My Open Space letter with Chiara Bonfiglioli in Feminist Review →

It’s paywalled, but for those of you without institutional access, you can find the text below.

Vanishing Act: Global Socialist Feminism as the ‘Missing Other’ of Transnational Feminism – a Response to Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert and Koobak (2019)

As a historian and an ethnographer who have laboured for over a decade to rescue the complex but little-known history of socialist feminist activism in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, we are delighted to see Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Redi Koobak’s contribution on ‘The postsocialist “missing other” of transnational feminism?’ (2019) in the pages of Feminist Review. While we wholeheartedly agree that there is a (post)socialist ‘missing other’ from the intellectual spaces occupied by transnational feminism, we do not believe that this is only due to an epistemic exclusion borne of a ‘strict, Western-centric frame that continues to represent itself as universal and delocalised’ (ibid., p. 82). Rather, it is also the result of the deliberate erasure of the history of an earlier internationalist form of women’s activism that once linked the subaltern subjects of the Global South with their comrades in the former state socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It is our view that the continued equation between Western and socialist colonialities—and the assumption of a long-lasting missed encounter between (post)colonial and (post)socialist subjects—silences the existence of past socialist anti-colonial networks.

In June 2019, we both met with a group of historians, anthropologists and other scholars of women’s and feminist movements at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, to discuss the emergence of a new field of studies, namely global socialist feminism.1 This recent field of research focuses on the legacy of socialist, communist and anti-colonial women’s organisations from the West, the East and the Global South, affiliated to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a global organisation founded in 1945 on the basis of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist principles, and engaged in the promotion of women’s rights until the end of the Cold War. Through the WIDF, women’s activists from Africa, Asia and Latin America forged close ties with socialist, communist and other left-leaning women from Europe to oppose war, colonialism and other forms of hegemonic domination they saw as emanating from a deeply unjust global distribution of wealth and power resulting from capitalism (De Haan, 2010, 2012). As a result of Cold War anti-communism, the history of the WIDF and of its national branches has been silenced for a very long time in the historiography. But this silencing is also the result of the continued predominance of Western liberal feminist agendas (and not just their epistemological perspective).

Multilateral networks of leftist women once openly opposed what they called ‘bourgeois feminism’, with its desire to focus solely on specific women’s issues without dealing at all with the larger political and economic context within which those issues occurred. Liberal feminists believed that women’s problems could be solved by the achievement of equal rights of opportunity with men within the framework of capitalism, a model they tried to export to the Global South. Leftist women’s activists were far more attuned to the ways in which race and class intersected with gender. For example, four years before Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) coined the term ‘intersectionality’, African women, together with their allies in Eastern Europe, fought to include the issue of apartheid in the official deliberations of the United Nations Third World Conference on Women to be held in Nairobi in the summer of 1985 (Ghodsee, 2019). Ever since the First World Conference on Women held in Mexico City a decade earlier, liberal feminists from the United States and Western Europe had insisted that these official conferences should solely concentrate on the legal and economic status of women. Topics not directly related to the promotion of sexual equality, they argued, should be handled (by men) in the General Assembly. Rejecting this view, socialist women, as well as women affiliated to the Non-Aligned Movement, protested that a women’s conference should allow them a chance to address all issues that impacted the lives of women (Jain and Chacko, 2009; Ghodsee, 2014; Bonfiglioli, 2016).

In the last ten years, numerous scholarly works (Chase, 2012; Ghodsee, 2012; Donert, 2013; Bonfiglioli, 2014; Ghodsee, 2014; Tambor, 2014; Armstrong, 2016; McGregor, 2016; Zheng, 2016) have documented the significance of the WIDF and of transnational socialist and communist women’s networks during the Cold War, particularly in the context of the expansion of women’s political, social and economic rights, and within the framework of the UN Decade for Women and the three meetings in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). For instance, in her 2019 book Second World, Second Sex, Kristen Ghodsee traces the important alliances between socialist and socialist-leaning women in Bulgaria and Zambia and their impacts on the shape of the international discourses about women’s rights, arguing that Bulgarian and Zambian women’s political solidarity provided an important challenge to liberal feminism on the world stage. This new scholarship on global socialist feminism, however, still appears to be the ‘missing other’ of transnational feminism, insofar as its historical and political contributions are not acknowledged within feminist critical theory and gender studies, nor are they allowed to disrupt existing categories of analysis when it comes to (post)colonial and (post)socialist feminism. Even when feminist scholars engage in a critique of transnational feminism’s blind spots, global socialist feminism is nowhere to be seen.

