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Despite the considerable body of scholarship and practice on interconnected systems of dominance and its effects on women in different social locations, Chicanas remain “outside the frame” of mainstream academic feminist dialogues. This article provides an overview of the contributions of Chicana intersectional thought, research, and activism. We highlight four major scholarly areas of contribution: borders, identities, institutional inequalities, and praxis. Although not a full mapping of the Chicana/Latina presence in intersectionality, it proffers the distinctive features and themes defining the intersectional terrain of Chicana feminism.

In April 2015, we organised a Swedish Research Council funded workshop on ‘Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice’. Our interest in holding this conference arose from our shared experiences of working and living in Sweden as ‘non-Swedes’, through our specific postcolonial and postsocialist positions. Originating from non-European Russian/Soviet ex-colonies (North Caucasus and Central Asia), Madina sees herself as both a postcolonial and postsocialist scholar, yet academics from mainstream institutions in the West/North often refuse to see her colonial difference from Russia. Suruchi’s postcolonial positionality has been shaped through the legacy of her parents’ anti-colonial activism in India and the spatial-colonial contexts of academic institutions in the UK, where she studied and worked. As a feminist scholar who grew up in Soviet/post-Soviet Estonia, Redi has experienced feeling out of sync in Western academic contexts where her positionality is often read as similar to the West but not similar enough, while also registering as different but somehow not different enough. Our respective academic journeys made us realise that there were conversations that needed to be had between postcolonial and postsocialist feminists. From Madina’s experience of giving keynote lectures at the conference ‘REDaktura REDacting. TransYugoslav Feminisms: Women’s Heritage Revisited’ (in Zagreb, 2011) and the conference ‘Postcolonialism and East-Central European Literatures’ (in Bratislava, 2014), we knew that attempts to connect postsocialist Eastern Europe with postcolonial discourses have been made, but that these either did not include postcolonial feminists or did not focus on feminism. The aim of the conference was to spark and consolidate focused dialogues on theoretical, temporal and spatial intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist feminisms, investigating the echoing and untranslatable experiences, concepts and ideas between the two critical discourses. Through the energy of the conference, we quickly realised that postcolonial scholars, who were mostly from the former colonies of the British Empire, found it difficult to engage with the particularities of postsocialist contexts. Postsocialist scholars, mostly of Eastern European origin, on the contrary, seemed more at ease applying concepts from postcolonial feminism to criticise their subalternisation. Moreover, the participants’ interventions demonstrated that the postcolonial feminists clearly saw themselves as an established part—if not the core—of transnational feminisms, with their own well-defined agenda in the global feminist division of labour. By contrast, the interactions at the conference revealed that postsocialist feminists are still not recognised as legitimate representatives of transnational feminist traditions, and lack an established agenda of their own, in the eyes of their postcolonial and Western counterparts. All the while, we are not arguing for or holding on to any kind of fixed positions of postcolonial and postsocialist feminisms, because we know from our personal experiences that there are always overlaps and border spaces between these positionalities. As feminist scholars living and working in Sweden as ‘non-Swedes’ and dis-identifying with Western feminist academia through our specific postcolonial and postsocialist positions, we are attuned to our ‘in-between’ sensibilities (see Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert and Koobak, 2016). This space is always changing, a realm where new meanings, concepts and tactical identifications are generated to destabilise and erode the established and fixed geo-cultural, disciplinary and epistemic models, be they Western, non-Western, Northern or Southern. Yet even if we acknowledge that the terms ‘postcolonial feminism’ and ‘postsocialist feminism’ are equally ambiguous, porous and not at all parallel, we need these terms in order to address a set of issues within transnational feminisms. In what follows, we will unpack some of our observations from the aforementioned conference and trace possible ways to change. In particular, we will address the main reasons for the strained dialogue between postcolonial and postsocialist feminists that we observed, taking into account the temporal dynamics, the question of race and the methodological stumbling points seen in the frame of transnational feminism.

The importance and impact of feminist mobilization across borders is well documented, but the impact of autonomy as an aspect of such organizing has not been explored in the transnational context. We argue that to understand the impact of transnational feminist mobilization, at least two distinct types of feminist mobilization require further conceptual development and empirical exploration in the transnational context, namely, autonomous as contrasted with multilateral mobilization. We offer a conceptual framework for distinguishing and studying these two forms. Further, using a mixed-methods study design, we empirically distinguish domestic and transnational dimensions of feminist activism and illuminate the impact of both multilateral feminist organizing and autonomous feminist organizing in the transnational space. Our analysis reveals that domestic and transnational organizing are distinct but related phenomena. We also find that in online organizing spaces, autonomous feminist campaigns amplify the messaging of geographically dispersed grassroots and individual activists more than multilateral ones. It further suggests that autonomous movements may offer more potential for representing marginalized groups of women, though this potential may not always be realized. The paper offers new concepts and empirical insights for the study of transnational feminism, thereby enabling a new research agenda. Further, this research contributes to the study of the ways that Transnational Social Movements can enrich global civil society and deepen global democracy.

As the space for discussing feminism and related issues on domestic social media platforms in China narrows, Chinese women and feminists are increasingly seeking new platforms that provide a more supportive digital environment for advancing gender justice. This article explores the growing transnational engagement of Chinese digital feminism, with a focus on its presence on the foreign-based social media platform, Instagram. Based on interviews with 12 Chinese female Instagram users and an analysis of 184 of their women-focused posts, this study employs thematic and content analysis to explore the intricate, multi-layered transnational connectivity and social representations that contribute to a distributed form of gendered collective memory. The article argues that the digital engagement of Chinese women on Instagram plays a critical role in offsetting the limitations found in domestic social media platforms. This is vital for preserving certain vanished recollections, disseminating feminist narratives, and building gendered collective memory that challenges and reframes the often-distorted and stereotypical perceptions of Chinese women in public consciousness within China’s domestic media landscape. Despite the constrained impact and visibility of their gendered collective memory on Instagram, largely due to the specific class and group these women socially represent, their transnational efforts in shaping a more equitable collective memory remain noteworthy.

Jineolojî, the women's science proposed and developed by the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement, has become central to its transnational organizing both in the Middle East and in Europe and the Americas. Activists in the Kurdish women's movement critique positivist and androcentric forms of knowledge production as well as liberal feminism. They instead propose Jineolojî, which aims to rediscover women's histories and restore women's central place in society. Based on a series of interviews with Kurdish women involved in developing Jineolojî, this article first situates Jineolojî within wider transnational and decolonial feminist approaches and then draws out the main ideas constituting Jineolojî. We focus on the ways Jineolojî speaks to ongoing discussions within transnational feminist knowledge production. Our article critically assesses the claim of Kurdish women activists who present Jineolojî as a new science and paradigm that goes beyond feminism while developing our argument that Jineolojî represents an important continuation of critical interventions made by marginalized women activists and academics transnationally. Moreover, our article illustrates that Jineolojî provides a helpful ideological underpinning for and epistemology of Kurdish women's political struggle for gender-based equality and justice.