Introduction: Positioning Feminist Voices in the Global South

Scholarship in the field of feminist theory and praxis has significantly expanded over the past two decades as the complex and interlocking conditions that produce oppression, opportunity, and privilege (e.g., race, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, disability, and age) have generated new questions, issues, and interpretations of women’s lives. There are concerns about the nature of knowledge itself, such as the pathways of formation and the hegemonies of dominant forms and voices that continue to determine global politics and marginalize the diverse voices and perspectives of subaltern communities in the global South (e.g., women, the poor, young people, and LGBTQI). It is now clearly understood that feminist theorizing that complicates analysis of contextual, historical, geo-economic, political, and cultural processes shaping women’s differentiated lives is necessary to generate new interdisciplinary feminist theories and praxis. For example, studies by feminist scholars in the global South and its diaspora have rejected hegemonic Western feminism, effectively criticizing homogenized conceptions of gender in feminist theory and putting more emphasis on the impact that global economic processes such as colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have on the oppression of women and marginalized communities in the global South (e.g., Alexander & Mohanty, 1997, Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 1997; Steady, 1981, 2004). These studies and others have challenged feminist theory to explore the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, but to also more broadly interrogate the particularities of other structures of power that impact women’s lived experiences in the global South, such as patriarchal nationalisms, religion, and local structures of legal-juridical oppression (Desai, 2015; Mama, 2009; Moghadam, 2015; Mohanty, 2003). As a result, it is now commonplace for feminist scholarship and pedagogy in the global North to take a global, transnational, and intersectional approach. Such developments have enhanced intellectual exchanges among scholars and activists regionally and transnationally.