This course explores how women, trans, and non-binary people in the Global South have been impacted by — and resist — the forces of globalization. These forces include colonialism, capitalism, climate change, neoliberalism, and whiteness. The course also examines constructions of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and citizenship across diverse contexts. The primary intellectual framework is transnational feminism, a theoretical and activist tradition that emerged in the 1990s to challenge the universalism of earlier Western feminist thought.

The core texts are Hobbs and Rice, eds., Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain (2^nd ed., 2018), and Norah Bowman, Amplify: Graphic Narratives of Feminist Resistance. Assigned scholarly readings include Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders and Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”

Chapter 1: Foundations of Transnational Feminism(s)

What Is Transnational Feminism?

Transnational feminism is a theoretical and activist paradigm that emerged in the early 1990s to address the limits of both liberal Western feminism and earlier “international” feminist projects. The term was first used in 1994 by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan in their edited volume Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, and the field solidified further when the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism launched in 2000.

Earlier feminist movements, particularly those dominated by white, middle-class women in Western countries, often assumed a universal feminine experience — a kind of global sisterhood premised on shared oppression. Transnational feminists challenged this assumption directly. They showed that the category “woman” cannot be treated as a stable, unified entity, because women’s experiences are fundamentally shaped by their location within intersecting global systems of race, class, nationality, religion, sexuality, and disability. A garment worker in Bangladesh, a land rights activist in Kenya, and a corporate lawyer in Toronto may all be “women,” but the material conditions of their lives, and the forms of power operating on them, are radically different.

Transnational feminism distinguishes itself from earlier approaches by emphasizing:

• Difference as the foundation of solidarity. Rather than erasing differences among women to claim unity, transnational feminism builds coalitions across difference, recognizing that meaningful solidarity requires engaging honestly with inequalities within feminist movements themselves.
• Structural and historical analysis. Individual women’s circumstances must be understood within the context of global capitalism, colonial histories, and continuing imperial relationships between the Global North and South.
• Anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist orientation. Scholars like Mohanty argue that feminist theory cannot be separated from critique of the economic and political structures that exploit women, particularly Third World women.
• Centering Global South knowledge. Transnational feminism insists that feminist knowledge produced by women in the Global South — including grassroots movements that predate Western academic feminism — must be treated as foundational, not supplementary, to the field.

Intersectional Feminist Frameworks

The concept of intersectionality, coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is foundational to transnational feminist analysis. Crenshaw developed intersectionality to describe how Black women in the United States experienced forms of discrimination that could not be understood by looking at race alone or gender alone — their experiences arose at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression simultaneously.

In the transnational context, intersectionality means analyzing how gender, race, class, nationality, sexuality, ability, religion, and other axes of identity shape experience in simultaneous and inseparable ways. A woman in the Global South experiences gendered oppression, but that oppression is always already shaped by colonial history, global economic hierarchies, local religious and cultural structures, and the particular political context of her nation. Intersectional analysis refuses single-axis frameworks that would reduce her experience to any one category.

The textbook chapter “Intersectional Feminist Frameworks: A Primer” (pp. 65–69 in Hobbs and Rice), produced by the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW), introduces students to these tools for applied feminist analysis. Importantly, before the term was coined in US academic settings, grassroots women’s movements in the Global South had been practicing intersectional thinking since at least the 1970s, demanding recognition of their interlocking experiences and challenging the limitations of mainstream Western feminist movements.

Defining “The Global South”

The term Global South refers to countries and regions that experience conditions of economic dependency, political vulnerability, and cultural marginalization within global hierarchies — predominantly located in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The term is not strictly geographic: it encompasses marginalized communities within wealthy nations as well. The Global South is not a monolith. As transnational feminists emphasize, “Third World women” are often treated as a homogeneous category, but their experiences are shaped by specific geographies, histories, colonial relationships, and cultural contexts that differ enormously across and within regions.

The contrast implied by “Global South” and “Global North” points to a structural relationship, not a simple economic divide. Wealth, knowledge production, and political power tend to concentrate in the Global North, while the Global South bears disproportionate costs — of resource extraction, labor exploitation, climate catastrophe, and the ongoing legacy of colonial reorganization of land, language, and governance. Feminist analysis of the Global South therefore cannot be separated from analysis of imperialism and the global economic order.

Chapter 2: Key Texts and Scholars

Chandra Talpade Mohanty: Feminism without Borders

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is one of the most influential theorists in transnational and postcolonial feminism. Her collection Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003, Duke University Press) gathers two decades of work and remains a central reference in the field.

