Conference Narrative
"Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism… and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name."
(Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle)
The 2024 Transnational Feminist Solidarities (TFS) Conference will take place at CSULB on Thursday, April 18 and Friday, April 19. The conference is free and open to the public. Transnational feminisms offer a critique of Western-Eurocentric and liberal feminisms and simultaneously inform and emerge from various radical feminist frameworks including, but not limited to, women of color, postcolonial, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and abolitionist feminisms.
The rich genealogy of foundational interventions includes the groundbreaking anthologies This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981), But Some Of Us Are Brave (Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith 1982), Making Waves: Writings By and About Asian American (Asian Women United of California 1989), Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora (Bhatt et al. 1993), and Through the Eye of the Deer: An Anthology of Native American Women Writers (Dunn and Comfort 1999), as well as more recently collectively authored works such as Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging (Abdulhadi, Alsultany and Naber 2011) and Abolition. Feminism. Now (Davis et al. 2022).
Similar to these powerful anthologies, scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003), M. Jacqui Alexander (2006), Leela Fernandes (2013), and Julia Chinyere Oparah (formerly Sudbury) and Margo Okazawa-Rey (2009), amongst many others, have made critical contributions to the development of transnational feminist praxis and theory that emphasizes engagements with difference in a way that unsettles geopolitical borders while seeking to challenge and transform systems of oppression. Extending and in conversation with these frameworks, conference speakers include leading transnational feminist thinkers and writers including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ana Castillo, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Amira Jarmakani, and Karma R. Chávez, among other dynamic feminist voices.
We have carefully constructed each conference panel to disrupt normative tendencies within the neo-liberal university to co-opt, institutionalize, and de-radicalize feminist scholarship and politics. Invited speakers will offer critical analysis of our shared existence and how we might produce a more life-affirming world, contemplating how solidarity and collective action might be generated across geopolitical borders, identities, and subjectivities. As a response to the urgency of the global political situation, panelists will engage with questions of pinkwashing and queer solidarity, Chicana feminist writing, transnational feminist solidarity, Palestine as a feminist issue, feminist art and struggles for liberation, feminist care work, mutual aid and abolition, the neoliberal university, and the future of transnational feminisms.
