event
GENDER SEMINAR SERIES
Thursday
07
October
Manisha Desai

Reflections on Decolonising the Transnational Feminist Analytic

Manisha Desai, University of Connecticut
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While transnational feminist movements and praxis have a centuries old history, transnational feminism as an analytic emerged in the 1990s United States academy in response to its own internal debates of theorising across difference and the larger context of the global gender equality regime that had emerged over the United Nations Women’s Decade and the Fourth World Conference in Beijing.

If Transnational Feminist Analytic (TFA) is to remain relevant as an example of theorising across differences, it needs to be in conversation with other imaginings across difference. In particular, Manisha Desai will highlight the need to attend to three such endeavors: decolonial feminisms that centre the settler coloniality of the Americas; Bahujan and Dalit feminisms that challenge the Brahmanic supremacy of unmarked Indian feminism; and decolonial, postsocialist feminisms that challenge the already recognized erasure of the erstwhile Second World from the transnational feminist analytic.

 

About the speaker

Manisha Desai is the Head of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her areas of research and teaching include gender and globalisation, transnational feminisms, and social movements in India. Her most recent book is Subaltern Movements in India: The Gendered Geography of Struggles Against Neoliberal Development (Routledge 2016). In addition, she has 4 other books and numerous articles and book chapters. In recognition of her contribution to feminist scholarship she was awarded the Sociologist for Women in Society’s 2015 Distinguished Feminist Award. She is also the recipient of the 2016 Faculty Mentor Award from the Compact for Faculty Diversity in the United States. She has served in many leadership capacities including as President of Sociologist for Women in Society and as part of the Expert Committee of Every Woman Everywhere’s Global Treaty to End Violence Against Women.  She is currently a Visiting Fellow at UNRISD working with them on papers related to their New Eco-Social Contract and Global Gender Justice Initiatives.

 

PART OF THE GENDER SEMINAR SERIES

The Gender Centre has developed this series of research seminars in order to offer a platform of exchange for students and researchers whose work includes a gender perspective. During this monthly series, researchers have the opportunity to discuss their work, meet peers from different disciplines at the Graduate Institute, as well as interact with other students, guest speakers and faculty members.

See the programme of this semester's Gender Seminar Series here.

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This is a hybrid event.

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