Transnational

The term transnational entered feminist studies terminology in the 1990s, emerging out of a desire for studies of gender and sexuality to address asymmetries in globalization processes. Transnational feminism purposefully set itself apart from “international” and “global” feminisms—rejecting the reified cartographies and national borders of the former and the dismissal of nation-states and the universalizing gesture of the latter (Swarr and Nagar 2010). By contrast, transnational approaches emphasize the political function of borders while they expose their constructedness and porousness. Under historical circumstances where global capitalism is imagined to undermine national borders, scholars have noted that states, and therefore borders, have been unevenly impacted by processes of global neoliberalization: while some states have waned in power, others have grown stronger (Grewal 2005). While globalization may have increased the flows of capital and technologies across borders and thereby created the conditions for an uncritical celebration of increased mobility, it did not result in equal mobility for all bodies (C. Kaplan 2002). Scholars have also problematized the suggestion that the “global” constitutes a moment of decentralization of power, underlining that such deterritorialization, or delinking of power from territorial bounds, has been followed by various reterritorializations, or remapping of power, especially through asymmetrical travels of culture and media (Grewal 2005). In other words, the fact that US “culture” is now widely mediated and detached from the physical space of the United States or that many jobs are now outsourced and capital is offshored does certainly not culminate into the US empire’s inability to consolidate and exercise economic, cultural, and military power worldwide (Grewal 2005).