Over the past two decades, feminist scholars have examined the terms “comparative” and “global” in innovative ways. Transnational and postcolonial feminist approaches have troubled the premise underlying com­parative work that nation-states serve as adequate units of analysis. Transnational feminists have also contested the universalizing gestures characteristic of many phenomena traveling under the sign of the “global.” Notwithstanding this critical precedent, several of the works featured in this issue revisit the analytical resonance of comparative and global scholarship. We begin with a cluster of articles that emerged from the Global Feminisms Project (GFP) at the University of Michigan. Jayati Lal, Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Stewart, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Justine M. Pas, in “Recasting Global Feminisms: Toward a Comparative Historical Approach to Women’s Activism and Feminist Scholarship,” present the significance of the GFP as destabilizing many received understandings of the terms “comparative,” “global,” and “transnational.” Although their project compares feminisms in four national locations–India, Poland, China, and the United States–they refuse the common comparative goal of being representative of these four locations, instead pointing to the uneven and multiple locations of feminists in each country. The authors also refute the assumption that there is a unidirectional flow of influences from Western European and US locations to the rest of the world, instead pointing to examples of how lesser-known organizations in India and Poland, for instance, direct the agendas of more prominent metropolitan scholars and institutions. Insisting on the multiplicity of feminist movements and stressing the exchange of ideas between locations, they describe a mode of global scholarship that displaces questions of scale and highlights flows of influences. In this sense, they absorb many of the insights offered by trans­national feminist scholarship while remaining attentive to the contextual specificity of national politics and the feminist formations shaped by them. {READ MORE as PDF }

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Jayati Lal, Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Stewart, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Justine M. Pas
Recasting Global Feminisms: Toward a Comparative
Historical Approach to Women’s Activism and
Feminist Scholarship

Wang Zheng and Ying Zhang
Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese Feminism
since the Fourth UN Conference on Women

Elizabeth R. Cole and Zakiya T. Luna
Making Coalitions Work: Solidarity across
Difference within US Feminism

Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Stewart, and Nicola Curtin
Becoming Feminist Activists:
Comparing Narratives

Maura Reilly
Curating Transnational Feminisms
(Art Essay)

Nancy Plankey Videla
Engendering Global Studies of Women and Work
(Review Essay)

Millie Thayer
Translations and Refusals: Resignifying
Meanings as Feminist Political Practice

Creative Writing:
Rachida Madani (translated by Marilyn Hacker),
Gina Athena Ulysse, Davi Walders

Cover Art:
Pilar Albarracín. Singing Forbidden (Prohibido el cante), 2000. Video, color, sound, 6 min., 20 sec.