Global Feminism is a feminist theory closely aligned with post-colonial theory and postcolonial feminism. It concerns itself primarily with the forward movement of women's rights on a global scale. Using different historical lenses from the legacy of colonialism, Global Feminists adopt global causes and start movements which seek to dismantle what they argue are the currently predominant structures of global patriarchy. Global Feminism is also known as Transnational Feminism, World Feminism, and International Feminism.
Two historical examples Global Feminists might use to expose patriarchal structures at work in colonized groups or societies are medieval Spain (late eleventh to thirteenth centuries) and nineteenth-century Cuba. The former example concerns women of the Mudejar communities of Islamic Spain and the strict sexual codes through which their social activity was regulated. Mudejar women could be sold into slavery as a result of sexual activity with Christian man; this was to escape the deemed punishment accorded by the Sunna, or Islamic law. Because of their simultaneous roles as upholding one’s family honor and one of “conquered status and gender,” “Mudejar women suffered double jeopardy in their sexual contact with Christians .”
Nineteenth-century Cuba can be looked at as an example of colonialism and neocolonialism working together in a slave-based society to affect women’s lives under patriarchy, where Cuba “remained a Spanish colony while enduring a neocolonial relationship with the United States.” Havana, a city noted for its “absence of the female form,” had, “of all the major cities in the West…the most strict social restrictions on the female portion of its population.” Upper-class Cuban women were “a constant visual reminder of the separation between elite white society and the people of color they ruled."
Famous quotes containing the words global and/or feminism:
“However global I strove to become in my thinking over the past twenty years, my sons kept me rooted to an utterly pedestrian view, intimately involved with the most inspiring and fractious passages in human development. However unconsciously by now, motherhood informs every thought I have, influencing everything I do. More than any other part of my life, being a mother taught me what it means to be human.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)