to reect on the ways in which they had succeeded and failed in addressing the issues of the other three movements. Given the setting, all the representatives spoke of building alliances but again none of them engaged in the questions of the dialogue very concretely. There was no effort to think through ongoing coalition building for redistributive efforts at local or regional levels. The participants and most of the panellists were women. Here were feminists who had become autonomous from parties and other movements and were now seeking to build alliances based on a position of strength and a well-developed feminist perspective. But if this session was an indicator of coalition politics, it did not seem very promising. Coalition politics for social movements has become the strategic equivalent of micro-credit in development: a panacea. But as the inter-movement session at WSF in 2005 showed, movements have not done the serious work of rearticulating their visions to integrate other visions; reorganising their movements to include others; and rethinking strategies to address issues of all inequalities, class, race, gender, and sexuality, among others.

In addition to sessions organised by the FD at the 2005 WSF in Brazil, other gender and feminists sessions were organised by INGOs, such as AWID, WEDO, WIDE, CWGL, Latin American feminist organisations, academics, and most visibly the World March of Women. The 2005 WSF carried over the major issues from the WSF in India but was organised differently. Workshops, presentations, and meetings were organised into 11 themes, which met in 11 sites, with a huge site in the middle for a youth camp where 35,000 young activists lived in camps and met for sessions to discuss various issues. It was in the youth camp that there were incidences of sexual harassment and young women did not let them go unnoticed. They responded with a march and a big public discussion about them. The women who led the protest were mostly from the World March of Women. While there were many sessions related to gender and feminist issues at the WSF, some of the major plenaries were male dominated despite the presence of women on the organising committee of the WSF. And as is often the case, sessions dealing with gender issues were dominated by women, as presenters and participants. But it was heartening to see young feminists, both men and women, most of whom were not even aware of the Feminist Dialogues that had taken place a couple of days previously. As the two sites above show, a new geography of feminist politics is emerging. Feminist movements have to be local and global and to frame issues that can speak to a global audience. As the example of the FD and the WSF shows, they also need to build bridges across specic movements. But the terrain of transnational activism, given its reliance on information technology and expert knowledge, cross-border travel and dialogic gatherings, privileges educated middle class activists who are able to engender discursive changes to implement which there are few resources and even less political will in the era of neo-liberalism, fundamentalism, and increased militarism.

Transnational feminism and feminist politics

One of the main contributions of feminist politics has been to re-conceptualise politics in

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several ways: to expand the terrain of the political from public to private and from productive to both productive and reproductive issues; to emphasise multiple sites of resistance and activism; and to move away from orthodox notions of primary contradiction and revolutionary strategies to recognise multiple contradictions and heterodox methods and means. Thus the issue of power is understood in terms both of structural power of the state and the capitalist economy and of the discursive power of micro-politics (Piper & Uhlin 2004). But as I show above, transnational feminist movements have primarily succeeded at the level of discursive power. They have operated on the notion of discursive representation rather than political representation. Discursive representation has sought to be inclusive, open, and selfreexive. Such an emphasis is in part a reection of feminists ability to harness communicative rather than conventional power. Discourses have an empowering function and are an important site of resistance. But feminist discourses have not become hegemonic, they remain an alternative. And when discourses such as gender mainstreaming and womens human rights are taken up by states and international agencies they tend to become

depoliticised and have little impact on actual policy changes. As Pearson (2004) and Rai (2004) note, transnational feminists have actively engaged the institutions of global governance and made important contributions to policy changes, from gender mainstreaming to gender budgets, gender codes of ethics to micro-credit, the Tobin and Maria Taxes,4 yet there is growing gender inequality. Pearson (2004) argues that in part this is a result of conating academic feminist analysis with feminist politics: while analysis is needed to under-gird political action it is not political action by itself. Simon-Kumar (2004) argues that under neo-liberalism the state has become the market with the result that womens emancipation depends on negotiating with the state and the market in more complex ways. Thus a neo-liberal moment calls for a neo-radical feminist politics that is based on intersectional analysis and democratic practices but devises strategies with other mass movements such as unions in the informal sector as well as export processing zones that can hold corporations accountable, land redistribution and challenging agribusiness to sustainable land use, fair trade economic alternatives, political quotas for women that can redistribute resources and emancipate women.

Notes
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I wish to thank Valentine Moghadam and Gale Summereld for their comments on the paper. 1. The CSW succeeded in adopting six new resolutions on gender mainstreaming in national policies and programs; the possible appointment of a special rapporteur on laws that discriminate against women; trafcking; integrating a gender perspective in post-disaster relief, particularly in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster; indigenous women; and womens economic advancement. It also adopted four traditional texts on: women, the girl child and

HIV/AIDS; the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW); the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan; and the situation of and assistance to Palestinian women. 2. I use the term feminist to refer to movements that challenge the gendered division of labour in all social institutions and relations and seek womens equality in the economic, social, political, and cultural realms. 3. Feminist scholars such as Rupp (1998), Moghadam (2005), Naples & Desai (2002) have emphasised that transnational

activism is not new to contemporary globalisation but has been present in the womens movement since the midlate nineteenth centuries when women came together across borders around abolition of slavery, suffrage, anticolonialism, and labour rights. 4. Pearson (2004) proposed this tax, to be levied by national governments on exporters in proportion to the number of women in the export zones, and to be used specically for gender equity for women workers, not just in the export zones but also women in the economy as a whole.

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