Transnational Feminism and Gender-Based Violence
Art and blog post by L.E.M / Lucia E. Murray, Intersect Antigua
November 25th marked the beginning of the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign. Gender-based violence – often abbreviated to GBV – occurs throughout the world, in various manifestations and to varying extremities. According to Tracey Robinson, gender-based violence refers to “forms of violence, in which gender significantly explains the use or performance of violence and the experience of violence. In other words, gender tells us something about who does it and why, and who experiences and why.” In “Queering Feminist Approaches to Gender-based Violence in the Anglophone Caribbean,” Tonya Haynes and Hamilah A. F. DeShong underline the importance of considering gender’s overlap with sexuality, “gender as identity, embodiment and performance,” and the ways in which gender influences “relations of power” (111) when we think about gender-based violence. Anyone can be harmed by GBV, including men and boys – whose harms are under-reported, in part due to the standards of manhood impressed upon them by cisheretopatriarchy. Nevertheless, women and girls – including trans women, cis women, intersex women, and queer women – are disproportionately affected by GBV. Sexual minorities and gender diverse or non-conforming people, in general, are also disproportionately affected. For the past few weeks, Intersect has made calls for people within and beyond the Caribbean region to engage in transnational feminist action with us. As we continue to do so, we would like to take some time to elaborate on what exactly transnational feminism entails, in addition to underscoring the issue of GBV as a transnational, Caribbean feminist concern.
What is transnational feminism?
Transnational feminism deviates from white, liberal feminism that is rooted in a western, imperialist worldview. It flouts the white/liberal feminist assumption that women’s experiences of womanhood and oppression are universal. In “Transnational Feminisms” from Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives, Dutt-Ballerstadt and Anderson corroborate this, asserting that transnational feminism “also suggests a politics rooted in solidarity, rather than an assumed shared experience.” It avoids replicating the typical saviour-victim dichotomy when drawing linkages between oppressed groups in the Global North and those in the Global South. Narratives of the benevolent white feminist, swooping in to rescue helpless ‘third world’ women from their circumstances, may come to mind. Alternatively, one might picture women from one region of the world – subconsciously or unconsciously assuming authority, that they know best – trying to speak for, and consequently over, those of another.
““While transnational feminism rejects the idea that people from different regions have the same subject position and subjectivities and experiences with gender inequality, it recognizes that global capitalism has also created similar relations of exploitation and inequality.” ”
Despite the similarities – and sometimes even parallels through the influence of global capitalism – in experience that oppressed groups across the globe share, it is important to remember that we are not a monolith. There is nuance to a woman’s position as a subject that is influenced by a variety of factors – including, but not limited to, her gender, sexuality, class, race, the region in which she lives, and whether or not she has disabilities. This also hold true for gender non-conforming people and men, and Haynes and DeShong substantiate these assertions when they elaborate the deviation of “Caribbean queer subjectivity” from established understandings of queerness in the Global North by virtue of “the fluid, overlapping, and exchangeab[le] . . . ways in which . . . terms of self-identification [like lesbian, gay, and trans] are used” (109). This is why solidarity and forging ties with feminist movements within and across borders is so important – because it makes space for the varied articulations of marginalised experiences, and their corresponding issues, to simultaneously exist.
““In order to address issues of inequality and intersectional oppressions, transnational feminist practice is involved with and rooted in activist movements across the globe that work together to understand the role of gender, race, class, sexuality, and the state in critiquing and resisting heteropatriarchal, capitalist power structures.””
Therefore, transnational feminism is grounded in anticolonial, critical race, and anti-capitalist thought, and it is interconnected with many other forms of feminism – such as Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black feminisms – emerging from the Global South, as well as from within BIPOC and immigrant communities of the Global North.
Art by L.E.M, Intersect Antigua
So, how is GBV a transnational, Caribbean feminist issue?