The collection opens with “Under Western Eyes,” Mohanty’s groundbreaking 1986 critique of Western feminist scholarship on women in the Global South. She argued that much Western feminist writing produced “Third World Woman” as a monolithic, ahistorical victim — a figure defined entirely by her oppression (poverty, tradition, patriarchy, religion) in contrast to the implicitly modern, liberated, and empowered Western woman. This move, Mohanty argued, was not simply an intellectual error; it was a form of discursive colonialism that reproduced the epistemic hierarchies of imperial ideology. By constructing Global South women as passive and without agency, Western feminist scholarship effectively positioned itself as the source of knowledge, analysis, and liberation.

Feminism without Borders moves beyond this critique to ask what feminist solidarity might look like across these divides. Mohanty analyzes:

• “Home,” “sisterhood,” “experience,” and “community” as contested feminist categories that take on very different meanings in different geopolitical contexts
• Women workers across the global assembly line — examining how women in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States are connected through global production chains, yet occupy radically different positions within them
• Multiculturalism and citizenship as terrain on which feminists must challenge both liberal nationalist frameworks and corporate diversity discourse
• The corporatization of the North American academy and what it means to do feminist intellectual work within institutions shaped by market logics
• Transnational women’s movements organizing around ecological justice, consumer rights, reproductive health, and worker organizing

A defining feature of Mohanty’s politics is her uncompromising anti-capitalism. She argues that global capitalism is a central engine of the exploitation of Third World women, who are disproportionately concentrated in the most precarious, underpaid, and dangerous sectors of the global economy — electronics assembly, garment manufacturing, agricultural export production, and domestic service. Feminist solidarity, she argues, must be anticapitalist to be meaningful.

Lila Abu-Lughod: “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”

Lila Abu-Lughod is a feminist anthropologist whose work on women in the Middle East challenges Western cultural frameworks that reduce Muslim women to figures of oppression and victimhood. Her 2002 article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others” (published in American Anthropologist) was written in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan, when the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban rule was offered as a humanitarian justification for military intervention.

Abu-Lughod’s argument is precise and powerful. She shows how the discourse of “saving” Muslim women draws on a long tradition of colonial and missionary rhetoric that deployed images of oppressed Eastern women to justify Western intervention. The figure of the veiled, subordinated Muslim woman serves ideological functions: she makes Western liberal societies look progressive and humanitarian, she justifies military action as rescue, and she renders the political complexity of US foreign policy invisible beneath the language of women’s rights.

Abu-Lughod does not argue that gender inequality does not exist in Afghanistan or other Muslim-majority societies. Rather, she insists that:

1. Agency must be recognized. Muslim women are not passive victims of culture; they are active agents negotiating complex social, religious, and political landscapes.
2. Western intervention is not liberation. Military occupation, economic devastation, and the destruction of civil society do not improve women’s lives. The women of Afghanistan did not ask to be bombed into freedom.
3. Cultural difference is not inferiority. The burqa, for example, has complex meanings within its cultural context that cannot be collapsed into the simple sign of oppression that Western media presents.
4. We should ask for what, not just whether, to help. Abu-Lughod asks us to think carefully about what women around the world actually want and need — healthcare, education, economic security, legal protection — rather than assuming that Western-style liberation is the universal goal.

This article is foundational to Module 1 of the course. It exemplifies transnational feminist critique of saviorist feminism: the tendency of Western feminist projects to position themselves as rescuing or speaking for women elsewhere, reproducing the very colonial power dynamics they claim to oppose.

The Course Textbook: Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain

Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain, edited by Margaret Hobbs and Carla Rice (2^nd ed., Canadian Scholars, 2018), is the primary course anthology. Hobbs is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at Trent University; Rice is a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph, where she directs the Re-Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice.

The textbook provides an essential introduction to key debates, frameworks, and scholarly traditions in the field, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, class, ability, age, and sexuality. The editors deliberately center Indigenous, racialized, disabled, and queer voices throughout — including works by scholars who are often marginalized within mainstream academic publishing.

The second edition added chapters on: sex work as labour, the politics of veiling in Canada, trans and gender-queer identities, and Indigenous sovereignty, reflecting the field’s evolution in response to both scholarly debate and activist movements. The anthology is designed for Canadian students, and many chapters engage specifically with Canadian contexts of colonialism, multiculturalism, and Indigenous rights — making visible how Global South dynamics also operate within settler-colonial states like Canada.

The chapter “Intersectional Feminist Frameworks: A Primer” (pp. 65–69), produced by CRIAW, is an introductory resource that the first assignment (the Transnational Feminism Brief) specifically draws upon. It introduces students to the practical tools of intersectional analysis: how to identify which social systems are operating in a given context, how they interact, and what their effects are for differently positioned groups.

Chapter 3: Forces of Globalization and Their Gendered Effects

The course examines several interlocking forces that structure the lives of women, trans, and non-binary people in the Global South. These forces do not operate independently — they form a system in which each reinforces and depends upon the others.

