Politics of Transnational Feminism to Decolonize Feminist Organizational Communication: A Call to Action

Abstract

We draw upon transnational feminism as a theoretical resource to outline decolonial thinking for feminist organizational communication in this essay. Decolonial perspectives in transnational feminism reinforce antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperial interventions in theory, practice and activism. We argue that the assumptions of neoliberal hegemony and imperial legacy remain largely unchallenged in feminist organizational communication research and call for rigorous examination of global capitalism and its close links with colonization of knowledge to make the project of the empire visible. Our recommendations urge shifting dominant sites of knowledge-making to epistemologies of disenfranchised women and generating insurgent knowledges by carefully forging non-exploitative collaborative relationships with activists and communities of struggle. We hope these agendas offer new imaginings to decolonize imperial legacies, address historical absences and silences, and invigorate social justice orientation in the field.

Keywords

decolonial politics epistemologies of disenfranchised women neoliberal feminist research intersectionality imperial legacies

Introduction

This paper explores the theme of decolonizing organizational communication in the context of feminist engagement. While feminist organizational communication research has made substantive emancipatory contributions, we argue that much work remains to be done in our field to harness the potential of feminism in global struggles for decolonization. Feminist theorizing is a reflection of our times and geopolitical tensions (Buzzanell, 2021). The present historical context brings forth twenty-first century concerns about unbridled growth of transnational corporations, state-military-corporate nexus, destruction of livelihoods, displacement and dispossession of communities, forced immigration of people, hyper nationalism and xenophobia, ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and environmental degradation (Banerjee, 2011; McLaren, 2017). We argue that turning to these issues and interrogating coloniality of power, capitalism, and gendered and racialized division of labor across these issues are important for decolonization of feminist organizational communication research (McLaren, 2017; Mohanty, 2017). More specifically, we draw upon transnational feminism as a theoretical resource to outline decolonial thinking for feminist organizational communication.

Transnational feminism as a mode of analysis locates women’s histories, experiences, identities, and practices “within transnational inequalities—particularly those linked to colonial relationships of power and structures of global capitalism” (Fernandes, 2013, p. 13). The linkages between structures of power are inherent in the idea of the transnational. While “global” and “international” refer to mere border crossing, transnational allows us to understand the intersections among diverse experiences of women across borders without overlooking the contextual differences in terms of poverty and violence (Falcón & Nash, 2015). Transnational as an analytic in transnational feminism can be best understood by Mohanty’s conceptualization of the latter as feminism across borders, but not borderless. The framework also calls attention to a close relationship between knowledge and power and demands self-reflexive knowledge practices.

We recognize that transnational feminism has been deployed in various ways, giving rise to many threads of theorizations. We emphasize the focal points of convergences in this essay and attempt to delineate how this theoretical paradigm has the potential to align feminism with the political project of decolonization. Decolonial perspectives in transnational feminism reinforce antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperial interventions in theory, practice, and activism. Mohanty (2003) wrote:

If processes of sexism, heterosexism, and misogyny are central to the socialist fabric of the world we live in; if indeed these processes are interwoven with racial, national, and capitalist domination and exploitation such that lives of women and men…are profoundly affected then decolonization at all levels…becomes fundamental to a radical feminist transformative project. (p. 8)

We hope transnational feminism further crystallizes social justice agendas central to feminist organizational research (Buzzanell, 2021; Cruz, 2015; Cruz & Linabary, 2021; Linabary et al., 2021; Parker, 2020; Walker & Muñoz Rojas, 2021).

Transnational feminism is not new to organizational communication research. Scholars have initiated conversations on complex analysis of the gendered nature of global economic processes (Dempsey, 2011) and multi-layered facets of transnational feminist networks (Dempsey et al., 2011; Linabary & Hamel, 2015). However, without much uptake of the paradigm, it has not quite delivered on its decolonial potential (Cruz & Linabary, 2021). In order to invoke the radical impulses of transnational feminism, it is important we interrogate what the category of the transnational entails in today’s economy, and more importantly, today’s academy. This interrogation is particularly important because with the proliferation of transnational feminism, the idea often gets deployed superficially, removing it from its intellectual and political genealogies rooted in studies of race, colonialism, sexuality, gender, and capital (Alexander & Mohanty, 2010; Fernandes, 2013). To this end, we probe the profound meanings of transnational feminism and offer recommendations for decolonial praxis for feminist organizational communication research.

We begin our essay with a review of the core analytics, namely, intersectionality and local-global, in transnational feminism and discuss how they often get co-opted in research and practice. Then, we describe key contributions of feminist organizational communication research and identify the absences and silences in the field, before concluding with a possible agenda for application(s) and further interrogation(s).

Transnational Feminism

The framework of transnational feminism has had a significant influence on feminist scholarship worldwide since its introduction in the mid-1990s in the United States. It is attributed to pioneering work of postcolonial scholars of the global South and scholars of color of the global North such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, and Ella Shohat. We first delineate the foundational ideas of transnational feminism in this section before moving on to engaging with two key concepts related to this framework—a) intersectionality, and b) local-global.