Building a world free from gender-based violence necessitates the complete dismantling of the interlinked systems that allow it to thrive. This means confronting capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, colonialism, neocolonialism, anti-blackness, white supremacy, and other modes of marginalisation baked into or accompanying these structures. This also means envisioning a world free of all the aforementioned trappings, and accompanying injustices, and coming together to mould our knowledge and ideas into the seed from which a new world will spring forth.
This means addressing the multitude of ways in which women and girls are harmed by the hegemonic systems under which they live. For some women, such harm may comprise femicide, female genital mutilation, and limited or no access to education. For other women, GBV might materialise as a lack of access to basic necessities and adequate health care – including reproductive and gender-affirming care –, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and sexual harassment. For even more, gendered violence may crystallise as financial abuse, physical abuse, and/or psychological abuse. Many of the aforestated examples also account for the injustices that trans people – especially trans women – face as a result of simply existing beneath intersecting hegemonic structures. In life, many trans women in the Caribbean experience “economic, physical, and sexual violence, and other human rights violations” – including blame and low priorisation from healthcare workers and “physical and sexual assault, theft, extortion for sex or money, and arbitrary arrest and detention” from the police (Lanham et al.). Even in death, trans people are subject to very specific forms of GBV by the media that sensationalise, dehumanise, and objectify their existences (Haynes and DeShong 115). Constructing a world liberated from gender-based violence enjoins us to include trans women in our advocacy without question, to work to improve their material and social conditions, and to shatter the bioessentialist notions surrounding gender that embolden others to continue perpetuating harm against them.
A world released from the vicious grip of gender-based violence demands building movements across borders and regions. It calls for us to agitate for Palestine’s liberation, to push for an end to the war in Sudan and assist those displaced by it, and to protest the neocolonial forces keeping the Democratic Republic of the Congo in conflict and its people exploited for resources that power our societies. It calls for us to stand with Guyana and the people of the Essequibo region – many of whom are indigenous – who are at risk of being uprooted from their homes in the face of potential annexation by Venezuela. It requires that we engage in direct action and work to elevate the Caribbean’s collective consciousness through education and the co-creation of feminist thought.
These are all preoccupations that feminist movements within, between, and beyond the bounds of their nations and nation-states possess – to differing degrees. In this way, the inextricable link between transnational feminism and Caribbean feminism is most lucid, as is the reality that GBV is a transnational, Caribbean feminist issue. Let us stand together, then, as transnational feminists – acknowledging the kaleidoscope of our experience and the ways in which our sufferings are shared – as we work to end GBV in and across our respective communities, countries, regions, and the world.
Works Cited
Dutt-Ballerstadt, Reshmi, and Kiana Anderson. “Transnational
Feminisms.” Women Worldwide, Oregon State University, 2nd ed.,
June 2022, open.oregonstate.education/womenworldwide/chapter/
transnational-feminisms/.
Haynes, Tonya, and Hamilah A. F. DeShong. “Queering Feminist
Approaches to Gender-based Violence in the Anglophone Caribbean.”
Social and Economic Studies, vol. 66, no. 1/2, 2017, pp.105-131.
ResearchGate, sta.uwi.edu/igds/sites/default/files/igds/documents/
Haynes_DeShong_QueeringFeminist ApproachestoGBVinthe
AnglophoneCaribbean_0.pdf.
Lanham, Michele, et al. “‘We’re Going to Leave You for Last, Because of
How You Are’: Transgender Women’s Experiences of Gender-Based
Violence in Healthcare, Education, and Police Encounters in Latin
America and the Caribbean.” Violence and Gender, vol. 6, no.1, Mary
Ann Liebert, 11 Mar. 2019, pp.37-46. Mary Ann Liebert Publishers,
doi.org/10.1089/vio.2018.0015.
Robinson, Tracy. “An analysis of legal change: law and gender-based
violence in the Caribbean.” Caribbean Judicial Colloquium on the
Application of International Human Rights Law at the Domestic
Level, www.devnet.org.gy/sdnp/16days/files/Judicial%20
Colloquium.pdf.