Colonialism and Its Legacies

Colonialism refers to the practice of domination in which one group (typically European) seizes control of another territory, reorganizing its land, labour, resources, governance, culture, and knowledge systems for the colonizer’s benefit. Colonialism was not merely a historical episode that ended with formal independence movements; its legacies continue to structure contemporary global inequalities. As postcolonial feminist theorists emphasize, contemporary economic arrangements (including debt, trade agreements, and the structural adjustment programs imposed by institutions like the IMF) reproduce colonial patterns of extraction and dependency.

For women in formerly colonized societies, the legacies of colonialism are multiple. Colonial administrations often intensified patriarchal control — either by privileging existing patriarchal structures or by imposing European gender norms that reconfigured local gender relations. Colonial land dispossession separated women from subsistence resources. Colonial education systems replaced Indigenous knowledge with European frameworks. Colonial legal systems denied women property rights and civic standing. Understanding contemporary gender inequality in the Global South therefore requires tracing these historical roots rather than treating current conditions as the products of local culture or tradition alone.

The figure that Abu-Lughod critiques — the Western feminist who seeks to save Muslim women from their own culture — often operates with a colonial logic: assuming that Global South cultures are the source of women’s oppression, while rendering Western imperialism and its material devastation invisible.

Capitalism and the Global Assembly Line

Capitalism — the economic system organized around private ownership of the means of production, wage labour, and accumulation of profit — creates specific conditions for women in the Global South. Mohanty’s concept of the global assembly line describes how global production chains connect women workers at different ends of the world into a single system of exploitation, even as their working conditions and wages differ dramatically.

Women constitute a disproportionate share of workers in export processing zones (EPZs) and special economic zones (SEZs) — areas where governments suspend labour regulations to attract foreign investment. In these zones, women typically work in garment manufacturing, electronics assembly, data processing, and agricultural export production. They are sought by transnational corporations specifically because they can be paid less than men, because their work is coded as unskilled (and therefore cheap) even when it requires great precision and dexterity, and because their social vulnerability makes them less likely to organize for better conditions.

Meanwhile, the global care economy depends on the underpaid and often unacknowledged labour of women in the Global South. As professional women in wealthy countries enter the workforce, they often outsource childcare, elder care, and domestic labour to women migrating from poorer countries. This creates global care chains: a sequence of caregiving arrangements across national borders, in which women in wealthy countries benefit from the migration of women from poorer countries, who in turn leave their own children and families in the care of other women. The women at each link of these chains perform essential work, but those at the Global South end do so for the lowest wages and with the fewest protections.

Neoliberalism and the Feminization of Labour

Neoliberalism refers to the economic policy framework that became dominant globally from the 1980s onward, emphasizing market deregulation, privatization of public goods, cuts to social spending, free trade, and the removal of barriers to the movement of capital. Neoliberal policies were often imposed on countries in the Global South as conditions of loans from the IMF and World Bank (known as structural adjustment programs), forcing governments to reduce public services on which women disproportionately depend — including healthcare, education, and social welfare.

One of the defining features of neoliberal globalization has been the feminization of labour: the dramatic increase in women’s formal employment, particularly in export manufacturing. This sounds like progress — more women in paid work — but feminist analysts show the picture is more complex. Women’s labour has been feminized in the sense of being feminized in conditions: concentrated in sectors characterized by low wages, poor protections, high turnover, and precarity. Employers in global supply chains often prefer women workers because they can be paid less and are more easily controlled. “Women’s empowerment through employment” rhetoric often obscures these structural conditions.

Neoliberal policies also displace women’s communities. When agricultural markets are opened to foreign competition, small-scale farmers — many of them women — lose their livelihoods. When common lands are privatized, women lose access to subsistence resources. The pattern of displacement, deprivation, and structural vulnerability that characterizes neoliberal globalization consistently intersects with colonial logics of resource extraction.

Whiteness as Structural System

Whiteness in this course is not simply a racial identity but a structural system — a global arrangement of social, political, economic, and cultural power that privileges those categorized as white, rooted historically in European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Black feminist scholars have shown, intersectionality requires analyzing how race, as a system of power, operates alongside and through gender.

Within feminist movements, white feminism — feminism practiced without critical attention to racial privilege — has historically reproduced racial hierarchies. White feminist organizations have centered the concerns of white, often middle-class women while treating race as a separate issue, treating women of color as supplementary rather than foundational to the movement, and speaking “on behalf of” women of color rather than ceding leadership to them.

Transnational feminism insists that gender justice cannot be separated from racial justice. The exploitation of women in the Global South — their presence in the lowest-paid, most dangerous sectors of global capitalism — is not incidental but structurally connected to the racial hierarchies that were forged through colonialism and reproduced through contemporary global governance. When white Western feminists engage with the Global South through charitable or humanitarian frameworks without interrogating these structural connections, they risk perpetuating the very dynamics of colonial benevolence that Abu-Lughod critiques.

