What Might a Transnational (Queer) Daughter Make? Staking Claims to Feminism via Race, Space, and Time

• In Event: The “Placetimematter” of Generation in Feminist Qualitative Research

Abstract

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to challenge current “classifications” of “feminist generations” in educational theory and research. Guided by the disorienting cartographical practices of queer of color, and feminist transnational scholars (as mode of inquiry), I chart a map of feminist “becoming” that pays careful attention to the regulatory tendencies within the construct of “generation” (e.g. reproduction). To do so, I briefly trace how ‘feminism’ has figured into canonical understandings of analyses of “gender and education” in four of the oft-cited edited collections under those monikers (Ali, Benjamin and Mauthner, 2004; Arnot and Mac an Ghaill, 2006; Skelton, Francis and Smulyan, 2006; Dillabough, McLeod and Mills, 2009;). As my data sources, I explore the following questions: How is feminism discursively constituted and rhetorically positioned by the individual authors in the text, as well as the edited collection as a whole? How are these texts shaped by disciplinary, epistemological and geopolitical boundaries? In other words, what “regional” knowledges are represented, and how are these knowledges imagined to relate to a larger population of gendered subjects? Finally, how do these texts address questions of race, racism and racialization in constructing the problematic of gender and education? The aim of this analysis is twofold: 1), to illuminate the specificity of particular knowledge claims, and 2) to articulate a possible alternative discursive framing through feminist transnational praxis. Drawing from Lather’s provocation of “working the ruins” as praxis of failure, but “as a failure of a failure to love totalizations and the shelter they provide against difficult knowledges” (2009, 277). Working with Lather the person, teaching and learning from Lather the theorist, and reading against Lather the author, has afforded a sense of queer ethics as the willful interrogation and pleasure act of mourning knowledges and desires as regulatory norms.

The theoretical perspective of queer feminist transnational praxis builds upon the work of woman of color and/or queer feminisms by taking an intersectional approach to identity, especially through critical analyses of how lived experience is shaped by interwoven dynamics of race, sexuality, class and gender. Yet feminist transnational praxis departs from woman of color feminism in shifting the object of analysis to the discursive practices and material conditions that produce, constrain and regulate relations between and among various racialized and gendered subjects in particular historical contexts and geopolitical locations (Alexander, 2005). According to Spivak (2011), the larger task of feminist transnational praxis is the ‘rearrangement of desire’ expressed through onto-epistemological and material structures. Capitalism, neoliberalism, heteronormativity and global racisms, then, become more visible as transnational investments and arrangements that require analytic and pragmatic attention within feminist theorizing and research on gender and education. The scholarly significance, then, is to provide a productive critique of normative understandings of the relationship between race, nationalism and feminism in research on gender and education as well as to suggest the disruptive possibilities of “queer” renderings of “generational” ways of thinking that actively engage racialized and geopolitical understanding of timespacemattering within feminist theorizing and contributions to educational research.

Author

• Lisa Weems, Miami University