Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Sasha Sabherwal: "Reflections on ‘Locations of Learning:’ Articulating a Transnational Feminist Practice"
Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Date and Time: May 21, 2014 | 12:00 PM-1:30 PMEvent Location: HG 3200
Event Details
Talk Description:
“Transnational feminism is neither revolutionary tourism, nor mere celebration of testimony. It is rather through the route of feminism that economic theories of social choice an philosophical theories of ethics preference can be complicated by cultural material” — Gayatri Spivak*
“Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Methods” was a Scholar and Feminist Conference, housed at Barnard College in February of 2014, that celebrated Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, the work of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. This unique grouping of extraordinary scholars offered a place to speak on the future of transnational feminist practices. Transnational feminist scholars have the dynamic task of negotiating between the national, the global, the historical, as well as the contemporary diasporic. This talk reflects on the ways in which the transnational, which positioned itself in response to the divides between Marxism, poststructuralism, and feminism, has manifested in practices of pedagogy, research and curriculum. I address the ways transnational feminist methods have functioned as a stimulus for critique. It asks: What kind of complicities structure power dynamics? How are universals constructed in terms of power? I further discuss how transnational feminist methods carefully analyze global asymmetries and highlight the ways gender, race, empire, power and colonialism sediment themselves in everyday life. Using the scholarship articulated at the conference, I ultimately deconstruct the corporatization of the university and the ways it has emerged as a site of management, productivity and
‘compartmentalized legitimacies.’
* Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993) 284.
A light lunch will be served. Please RSVP to ningk@uci.edu by Friday, May 16th.