Foundational Ideas

The two texts considered canonical on transnational feminism in the academy are Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s (1994) edited volume, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices and M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (1997) edited volume, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies and Democratic Futures. Even though the books share different perspectives, they converge on four important contentions (Patil, 2011). First, both distinguish transnational feminism from global feminism as global feminism obliterated differences between women and espoused an ahistorical model of global sisterhood. Second, they take issues with simplistic formulation of the nation, the local and the global. Third, they interrogate hegemonic feminism’s problematic understanding of gender inequality. Fourth, they challenge a number of longstanding binaries such as theory and practice, and local and global, among others. Fundamentally, their work converged to offer an entry point to critique a universalizing white, Western feminism and market logic. (Desai, 2015).

These foundational books outline a few common themes within the conceptual framework of transnational feminism (Nagar & Swarr, 2010): a) transnational feminism provides an understanding of racialized, classed, masculinized, and heteronormative structures of globalization and capitalist patriarchies, and the intersectional ways in which they reorganize imperial relations of domination and subordination, b) it interrogates the complex ways in which these processes simultaneously produce and are sustained by a range of subjectivities of individual and collective identities, and c) it urges for a constant process of critique and self-reflection to resist a pre-conceived notion of feminist politics in a given place and time.

These arguments charted a new discourse about women’s political location in the global matrix of power, distinct from global and international feminism (Conway, 2017). They subverted notions that women globally share similar experiences of exploitation, struggles, and privileges. These discourses also offered two conceptual directions—one launching transnational feminism as a theoretical framework for transnational knowledge production and the other imagining solidarities across cross-border organizing (Conway, 2017; Desai, 2015; Swarr & Nagar, 2012). Most importantly, they draw attention to how different social categories such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender are mutually constituted by intricate mechanisms of power informed by European imperialism and neoliberal order (Patil, 2011). Relatedly, intersectionality as an analytic got strongly associated with transnational feminism because of its interest in understanding interrelated dimensions of power even though scholars have largely treated them as distinct theoretical frameworks (Falcón & Nash, 2015).

Intersectionality

Intersectionality has been the hallmark of feminist and social justice agendas and has been adopted across disciplines, including organizational communication research (Harris, 2013; 2016; Harris & McDonald, 2018; McDonald, 2019), to refer to the complex interactions between systems of power. It accounts for the intricate relations and communication among social identities informed by race/ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, religion, class, gender, disability, and age among other categories. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) groundbreaking conceptualization of intersectionality as analyzing relationships among gender, race, and the law in the United States has fostered a vigorous agenda for feminist research.

Both intersectionality and transnational feminism share similar political commitments. Intersectionality is relevant for transnational feminism because of its engagement with interwoven forms of power or a matrix of domination that can exist at the level of the individual or can suggest broader structural forms of oppression. Transnational feminism expands on the basic concept of intersectionality by emphasizing that global structural and historical forces of subordination reinforce the dominance of the global North (Zerbe Enns et al., 2021) and extends the scope of research on intersectionality. Intersectionality has thinly theorized questions of nation, capital, and colonialism and is known for “its inattention to cross-border dynamics” (Patil, 2011, p. 849) as can be noted in Patil’s conceptualization of domestic intersectionality (also see Nash, 2015). But if both the analytics (transnational and intersectionality) can be brought in conversation with each other, they can lead to a robust examination of how cultural norms, economic policies, and imperial legacies may interact with other social categories such as class, ethnicity/race, or gender to create complex transnational intersectionalities (Falcón, 2012; Zerbe Enns et al., 2021). These ever-changing interacting dimensions have a significant impact on the lives of women—it is by calling attention to such an intersectional nature of gender that the paradigm of transnational feminism critiques a homogenized concept of gender in feminist theory (Desai, 2015).

We find Fernandes’ (2013) definition of intersectionality particularly helpful: it refers to interdisciplinary interventions to understand how intersections between inequalities such as race, gender, and class shape women’s lives and structure social locations of specific groups of women of color in distinct ways. Evidently, intersectionality is central to capturing the salience of the term transnational, where transnational calls “attention to inequalities and relationships of power that undergird the term [transnational] and to the complex linkages between local, national, and regional processes that interact with transnational phenomena” (Fernandes, 2013, p. 10).

Hence, transnational feminism and intersectionality are mutually constructive in foregrounding heterogeneity, debunking hegemonic feminism, and expressing commitments to social justice and women of color (Falcón & Nash, 2015). Both the paradigms complement each other to enable decolonial feminist research and praxis. By rejecting claims to the universal, they not only signify relations and flows across local and global but allow for broader analysis of structures of domination and uncover erasures of women of color in existing organizational cultures. For broader analysis of structures of power, newer scholarship in transnational feminism turned to examination of local and global processes to further understand intersecting inequities that shape women’s conditions, reinforcing anti-capitalist and antiimperialist discourses, and critiquing global capital’s search for profit, accumulation, and exploitation.