As scholars of international women’s movements, we agree that there have been instances of ‘strained dialogue’ between (post)colonial and (post)socialist feminists, and we are aware of the subordinated role of (post)socialist feminism within transnational feminist knowledge production, as opposed to (post)colonial feminism, which has been partly validated—but also co-opted—within transnational feminist discourses. As astutely recognised by Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert and Koobak (2019, p. 82), ‘the presumably egalitarian and inclusive frame of transnational feminism has failed to advance a truly comparative, cross-regional and transcultural intellectual approach’ due to its Western-centric framework. It is interesting to note, however, that those who are critical of the misrecognition of (post)socialist subjects’ experiences within transnational feminism—and of the lack of dialogue between (post)socialist and (post)colonial feminisms—often ignore the existing scholarship on global socialist feminism. We believe that it is difficult to fully deconstruct Western-centric frameworks as long as the ‘almost emotional rejection of everything socialist’ (ibid., p. 83) proper of (post)socialist discourses goes unproblematised.

We recognise that the alliance between (post)socialist feminists and (post)colonial feminists is complicated by asynchronous developments in (post)colonial and (post)socialist studies as well as by divergent understandings of race. On the one hand, early (post)colonial theory was attached to left-wing and socialist perspectives, while on the other hand early (post)socialist discourses rejected anything related to socialism and focused on ‘catching up’ with the West. (Post)colonial feminists, moreover, advocated an epistemic privilege on race issues, while (post)socialist feminists tended to reinstate their whiteness and ‘European-ness’. These diverging emphases, as argued by Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert and Koobak, made it difficult for (post)socialist feminists to find common ground with women in (post)colonial contexts even as they both struggled against the homogenising forces of globalisation and the increasing hegemony of liberal feminism. While we agree that (post)socialist feminists’ rejection of socialist modernity is a fundamental element in this missed encounter, we emphatically reject the idea that socialist women’s solidarity with women in colonial and (post)colonial settings was simply a top-down phenomenon, now a ‘relic of the past’. Existing scholarship clearly documents the interrelations between top-down and grassroots mobilisations and, most notably, the significance of socialist ideas and networks within processes of decolonisation and (anti-)colonial activism in the Global South.

For example, in her intellectual history of women and the United Nations, the Indian economist Devaki Jain (2005, p. 84) lamented the end of the Cold War context because, with its demise, she believed that leftist women in (post)colonial settings lost their ability to forge paths independent of Western economic and political hegemony: ‘The fading out of the Cold War … removed a vital political umbrella that had sheltered the women of the South, given them a legitimacy to stake a claim for justice as part of the movements to address domination’. Jain also recognised the essential role of the solidarity between women from the state socialist East and women from the Global South:

The Socialist bloc had supported approaches that required a strong state, a thrust toward public provision of basic services, and a more equitable global economic program such as the New International Economic Order. It was often an ally of the newly liberated states as they attempted to forge coalitions … to negotiate with their former colonial masters. (ibid., p. 103)

Although liberal feminist coalitions in the Global North enjoyed financial resources that far exceeded those of the women’s activists in the rest of the world, many left women’s activists forged coalitions that gave them strength in numbers, especially at the United Nations.

Yet, Western historiography of the twentieth century international women’s movement has ignored these powerful coalitions between socialist and (anti-)colonial activists. This results from a widespread tendency to equate the colonial ‘dark sides’ of Western and socialist modernity, which proposes a fundamental equivalence between processes of oppression, colonisation and racialisation under both capitalism and socialism. By reducing (post)socialist modernities to a form of coloniality, scholars have failed to recognise the utopian potential of socialist ideas and of socialist modernisation projects and their profound impact among feminist and (anti-)colonial activists located in the Global South. In other words, socialist ideas in the twentieth century inspired many colonial subjects to dream of becoming (post)colonial citizens.

The concept of ‘transnational feminism’ must be reimagined to include more space for South-to-South and South-to-(semi-)periphery coalitions between both activists and scholars, but we insist that these future coalitions be built on more robust understandings of the past. Western and socialist colonialities were not the same thing, and socialist women forged strong (anti-)colonial coalitions with women in the Global South throughout the Cold War. These (anti-)colonial networks also extended into the West itself (in such iconic figures as Angela Davis or Claudia Jones, for instance, both of whom were members of the Communist Party USA) and challenged Western colonial structures from within. Ignoring the history of global socialist feminism reifies rather than challenges the theoretical hegemony of Western concepts like ‘transnational feminism’. Only by rejecting the continued persistence of the Cold War’s ideological baggage, acknowledging women’s past political agency in both (post)colonial and (post)socialist settings, and recognising the global circulation of socialist feminist ideas can we possibly overcome Western-centric feminist frameworks of analysis.