Where Feminist Theory Meets Feminist Practice: Border-Crossing in a Transnational Academic Feminist Organization

In: Organization: the interdisciplinary journal of organization, theory and society, Band 8, Heft 4, S. 723-750

Abstract

This paper focuses on our four years of involvement with a feminist organization within academia that brought `Third World' women activists from a variety of fields as visitors to our US university campus. Based on our experiences as white, US-born feminist sociologists committed to political change, we analyze the challenges and contradictions that we confronted in the daily processes and activities of this organization. By exemplifying complex power dynamics, which often are unacknowledged and unarticulated, our case highlights the need for new theoretical perspectives that take into account power differences that exist along various axes - including axes of domination among women. Transnational processes, we argue, further complicate such power differentials. Serious analyses of the processes and outcomes that are recreated in transnational, international and local feminist development organizations constitute an important political step towards bridging existing gaps between feminist theory and practice.