Global Capital and Local Politics

Second, analysis of global-local dynamics in transnational feminism gained importance to draw attention to the extractive nature of neoliberalism, exponential growth in corporate profit, and corporatization of academia. This trend gained salience with Mohanty’s (2003) Under Western Eyes Revisited, where the author identifies politics and logic of capitalism as an urgent locus of struggle. Much of this newer scholarship also critiqued institutionalization of conceptual categories (such as transnational and intersectionality) in transnational feminist research, which, they argued, led to depoliticization of critical feminist research, making decolonization of feminist work urgent and necessary. In this section, we describe the pervasive nature of economics of capitalism, co-optation of transnational feminist and related work, and the neoliberal model of academia. We begin by discussing the exploitative economic logic embroiled in local-global dynamics.

The local (i.e., the global South) constitutes the extractive zones—space of violent displacements, expulsions, and even death in the service of neoliberal capital—for the global or the global North. Aggressive global capitalism, the backbone of neocolonial projects, destroys livelihoods and collective knowledge of communities in extractive zones in its quest for ever-new frontiers of profit-making (Dutta & Pal, 2020). The global South, which may even exist within the global North, comprises sites of raced, classed, and gendered inequalities. The actions of rich countries in the global North in collusion with the local elites in the global South have led to growing poverty in the global South, particularly for women and children, making it evident that concerns such as economic issues, and access to material resources have become paramount for feminists to consider (McLaren, 2017). The ever-increasing significance of transnational institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and IMF, international corporations with a higher net worth than many countries,, and rise of religious fundamentalism, misogynistic and racist discourses pose significant challenges for feminists (Mohanty, 2003). Alongside women’s social subordination, a grave implication of global economic processes is global feminization of poverty.

Since women and children comprise the largest population living under the poverty level all over the world, women’s situations are severely impacted when poverty is extreme (McLaren, 2017). In particular, export processing zones (EPZs) in the global South play a huge role in contributing to global feminization of poverty. They are designed to provide cheap labor to transnational corporations for profit maximization and are low-paying factory jobs with long hours and deplorable working conditions. Over-representation of women in these low-paying jobs has been noted by many scholars as mostly because they are docile and unlikely to organize unions (Salzinger, 2003). Industries such as textiles, apparel, electronics, and footwear rely heavily on exploitation of female labor, demonstrating the gendered nature of division of labor at the intersection of the global and local (Pal, 2017). In other words, globalization’s effects are gendered, affecting women differentially (Escobar, 2015; McLaren, 2017).

Globalization has been linked to environmental degradation and immigration. When state-backed corporations ruthlessly encroach into public spaces, defined as extractive zones earlier in the essay, in pursuit of profit, they cause loss of livelihoods as well as severe environmental damage for primarily poor communities. Escobar calls these livelihood and ecological struggles gender struggles as women are most negatively impacted by this kind of violence. They affect women in particular as women in many communities are responsible for procuring resources such as water and fuel for cooking. Women, being responsible for domestic chores in many parts of the world, are adversely impacted by immigration as well. When families get split, women’s work increases as they often need to take up paid work along with their unpaid domestic work such as childcare and cooking (McLaren, 2017).

Understanding women’s labor in the context of globalization allows us to see the connections between global economic processes and their inequalities and how they differentially affect women (McLaren, 2017). The examination of the constitutive nature of global-local uncovers institutional mechanisms of global capital and broader processes of exploitation. Mohanty (2003) makes a strong case for anticapitalist transnational feminist practice involving a vigorous critique of the neoliberal economy. Mohanty (2003) wrote: “global economic and political processes have become more brutal, exacerbating economic, racial, and gender inequalities, and thus they need to be demystified, reexamined, and theorized” (p. 509). However, to decolonize hegemonic feminist thinking, it is important to understand how the conceptual categories in transnational feminism often get co-opted in academic theorizing and practices. Much of the problematic engagement with the concepts can be traced within the neoliberal model of the academy.

Critique of Transnational Feminism

To invoke the radical potential of transnational feminism and connect it with its vision of generating insurgent knowledges and practices, it is important to recognize how the analytics often get depoliticized. While the overuse of the term threatens to take away its “political valence” (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994, p. 664), co-optation of the idea of intersectionality has also had its negative effect on transnational feminism.

The most common critique of transnational feminism involves a critique of the deployment of the term transnational. Given its ubiquity across the world, transnationalism has been appropriated in many ways. Far removed from its original vision, it often becomes synonymous with multiculturalism or the global or international. This use advances a singular notion of gender inequality, ignores significance of historicity and cultural specificity, and leaves out any analysis of structural oppression. An underlying challenge is to understand the location of the other in the transnational—a space within structures of global capital and geopolitical arrangements: “Dominant paradigms of multiculturalism often continue to cast transnationalism as another marker of identity so that the inclusion of transnational perspectives simply means the inclusion of one more category of the “other”” (Fernandes, 2013, p. 168). The meaning of multiculturalism here is one that considers the rest of the world as a minority identity category to be included in feminist thought. Fernandes calls attention to this kind of racialized imagination that can reduce the world to a minority category and advance a simplified meaning of difference.

