Gender Studies as Sites of Transnational Encounters? (subproject)

In this project, transnational processes of communication and the circulation of knowledge in the social sciences will be investigated using the example of gender studies. This example was selected because in gender studies there is already a relatively long tradition of internal criticism and debate around issues of the importance of standpoints within knowledge production and the universal or partial validity of knowledge. The best-known critics were Black and Chicana feminists. But also authors from the Global South and from post-socialist contexts criticized the practice of white, Western members of the middle class of presenting their own experiences and analyses as the normal experience ‘of women’ and hence reproducing a pattern that they criticized in ‘male-stream’ science. Over time these criticisms also came to be heard. The question still remains whether and which approaches from non-Western contexts are listened to, read and taught. Accordingly, the research project refers to current debates about ‘transnational feminism’. One of the main questions is, if and in how far global academic discussions and communities can be transformed into networks or engaged conversations without reproducing Eurocentric universalisms.

Against the background of analyses that Dr. Veronika Wöhrer has carried out with respect to post-socialist feminist concepts and their (missing) reception in the discourses of Western academic centres, the aim here is to examine the production of knowledge and the communication flows between India and the USA. In this investigation the main focus is on structural aspects of academic exchange: How important are factors like: the long and diverse history of women’s movements in India, the multiplicity of academic women’s studies centers, of feminist literature, the use of English as the main academic language, the connection to international publishing houses (via New Delhi) and to migrant academic communities in the USA? These structures are in sharp contrast to the ones shaping the (marginal) exchange between the USA and post-socialist countries. It is exactly this contrast that makes the exchange between Indian and US American women’s and gender studies an interesting case study for the circulation of social science knowledge.

In this subproject, therefore, the first step was to look at current debates and research areas in women’s studies in India, and define a set of findings and key concepts perceived as important there. The next step is to examine where, how and by whom these are being taken up and cited in international debates. In keeping with Raewyn Connell’s (2007) demand that it is the task of the social sciences to study the metropoles and their involvement with the periphery, the main attention here will be on the dominant discourses and sites in gender studies. The project will examine whether, where and how theories, research and authors from India are represented in mainstream gender studies. Hence the question will be asked what theories and findings from India – beyond those social scientists who have already obtained chairs in the U.S. and apart from isolated empirical examples of the particularly dramatic repercussions of patriarchal violence – have gained entry into curricula, textbooks, encyclopedias and scholarly journals in gender studies.

For this purpose qualitative interviews have been conducted with gender studies scholars in several universities in India and the USA and scholarly literature (readers, textbooks, encyclopedias and academic journals) will be analysed with regard to the authors and the concepts appearing in them.