Transnational Feminism: Re-reading Joan Scott in the Brazilian Sertão

Abstract

Accounts of globalization often depict a world awash in faceless flows of global capital that deprive broad sectors of humanity of a role in the international division of labor. Extrapolating from this economic analysis to politics and culture, some theorists conclude that meaning has evaporated from local sites, leaving their isolated inhabitants unable to articulate their own alternatives to global agendas. However, fieldwork with a rural Brazilian women’s movement in one of these ‘structurally irrelevant’ places, finds another face of globalization with more potentially positive effects. These local activists create meaning in a transnational web of political/cultural relations that brings benefits as well as risks for their movement. Rural women engage with a variety of differently located feminist actors in relations constituted both by power and by solidarity. They defend their autonomy from the impositions of international funders, negotiate over political resources with urban Brazilian feminists, and appropriate and transform transnational feminist discourses. In this process, the rural women draw on resources of their own, based on the very local-ness whose demise is bemoaned by globalization theorists.