The problem of multicultural inclusion can be traced in the wave-model of feminism as well, as has been eloquently argued by Fernandes (2013). The wave model represents a teleological narrative of progressive multicultural inclusion, with the third wave of feminism finally marking the inclusion of race and gender (Fernandes, 2013; Sandoval, 2000). While “second wave” feminism is constructed as a white, middle-class movement devoid of any intellectual engagement with race, feminist thinking outside of the U.S. is recognized only in the third wave. Such a linear sequence of temporality draws boundaries around each wave, obscuring possibilities of coinciding and conflicted intellectual movements. Given the history of a gendered colonial past and a subsequent postcolonial present, it is not difficult to imagine that women did not respond to oppression only in recent times. The act of recognizing women only in the sequence of waves renders a certain passivity to women (Fernandes, 2013). The result is a narrow racialized, nation-centered view of feminist thought in the U.S. (Fernandes, 2013; Saldívar-Hull, 2000; Sandoval, 2000).

The critique of wave models also draws attention to the paradigm of intersectionality that is closely identified with third wave feminism. Fernandes argued that in their institutionalized forms, both intersectionality and the third wave feminism have become aligned with a multicultural model of identity politics. Intersectionality in this sense is erroneously taken as a signifier for inclusion rather than an intellectual engagement with struggles of inclusion and any transformative politics. Similarly, as Fernandes pointed out, the idea of the transnational becomes a signifier for globalization and marks particular flows of cultural identities suggesting that feminism elsewhere is a later event or wave.

The discussion above indicates that the linear and ahistorical nature of the wave model and mainstreaming of concepts such as intersectionality and transnational have led to problematic engagement with the concepts. The transnational perspective at work here simply becomes an identity marker for inclusion of people of color or any category of the other. Such an approach runs the risk of depoliticizing the radical potential of a transnational theoretical framework.

Scholars have linked depoliticization of radical academic thinking and practice to the neoliberal knowledge economy (Falcón & Nash, 2015; Mohanty, 2013; Rhodes et al., 2018). The university has itself become a topic of renewed interest in terms of its increasing complicity with neoliberal state interests and adherence to a corporate model, posing a number of challenges to critical feminist research. Mohanty (2013) argued:

[N]eoliberal intellectual culture may well constitute a threshold of disappearance for feminist, antiracist thought anchored in the radical social movements of thetwentieth century. Radical theory can in fact become a commodity to be consumed; no longer seen as a product of activist scholarship or connected to emancipatory knowledge, it can circulate as a sign of prestige in an elitist, neoliberal landscape. (p. 971)

To understand this “disappearance” we need to understand the neoliberal restructuring of the knowledge economy. Neoliberal values of privatization and commodification in the academy have led to privatization of social justice commitments and academic knowledges associated with them. The feminist and antiracist knowledge claims are reduced to a privatized politics of representation disconnected from institutional and geopolitical understanding of power and histories of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Devoid of any political economy focus, race and gender justice commitments, among others, are recoded as “politics of representation/presence/multiculturalism or seen as irrelevant in the context of a so-called postrace/postfeminist society” (p. 972). They become “benign representation of various differences” (p. 972) in neoliberal universities. Falcón and Nash (2015) echo a similar view and argued that transnationalism and intersectionality continue to be conflated with diversity and difference in the corporate university. They wrote:

In this moment, faculty of color often have to vociferously defend the intellectual value of scholarship on gender, nation, and race; at the same time, we are celebrated for the diversity “value” we confer upon our universities, and our attachments to intersectionality and transnationalism are lauded for their attention to so-called differences. (p.1)

Clearly, as Alexander and Mohanty (2010) argued, it is increasingly important for us to connect politics of location with knowledge production, develop a sharper focus on the ethics of transnational knowledge production, and emphasize questions of collective responsibility and mutual accountability as fundamental to radical theory and research. The following section offers a preview of feminist organizational communication research with a goal to understand how feminist work in the field can further enrich discussions on gender and organizations in the contemporary political economy.

Feminist engagement in organizational communication

A surge in feminist scholarship in organizational communication work can be traced back to the essay titled “Gaining a Voice: Feminist Organizational Communication Theorizing” (Buzzanell, 1994), which called for an examination of gender in organizational experiences and practices and offered an extensive agenda for feminist research (Cruz & Linabary, 2021). In the three decades since the call was issued, feminist research grew considerably in the field (Buzzanell, 2021). Even though it is not possible to discuss the vast amount of work in the area, we describe some of the key themes of research, where we are at, and what we ought to accomplih.

A significant body of research, which came soon after Buzzanell’s call for feminist engagement, examined issues of power and gender by looking at sexual harassment (Clair, 1993; Dougherty, 2001; Townsley & Geist, 2000), alternative organizational forms (Ashcraft, 2000; 2001; Buzzanell et al., 1997), masculinity and organizing (Ashcraft & Flores, 2003; Mumby, 1996; 1998), the intersection of race, gender, and organizing (Allen, 1998; 2000), gender, control, and resistance (Homer-Nadesan, 1996; Murphy, 1998) and a host of other topics (also see Mumby & Ashcraft, 2006 for an overview). Much of this scholarship made a place for gendered analysis of organizations—a shift from looking at gender as a variable to social constructionist approaches to studying gender.

