October 16 - 18, 2007 

Giving Way At The Intersection: Postcolonial Feminist Memory in the Global Justice Movement

Ann Deslandes,

Department of Gender & Cultural Studies,

University of Sydney

(Australia)

As an alliance across ‘first’ and ‘third’ world locales, activists in the global justice movement practice solidarity at the intersection of such ‘experiential categories’ as gender, geopolitics and culture. A problem, in their praxis, occurs when the ‘pile-up’ of experiential categories makes certain experiences of oppression ‘disappear’ in activist discourse.  This is politically problematic for a movement that aims (and claims) to say ‘yes’ to struggles for liberation within/from these experiential categories, whilst saying ‘no’ to neoliberal, neocolonizing globalisation. As postcolonial feminism reminds us, it is important to locate resources alongside the intersection, as; without ethical mechanisms for living with/in difference and interest, a pile-up can stifle the possibility of alliance.

The paper is mediated by a conversation between myself (white settler feminist from Australia) and ‘Carolina’* (a woman affiliated with the Setor de Gênero of the Movimento sem Terra in Brazil); which highlighted certain differences between traditionally ‘first’ and ‘third’ world feminisms, within the discourse of the global justice movement that brought us together. In this context I examine the contemporary discursive alliance between ‘first’ and ‘third’ world activists in the movement, and bring it into dialogue with that of post-colonial feminist praxis from 1969-90.  This enables me to chart certain points where ‘gender’ disappears at the intersection in the discourse of the global justice movement, and to show how a renewed attention to the notion of ‘intersectionality’ can make gender, or any other subjugated category, appear in the discourse as necessary.  Within this I suggest that the movement has an implicit reliance on the ethics of solidarity foregrounded by postcolonial feminism.

Indeed, social movement that is variously referred to as postcolonial, third world or US third world feminism shares with the global justice movement an emphasis on global affinity, autonomy, diversity, and decolonisation; not to mention eccentric and poetic forms of dissidence. Reflecting thirty years of work in this vein, US third-world feminist theorist Chela Sandoval inaugurates her ‘tactical subjectivity’ for activist negotiation of ‘neo-colonizing postmodern global formations’ (Sandoval 2000:41-64) and feminist theorist-in-postcoloniality Sara Ahmed speaks of ‘the particularity of the encounter’ as a re-encounter for transnational feminism (2000:137-181).  I mobilise Ahmed’s particular (re)encounters and Sandoval’s tactical subjectivity as a form of postcolonial memory work in a context of neocolonizing globalization, and thus (re)produce ethical epithets for ‘giving way at the intersection’ in the global justice movement.

The contemporary global justice movement has an implicit reliance on the ethics of solidarity foregrounded by postcolonial feminism. Indeed, social movement that is variously referred to as postcolonial, third world or US third world feminism shares with the global justice movement an emphasis on global affinity, autonomy, diversity, and decolonisation; not to mention eccentric and poetic forms of dissidence. Reflecting thirty years of work in this vein, US third-world feminist theorist Chela Sandoval inaugurates her ‘tactical subjectivity’ for activist negotiation of ‘neo-colonizing postmodern global formations’ (Sandoval 2000:41-64) and feminist theorist-in-postcoloniality Sara Ahmed speaks of ‘the particularity of the encounter’ as a re-encounter for transnational feminism (2000:137-181). In this paper I mobilise Ahmed’s particular (re)encounters and Sandoval’s tactical subjectivity as a form of postcolonial memory work in a context of neocolonizing globalization, in a movement towards (re)producing epithets for an ethics of solidarity in the global justice movement.

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