Climate Change and Environmental Justice

Climate change is a deeply gendered and racialized phenomenon. Its causes and consequences are distributed unequally: the countries and communities that have contributed least to global carbon emissions are typically those facing its most devastating effects. The Global South — which has benefited least from industrial capitalism — bears a disproportionate burden of climate impacts, including droughts, floods, sea-level rise, disruptions to agricultural systems, and intensified natural disasters.

Women in the Global South are particularly vulnerable to these impacts because their livelihoods, food security, and social roles are often directly tied to land, water, and ecological systems. When droughts destroy subsistence crops, women bear primary responsibility for finding food. When floods displace communities, women face heightened risks of gender-based violence in displacement camps. When water sources are contaminated or depleted, women’s labour (collecting and managing water) intensifies.

Transnational feminist movements have increasingly centered ecological justice as a feminist issue, connecting environmental struggles to anti-capitalist and anti-colonial analysis. The destruction of ecologies in the Global South is not natural disaster but the consequence of centuries of resource extraction organized for the benefit of the Global North.

Chapter 4: Feminist Resistance in the Global South

Amplify: Feminist Resistance as Storytelling

The course textbook Amplify: Graphic Narratives of Feminist Resistance, edited by Norah Bowman (with playwright Meg Braem and artist Dominique Hui), uses the form of comics to document and inspire feminist activism. Of its 166 pages, 115 are comics — graphic narrative adaptations of the histories of seven feminists and feminist organizations. The remaining pages include a 24-entry glossary of key terms (including lateral violence and heteronormativity), reading lists, and discussion questions.

The activist subjects of Amplify span multiple continents and political contexts: the collection includes two narratives set in Canada, one in the United States, and others from India, Russia, Liberia, and Germany. The emphasis, consistent with transnational feminist commitments, falls on international women of colour — though the collection also includes organizing by Pussy Riot and Rote Zora (white-led movements from Russia and Germany, respectively).

The course’s Amplify an Activist Project assignment asks students to “amplify” a Global Southern feminist activist or activist group of their own choosing, using a format of their choice — poster, narrated PowerPoint, video, podcast, infographic, or Instagram campaign. This exercise enacts the transnational feminist pedagogy that the course models: students do not just analyze feminist activism from a distance but participate in the work of making it visible.

Forms of Transnational Feminist Activism

Transnational feminist praxis operates at the intersection of theory and organizing. Key forms of activism connected to this course’s themes include:

• Labour organizing across borders. Connecting women workers in export manufacturing through cross-border labour movements, fair-trade organizing, and consumer campaigns that target brands at the end of supply chains.
• Environmental and ecological justice. Indigenous and peasant women organizing against resource extraction, dam construction, mining, and agricultural dispossession — movements that insist that land rights and environmental protection are feminist issues.
• Reproductive and health justice. Moving beyond the single issue of abortion access (central to US liberal feminism) to address the full range of conditions under which people can make meaningful choices about reproduction: healthcare access, poverty, immigration status, incarceration, disability, and violence.
• Anti-war and peace movements. Women’s organizations in conflict zones organizing against military occupation, sexual violence as a weapon of war, and the militarism that feminist analysis connects to patriarchal and imperial power.
• Transnational solidarity networks. Feminist organizations in the Global North partnering with movements in the Global South on terms of genuine solidarity rather than charity — deferring to local leadership, addressing structural causes rather than symptoms, and challenging their own institutions’ complicity in global inequalities.

Solidarity, Difference, and the Ethics of Feminist Engagement

A recurring concern throughout the course is the ethics of feminist engagement across difference — particularly across the inequalities between Global North and Global South. How should feminists in Canada or the United States relate to feminist struggles elsewhere? The course offers several principles, drawn from Mohanty, Abu-Lughod, and the broader transnational feminist tradition:

Listen before speaking. Transnational feminist solidarity begins with genuine attention to how women in the Global South understand and articulate their own situations, rather than projecting frameworks developed elsewhere.

Challenge saviorism. The impulse to “save” women elsewhere — whether through military intervention, NGO programming, or academic rescue narratives — reproduces colonial hierarchies. Feminist engagement must interrogate its own power relations.

Address structures, not just symptoms. Charity that provides aid without challenging the structural conditions that create poverty and vulnerability is insufficient. Feminist solidarity requires engaging with the global economic and political arrangements that produce inequality.

Build from strength. Amplifying existing feminist organizing in the Global South — rather than initiating new projects from outside — recognizes the knowledge, leadership, and resilience already present in communities.

Ground solidarity in accountability. Genuine solidarity means being accountable to the communities one claims to support, and being willing to hear critique and change one’s practice accordingly.

Key Terms