Reviewing the range and depth of feminist organizing in our field, Ashcraft (2014) described their manifestations in terms of five feminisms while acknowledging that there are tensions and overlaps among these perspectives: liberal feminism; cultural feminisms; standpoint feminism; radical poststructuralist feminism; and postmodern feminisms. Themes such as gender as an organizing factor, structuring of gender in organizations, gendered organizational culture, socialist and materialist promise in feminist research, encoding of gender in institutional processes, emancipatory ideals, gender in everyday life, and intersectional understanding of gender mark some of the prominent feminist theorizings across these perspectives. In sum, despite the connections and tensions, feminist research over the years offered critiques of power relations, with a commitment to theorizing alternatives and enacting social change, which was further consolidated in the last decade.

Over the last decade, feminist research unsettled some hegemonic ideas of organizations. First, studies disrupted corporate understanding of organizations and expanded its meanings to different contexts (Cruz, 2015; D’Enbeau & Buzzanell, 2011; Harris, 2013; Linabary & Hamel, 2015; Norander & Harter, 2012). Second, organizational paradox is presented as central to production of gender, power,and difference rather than an aberration (Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017), where contradictions are meant to be nurtured and sustained (Harris, 2016). Third, scholars have engaged with social issues and made policy-oriented and practice-driven recommendations such as family leave policies (Buzzanell & Liu, 2015), sexual violence on campus (D’Enbeau, 2019), community service (Parker, 2020), and pedagogical work (Linabary et al., 2017). Finally, feminist inquiry engaged with global economic flows and organizing through the lens of transnational feminism. One of the early essays on transnational feminism was Dempsey’s (2011) complex analysis of the gendered nature of global capitalism and its overreliance on reproduction of gender, race, and class difference. A relatively scant body of transnational feminist organizational communication research emerged thereafter examining transformative feminist praxis for alliance-building (Dempsey et al., 2011), organizational identity and TFNs (D’Enbeau, 2011), discursive construction of work and gender by women in the Middle East, North Africa, and India (D’Enbeau et al., 2015), reflexivity in efforts of an international nongovernmental organization in peace work (Norander & Harter, 2012), and reflexivity in a TFN’s work negotiating tensions related to voice (Linabary & Hamel, 2015). Transnational feminist research in the field broke the dominance of West-centric locations, emphasized the significance of global capital, expanded the scope of research to networks and organizing, and enhanced the importance of reflexivity.

However, despite this large body of feminist work in organizational communication, we note that there remain some critical absences in feminist engagement (Cruz & Linabary, 2021). We argue that the assumptions of neoliberal hegemony and imperial legacy remain largely unchallenged, posing a challenge to “an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist decolonial praxis” (Mohanty, 2017, p. viii). The political and intellectual concerns of the twenty-first century involving increasing influence of global capital, rising power of transnational corporations and growing state-corporate nexus, widening disparities between the rich and poor, continued displacement and dispossession of communities, imperial formations, and processes of ecological destruction, among others are still not central to feminist research in the field. There is rarely any mention of the U.S. imperial project as a point of inquiry (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007). US imperial project works through militarization and neoliberal principles assisted by multinational corporations, international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, corporate media, law enforcement/criminal justice policies, the prison industrial complex, national security apparatus, and the US academy (Mohanty, 2006). In particular, the absence of the role of the academy as a point of interrogation is intriguing. Devoid of any rigorous examination of global capitalism and its close links with white supremacy and colonialization of knowledge (Quijano, 2007), feminist research, including transnational feminist research in the field, remains inadequate in making the project of the empire visible: “Feminist organizational communication, like organizational communication as a whole, has centered whiteness, Eurocentrism, and heteronormativity (Cruz & Sodeke, 2020)” (Cruz & Linabary, 2021, p. 9).

These absences and erasures combined with the emergence of #ToneUpOrgComm Collective (Cruz et al., 2020), #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et al., 2018), special issues (Cruz & Linabary, 2021; Pal & Dutta, 2020), and forum conversations (Linabary et al., 2017; Pal et al., 2022) have sparked considerable interest in envisioning new directions for feminist futures in the field. We hope to further stimulate this conversation by engaging with radical politics of transnational feminism. We believe that the decolonial underpinnings of transnational feminism offer opportunities for fundamental social change predicated on transformation of oppressive conditions.

