The Transnational in Feminist Research: Concept and Approaches

The term “transnational” has become ubiquitous these days. So much that was called “global” or “international” is now being called “transnational“. In academic research, it is used by social scientists to discuss migration, by economists to address the globalization of finance capital and markets and by activists of all kinds to refer to international collaborations. Across many disciplines and fields and after fifteen years of published work on “transnational” as an important term for research, there have emerged multiple ways of understanding what this term might mean. While anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai used it to designate the flows of media, finance, goods and migrants and the “scapes” of these flows (

Appadurai 1996

), other researchers across the humanistic social sciences have seen it as a signifier for a globalization that is concentrating capital in the hands of the wealthy. To them it signals a new colonialism in which the nation-state is declining and the power of transnational corporations is increasing (

Miyoshi 1996

). Others have argued that the transnational does not signal the end of the nation-state but its rearticulation (

Grewal/Kaplan 1994

) and that there are many kinds of transnationalisms, some from “above” and some from “below” and to these scholars this disparity reveals that transnationalism relies upon unequal power relations (

Smith/Guarnizo 1998

).