WGSS 66.16 Transnational Feminist Sociology
How does globalization reconstitute the positions of workers and subjects on the global margins? How do the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and religion play out in the context of transnational and global power dynamics?
To answer these questions, we turn towards contemporary transnational feminist scholarship in sociology, anthropology, geography, and ethnic studies. Such perspectives are rooted in Black, Latinx and Third World feminist activism and scholarship that have begun the important work of decolonizing histories from the traditions of imperial dominion and white supremacy. In studies of globalization, these works point to critical interventions in understanding the modern world through frameworks of global and racial capitalism, neoliberalism, nation-building, and Western imperialism.
These transformative studies examine how global political and economic processes shape and is shaped by racial, gender, and sexual relations and furthermore how the continued exploitation of racialized and gendered bodies around the globe produce/reproduce the international division of (re)productive labor. Departing from top-down models of globalization that are often discussed in other courses, this class will center and honor the voices of women and minoritarian workers on the peripheries of global society to understand to how global capitalistic institutions, particularly, workplaces and government are intimately intertwined on the ground. In doing so, we not only interrogate the racialized, gendered, and social dis(locations) of social actors and subjects under neoliberal economic globalization but also identifying forms of feminist resistance and agency that can shift racial and gender power dynamics across time and space.
This class invites us to think relationally, historically, dynamically and use intersectionality as a lens to critique the power exercised by global institutions, corporations, and political processes. By grounding our analysis in the perspectives of women and minoritarian subjects, we can think about new ways forward in building cross-cultural solidarities and coalitions that can inspire abolition and expand concepts of liberation around the world.
Cross Listed Courses
SOCY 49.27