Call to Action

Our goal in this essay is to reclaim the decolonial potential of transnational feminism for invigorating feminist engagement in organizational communication. We call for research, practice, and activism to be centered around critique of logic of capital accumulation and profiteering (Ganesh et al., 2005; Mohanty, 2013; Pal, 2016). Understanding the differences and commonalities in the rules and relations of capital across cultures is crucial to uncovering its centrality within structures of domination: “Along with many other scholars and activists, I believe capital as it functions now depends on and exacerbates racist, patriarchal, and heterosexist relations of rule” (Mohanty, 2002, p. 510). For articulating a transnational anticapitalist feminist vision of research and practice in the field, we must imagine new epistemological and ontological contours of knowledge. To envision new ways of thinking and being, which are not organized by or around capital as a vector, we call to a) promote academic endeavors anchored in dissent and decolonized knowledge practices of poor women across the world and b) engage in collaborative work with activists and communities. Such work requires deep ethical commitment and reflexivity in scrutinizing the academy and inverting dominant epistemes. We weave in examples of struggles of disenfranchised women from across the world in this section, including movements against anti-Black violence in the U.S. We suggest solidarity building across these struggles, shaped by multiple historical and cultural contexts, and yet connected by politics of neoliberal violence (Carty & Mohanty, 2015; Dempsey et al., 2011).

We believe that our recommendations in this essay—to a) shift dominant sites of knowledge-making to epistemologies of disenfranchised women, b) disrupt naturalization of neoliberal discourses, c) situate anticapitalist and antiimperialist critique in feminist agendas, d) identify pressing issues of our times, and e) draw attention to the neoliberal model of the academy—promise to make radical interventions in feminist organizational communication research. We call them radical as these recommendations help us depart from and politicize dominant academic thinking and practices at all levels. To act on the recommendations and infuse radical politics in feminist organizational communication research, we believe it is important to advance our call to engage with decolonized knowledges of poor women, conduct self-reflexive collaborative work with activists and communities, and embrace transnational solidarity. We hope these agendas offer new imaginings to decolonize imperial legacies, address historical absences and silences, and invigorate social justice orientation in the field.

Decolonized knowledges and organizing of poor women

We identify discursive and material practices in the organizations of struggle of poor women both within and beyond the heart of the Empire as a starting point of our academic learning. The last two decades have seen an increasing number of women participate in activist practices against extractive neoliberal policies, lead community-based movements for demanding resources from local governments, and engage in alternative modes of production such as cooperatives for food and clothing (Brenner, 2003). Brenner argued that many community-based organizations have been central to larger political movements (Zapatistas in Mexico, the Workers Party in Brazil). Notably, these women at the forefront of struggles are the most disenfranchised women, since poor communities are always adversely affected when extractive zones (Dutta & Pal, 2020) are targeted. Majority of the Afro-Americans and Latinos live near toxic waste sites, and most of the largest hazardous waste landfills are in communities with a population that is 80% people of color (Mohanty, 2002). Yet, the women’s location within the matrix of domination situates them at an epistemic advantage (Escobar, 2015; Mohanty, 2002). Their lived experiences as poor women of color inform their struggles, their understanding of neoliberal hegemony, and their vision for transformative politics, as have been evidenced in many of their victories and ongoing struggles against extractive regimes.

Consider the women-led Chipko movement in India, a landmark non-violent protest movement against deforestation, where women hugged trees to protect them. Noted environmental activist Vandana Shiva said that Chipko offers lessons on organizing principles of social life, where forests are positioned as part of life and a source of knowledge rather than as a revenue source. Shiva wrote:

Chipko taught me ecology and biodiversity. When we finally got logging banned after the 1978 flood, it was because the authorities finally understood what the women were saying: forests regulate water, and therefore to avoid floods and droughts, we need to protect our forests. While others had treated the forest as separate from the river, the women knew it was connected…Forty years later, this is the language of science. Today people look at the ecological functions of the forest. Scientists took half a century to catch up with illiterate women. (para 11)

Shiva argued that modern science is finally waking up to the importance of connecting with nature. However, the women in the Chipko movement had always lived in harmony with nature and recognized that violence to nature is violence to humankind. Additional examples of communities living in harmony with nature abound, including the recent adoption of the Kawasak Sacha proposal or the Living Forest Declaration in Amazon prepared by women in Ecuadorian Amazon. Challenging extractive politics of neoliberal economy, Kawasak Sacha offers an alternative philosophy and ontology marked by indigenous autonomy and an intimate relationship with nature. Their discourses decolonize the nature-human binary, a Western construction, and emphasize preservation of nature (Sempértegui, 2020). Similarly, a women’s movement in Plachimada, a village in India, led to Coca-Cola shutting down its plant that was not only depleting the water supply in the rural area but also contaminating it. Discourses grounded in their resistance articulate principles of water democracy where water is not meant to be privatized but conserved (Shiva, 2006). Women also have been central to Imider political resistance in southeast Morocco, fighting against exploitation and environmental damage caused by the biggest silver mine in Africa, run by a transnational corporation. The local discourses of the Imider indigenous movement for environmental justice and human rights speak to the wider transnational struggle for environmental activism and challenge neoliberal modes of violence (Chambers & Higbee, 2021). We urge recognition of embodied forms of resistance to neocolonial capitalism in poor women’s organizing and call to democratize the spaces of theorizing work carried out by peoples, communities, movements in the global South (Dutta & Pal, 2020)—a direction for dismantling unequal terrains of theorizing in feminist organizational research.

