Insight Spring 2021

The Limits and Success of Transnational Feminism and Palestinian Solidarity Esha Akhtar ’21 Edward Said’s Orientalism provides a theoretical framework for the tendency of the West, or the Occidental, to “speak over ‘’ the East, or the Orient (2). Said argues that historically, the “West,” countries like England, France, and America, have centered their biases and stereotypes in their depictions of the East. Therefore, the image of the East that is popularized in the West is not an accurate representation. Rather, it is a result of “an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (6). Indeed, with the rise of transnational solidarity and global feminist movements, the power dynamic between Western women and Third World Women has fallen into Orientalist traps. In the context of Western feminism and the Middle East, particularly the struggle for Palestinian justice, there is such a tendency for Western feminists to “speak over” the voices of grassroots Middle Eastern organizers. Transnational feminism has, in fact, failed to create meaningful resistance in the Middle East because white feminists’ universal feminism is rooted in Western, Islamophobic narratives. However, Black feminists in America have shown, particularly through Palestinian organizing efforts, that by recognizing and working within differences, instead of rejecting them, it is possible to create effective transnational feminist solidarity.

For many white, Western feminists, universal feminism is rooted in a culture of neoliberalism and Islamophobia. Many white feminists are unable to fully recognize the complexities of the barriers for women in the Middle East, and as a result, they blame broad ideas of Islam as the primary reason behind their oppression. In her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle, long-time activist Angela Davis describes neoliberalism and how it “drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators” (137). She then poses the rhetorical question, in the context of global racism: “how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?” (137). Similarly, global feminism often critiques women’s oppression in the Third World without a sufficient consideration of the systems 11