Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization(Comparative Feminist Studies)

Calling for inclusion and dialogue, these essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists stress the need to put into relation seemingly discrepant approaches to reality and to scholarship in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South and East/West divides. This diverse group of authors, who spent fourteen weeks working collaboratively, dispense with unity and seek instead to use dialogue and difference in their production of knowledge about effective political action. The dialogues materialized here among women's movements that have emerged within different contexts and cosmologies take feminisms' challenges to contemporary corporate globalization in new empirical and theoretical directions.

Table of Contents:
Preface; C.Talpade Mohanty Introduction; M.Waller & S.Marcos PART ONE: ENCOUNTERS Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter or 'When' Does a 'Chinese' Woman Become a 'Feminist'?; S-M.Shih Making Sense in Chinese "Feminism"/Women's Studies; Y.Wu PART TWO: ENCOUNTERING 'Third World Women': Rac(e)ing the Global in a U.S. Classroom; P.Chatterjee International Conferences as Sites for Transnational Feminist Struggles: The Case of the First International Conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD); O.Nnaemeka PART THREE: DIALOGUES The Borders Within The Indigenous Women's Movement and Feminism in Mexico; S.Marcos One Voice Kills Both Our Voices: Transcultural Feminist Engagement; M.R.Waller Conversation on 'Feminist Imperialism and the Politics of Difference'; S-M.Shih , S.Marcos , O.Nnaemeka & M.R.Waller PART FOUR: RECONCEIVING RIGHTS South Wind: Towards a New Political Imaginary; C.Kumar Accidental Crossings: Tourism, Sex Work, and Women's Rights in the Dominican Republic; A.Cabezas Feminism and Human Rights at a Crossroads in Africa: Reconciling Universalism and Cultural Relativism; J.Ngozi Ezeilo

About the Author :
MARGUERITE WALLER is Professor of Women's Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, USA. SYLVIA MARCOS is Visiting Professor, Drew University, and Director of the Center for Psychoethnological Research, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Review :
"Drawing on diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds as well as divergent geographic and cultural experiences, the authors demonstrate the power of dialogue across difference for the creation of new feminist knowledges on social justice and social change. They show how seemingly opposing views can provide the basis for new conceptual frameworks that challenge more limited forms of feminism as well as provide resources for contesting oppressive modes of globalization. The authors critically assess how international conferences, human rights discourse, women s studies programs, and transnational feminist organizing as well as other sites of feminist practice can become vehicles for inclusion of the perspectives and political practice of feminists who are often left out of transnational feminist conversations and activism. One can only hope that others will take up this dialogic model and use it to transform transnational feminist praxis in more democratic and inclusive ways." - Nancy A. Naples, President, Sociologists for Women in Society and Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, University of Connecticut