A decolonial transnational feminist lens calls attention to the historical and material conditions of these struggles marked by violence and dispossession. The broader structural pattern of oppression informed by the logic of global capital connects the local embodied experiences of women across spaces. The common pattern of displacement and deprivation demonstrates how neoliberalism consistently intersects with colonial logic for expansion of markets. The anticapitalist and antiimperialist politics of decolonization then is about unsettling transnational institutions of power upheld by a state-corporate nexus, where liberation from colonial structures—epistemic, social, cultural, political, and economic—is anchored in “marginalized experience (women-of-color epistemology) in struggles for justice” (Mohanty, 2013, p. 969). However, paying attention to larger macro structures does not mean we ignore local specificities and historicities. The local contexts construct and maintain identities as social locations within the system of power (Alcoff, 2017). The resistances are culturally-specific but not culturally bound (Alexander & Mohanty, 2010). Such a perspective refers to the heterogeneity of struggles informed by specific cultural practices of many communities. Yet what connects them is their oppositional relationship to global capital. It is important to recognize that none of these struggles are singularly anti-capitalist. A transnational feminist lens traces how global capital and imperial power intersect with social categories such as race/caste, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, among others, significantly impacting lives of women.

Also, underlying these struggles is an entirely different way of organizing social life-- broadly understood as communal and relational, non-state, and non-capitalist (Pal & D’Souza, 2020; Escobar, 2015). These are terrains of knowledge generation that are outside the colonizing gaze and outside traditional organizational spaces, churning out creative theoretical anchors in their varied forms of embodied resistance to extractive capitalism (Dutta & Pal, 2020). The broader ontological and epistemological dimension of these struggles offers an entry point to decolonize the centrality of dualistic ontologies in the dominant neoliberal economy, such as nature/culture, human/non-human, and mind/body (Escobar, 2015). Hence, knowledge generated from these marginalized spaces or spaces of the other undergirds ideas of community and collective well-being as organizing philosophy and departs from neoliberal frames (e.g., individual, privatization, progress) in the dominant organizational systems, including the academy. A radical transnational feminist lens infuses dominant academic discourses with such other knowledges—a practice of generating what scholars call insurgent knowledges. The latter uncovers undemocratic practices of global capital and suggests a more equitable model of organizing our social worlds.

Generation of insurgent knowledges asks for collaboration with activists, political movements, and social justice advocates outside of academia. Drawing from Alexander and Mohanty (2010), we call for scholars to forge academic-activist and academic-community relationships rather than allow the binaries to continue to distinguish the academy from the community or the academic from the activist. The authors argue that the binaries privilege the academy and serve to reinforce its power. Also, academic production is inherently collaborative even if it privileges the author as the sole narrator (Chowdhury, 2011). Destabilizing the binaries challenges spatial hierarchies and threatens to displace the academy from its position of power as an epicenter of knowledge construction. Additionally, knowledge derived from these collaborations unsettles institutionalized discourses and practices of social justice that is aligned more with multicultural and representational politics, mentioned earlier in the essay. But co-constructing a politics of representation with those at the margins has its challenges and must be guided by continuous self-reflection.

Self-reflexive collaborative research and transnational solidarity

The ethical commitment of collaborative academic enterprises is guided by a principle of solidarity (Beverley, 2004; Pal, 2014) for conducting self-reflexive research. Solidarity demands our accountability and suggests we acknowledge our complicities and our privileges as academics. Without embracing the philosophy of solidarity, it is impossible to engage in meaningful collaborations with women at the margins in the global South, recognize their agentic capacities, and include their knowledges of alternative and indigenous ways of organizing in dominant academic theorizing.

Solidarity necessitates a scrutiny of our location within the dominant conceptual categories so we can re-envision a system of representation that establishes the disenfranchised groups on their own terms (Beverley, 2004; Spivak, 1988). It requires us not to impose our thinking onto the other. A radical transnational feminist praxis also mandates us to envision a horizontal solidarity across struggles for imagining and enabling a political economy anchored in a more equitable polity. Horizontal solidarity refers to building alliances across transnational feminist struggles fighting against imperial legacies. These alliances are important for forging a praxis for transnational solidarity. The key to such alliances is foregrounding gender oppression within intertwined structures of power, including the global neoliberal economy and focusing on mutual interests with attentiveness to historical, cultural, and experiential particularities.

Consider innumerable moments of what Kaplan et al. (2021) call feminist rage across all continents—against sexual violence and femicide, anti-government protests (Arab Spring, Hong Kong), state violence on religious minorities (Shaheen Bag in India), fighting for self-determination (Kashmir, Palestine, all indigenous struggles), ongoing struggles for women’s rights (Sudan), the global #MeToo movement, and many more. Feminist rage has been monumental in antiracist movements in the U.S. condemning structural racism operating through incarceration and racially-motivated violence (killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade among others) (https://nationalwomenshistoryalliance.org/about-2/our-commitment-to-antiracism/). Of particular significance is the more recent #SayHerName movement started by African American Policy Forum led by Kimberley Crenshaw to draw attention to anti-Black violence targeted at Black women (Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Nina Pop) that often remains invisible in dominant discourses. While analyzing the mutuality of all the struggles in terms of their location in relation to neoliberal capital is beyond the scope of this essay, we briefly delineate how anti-Black violence, particularly on women, intersects with global capital to create conditions of marginality.

