{"id":13349,"date":"2021-11-04T11:08:16","date_gmt":"2021-11-04T15:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/?p=13349"},"modified":"2024-08-30T11:22:15","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T15:22:15","slug":"professor-jessica-frazier-on-transnational-feminist-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/faculty-spotlights\/professor-jessica-frazier-on-transnational-feminist-networks\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Jessica Frazier on Transnational Feminist Networks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our faculty engage in cutting-edge research and innovative creative work every day as they bring new ideas to our students and communities locally and globally. We\u2019re pleased to continue this monthly spotlight series featuring our faculty\u2019s work through a question-and-answer style article published on the first Friday of every month during the academic year.<\/em><\/p>\n

Featured book: Creating Transnational Feminist Networks, 1940-2000<\/em>, (in progress) by Associate Professor Jessica Frazier<\/a>, Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies<\/a> and History<\/a><\/p>\n

Q: Can you give us a brief synopsis of the new book you are working on?
\n<\/strong>A. My current book project, <\/span>Creating Transnational Feminist Networks, 1940-2000<\/em>, traces the genealogy of transnational feminist praxis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It presents a collective biography of three non-state feminist activists from South Asia, North Africa, and North America who participated in international conferences, organizations, and networks in the late twentieth century. It aims to understand why they looked to the international realm in the first place; what challenges they faced in doing so; how international, regional, national, and local contexts shaped their advocacy; and how their activism influenced international discussions. This project uses the individual stories of Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, Indian economist Devaki Jain, and African American reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross to fold in other activists and networks in order to analyze how feminist ideas traveled across borders and were adapted, adopted, rejected, or co-opted in various regions of the world. It illustrates the diversity of \u201cwomen\u2019s rights\u201d issues as it also adds to and challenges previous scholarship that has primarily focused on feminist activism and activists in the Global North\u2014most commonly in the United States and Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

How does this book fit in with your research interests and passions?
\n<\/strong>I am primarily interested in studying women\u2019s interactions and activism across geopolitical borders and boundaries. My first book, <\/span>Women\u2019s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), examined relationships between Vietnamese and American women who wanted to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and it revealed an instance when American women crossed geopolitical boundaries to criticize American Cold War culture, not promote it. The American women I studied not only solicited Vietnamese women\u2019s opinions and advice on how to end the war, but also viewed Vietnamese women as paragons of a new womanhood by which American women could rework their ideas of gender, revolution, and social justice during an era of reinvigorated feminist agitation.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this project, I again pay attention to these transnational collaborations, but this time within the context of the UN\u2019s Decade for Women (1975-1985). At three conferences on women sponsored by the United Nations (with a fourth in Beijing in 1995), women and feminists from around the world hashed out what \u201cinternational women\u2019s issues\u201d were and what \u201cwomen\u2019s rights\u201d looked like on the ground. By paying attention to stories of feminists from the Global South, this project identifies ways in which they challenged visions of a unified \u201cglobal sisterhood\u201d and formed bonds of solidarity that more adequately reflected their lives.<\/p>\n

What surprised you when researching\/writing this book?
\n<\/strong>What continues to surprise me is both how similar women\u2019s lived experiences have been despite differences in terms of religion, location, familial responsibilities, educational background, and even generation, and also how different women\u2019s perspectives can be despite having similar experiences and coming to similar realizations regarding systems of inequality in their lives. For instance, all three women I chronicle faced forms of gender-based violence\u2014two of them at young ages\u2014but how those experiences influenced their decisions and activism greatly differed. Similarly, all three women identified as \u201cfeminist,\u201d but how they lived feminist lives and performed feminist activism differed. And all three women would agree with one another on some points in terms of women\u2019s rights issues and feminism, but may vehemently disagree with each other on others.<\/span><\/p>\n

For those reading this book, what do you hope is the main takeaway?
\n<\/strong>I hope readers take away a sense of the breadth, depth, and complexity of women\u2019s issues and feminist movements. I also hope they take away a sense that \u201cwomen\u201d are not a monolithic group. And I hope they recognize the significance of women\u2019s rights conversations and advocacy on issues that may not be traditionally viewed as \u201cwomen\u2019s issues\u201d\u2014such as development, international relations, human rights, and environmental concerns. Some of these issues are recognized today as having gendered components, while others are still seen as being gender neutral. The feminists that I study and their networks pushed for and made headway in showing how each of these categories should be analyzed through a gender lens. Lastly, I hope readers recognize the never ending struggle for justice. For as one of my colleagues, Jean Quataert, has written, \u201cRooted in struggle . . . rights gains can be lost.\u201d*<\/span><\/p>\n

*Jean H Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 304.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Frazier, associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History, is working on a book titled “Creating Transnational Feminist Networks, 1940-2000,” which traces the genealogy of transnational feminist praxis through a collective biography of three non-state feminist activists from South Asia, North Africa, and North America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":13350,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[340,360],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-spotlights","category-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13349"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13646,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13349\/revisions\/13646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}