Anti-Black violence on women has led to an explosion in incarceration of black women in Britain, the rest of Western Europe, and the U.S., accompanied by an expansive prison building program (Davis, 2008; Sudbury, 2002). Antiracist feminist scholars have examined how intricate relationships between race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality intersect with the logic of global capital to routinely exploit black and brown women and serve the expansion of the prison industrial complex. Sudbury wrote:

These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex…The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. (p. 57)

Women of color have long been at the forefront of movements advocating for prison abolition. Angela Davis, an icon of prison abolition movement has steadfastly called for restorative justice and decolonizing our perspective on justice. Marlihan Lopez (2020), a Black feminist activist wrote that prison abolitionists “within the feminist movement centre non-punitive, transformative community-based responses rooted in care, such as investing in life-affirming social services” (para 4).

These above-mentioned struggles are materialist antiracist feminist projects—they identify a neoliberal market economy as central to their concerns and aim to decolonize local and global structures of oppression. Systematically analyzing oppressive conditions and targeting the state and other neoliberal institutions, the movements converge on their critique of neoliberal capitalist practices. They articulate a vision for society anchored in care, greater democracy, and collective well-being. So the important questions are: What can we learn from knowledges and practices produced by transnational feminists targeting neoliberal institutions? What are the possibilities for women of color across borders and at the intersection of different social identities to form an alternative power bloc and confront neoliberal policies with vigorous counter-hegemonic practices and discourses? These questions call attention to the importance of building horizontal solidarity for consolidating a transnational feminist agenda against neoliberal political economy. As scholars have argued (Carty & Mohanty, 2015; Davis, 2008), it is through collective feminist organizing that we can learn about the tools, analytics, and imaginations for transformative politics articulated in struggles of women of color. For example, Angela Davis has long been vocal about incorporating politics of solidarity in social justice agendas: “The feminist critical impulse, if we take it seriously, involves a dual commitment: a commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way, and to use knowledge to remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants” (Davis, 2008, p. 20).

However, academic work embodying, envisioning, and practicing decolonial research and praxis, is meant to be conducted in conjunction with an interrogation of the academy. The racialized and imperial foundation of our academic institutions and their entanglement with neoliberal goals must occupy our attention. Universities are fraught—they are built by slave labor and sit on stolen indigenous land (Falcón & Nash, 2015; see Jiang et al.,’s essay in the forum by Pal et al., 2022; Paperson, 2017; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Hence, a decolonizing approach to research and practice guided by a radical transnational feminist lens also calls for decolonizing the university (see Mbembe, 2016; Paperson’s (2017) theorization of a third university).

To conclude, this essay explores decolonial potentials of transnational feminism for feminist organizational communication research. Integrating decolonial thinking into feminist organizational research, transnational feminism disrupts the ontological location of feminist theorization in organizational communication as a Western gendered system. It offers a new politics of knowledge and knowing and challenges the hegemonic practices that erase voices of women at the margins with discourses about them (Manning, 2021). Incorporating decolonial thinking into feminist organizational communication, transnational feminism provides a space for global South women to speak of their lived experiences and organization/organizing and encourages theorizing with them and not about them (Manning, 2021).

We recommend anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist engagement with organizing of dissent by disenfranchised women across the world. We call for generating insurgent knowledges by carefully forging non-exploitative collaborative relationships with activists and communities of struggle. Decolonization is not only about challenging dominant epistemologies and ontologies but is an active struggle for social justice at every level. A decolonial politics asks us to build a transnational solidarity across feminist movements connected by their critique of global capital, while interrogating imperial legacies and neoliberal landscape of corporate academy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to editor Rebecca Meisenbach for her guidance, and the anonymous reviewers at Management Communication Quarterly for their excellent feedback to strengthen this article. We are also thankful to Patrice Buzzanell for reading the final version of the manuscript and offering personal encouragement.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Mahuya Pal

Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez

Author Biographies

Mahuya Pal (PhD, Purdue University) is Associate Professor in the University of South Florida Department of Communication. Her critical organizational communication research explores decolonial politics anchored in organizing of resistance by underprivileged communities against institutional power. She contextualizes her research within the twenty-first century concerns about unbridled growth of transnational corporations, displacement and dispossession of communities, ever-widening disparities, and environmental degradation.

Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez (PhD, University of South Florida) is an Assistant Professor of organizational communication at Florida Atlantic University. Her current research investigates organizations that provide direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. Exploring the complex relationship between organizational identity and organizational stakeholders, she interrogates the role of DTC genetic testing organizations in framing racial identification and belonging in the United States.

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