Transnational Feminist Rhetorics And Gendered Leadership In Global Politics

Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics examines the rhetoric surrounding women who hold or have held the highest office of a nation-state. Heads of state, such as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet, have navigated their ascent to executive government in vastly different ways while contending with gendered expectations of leadership, especially since most of them are the first woman to occupy their country’s highest governmental position. This book analyzes how these women rhetorically perform their positions of power—discursively, visually, and physically—in a traditionally male leadership role. Specifically, this project examines how certain rhetorical acts open up and close down the potential to confront the gendered expectations surrounding political leadership. When people analyze, campaign for, or critique a “female prime minister” or a “woman president,” they are not just talking about one woman but also referencing a collective neoliberal logic that interrupts and reaffirms the belief that the nation-state is an eternal, inevitable structure. Diverse political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, and Indira Gandhi, are continually put in conversation with one another, through popular media representations, academic scholarship, and political analyses. This book examines the effect of such comparisons and connections, ultimately arguing that many of these gestures reduce or over-simplify women’s contributions to world politics. In order to show this effect, this book manifests the transnational connections found in autobiographies, organizations, political commentaries, biographical films, and other sources that focus on women who have been heads of state.

In How to Belong, Belinda Stillion Southard examines how women leaders throughout the world have asserted their rhetorical agency in troubling economic, social, and political conditions. Rather than utilizing the concept of citizenship to bolster political influence, the women in the case studies presented here rely on the power of relationships to create a more habitable world. With the rise of global capitalism, many nation-states that have profited from invigorated flows of capital have also responded to the threat of increased human mobility by heightening national citizenship’s exclusionary power. Through a series of case studies that include women grassroots protesters, a woman president, and a woman United Nations director, Stillion Southard analyzes several examples of women, all as embodied subjects in a particular transnational context, pushing back against this often violent rise in nationalist rhetoric. While scholars have typically used the concept of citizenship to explain what it means to belong, Stillion Southard instead shows how these women have reimagined belonging in ways that have enabled them to create national, regional, and global communities. As part of a broader conversation centered on exposing the violence of national citizenship and proposing ways of rejecting that violence, this book seeks to provide answers through the powerful rhetorical practices of resilient and inspiring women who have successfully negotiated what it means to belong, to be included, and to enact change beyond the boundaries of citizenship.

Global Women Leaders: Studies in Feminist Political Rhetoric demonstrates the ways in which women have used political rhetoric and political discourse to provide leadership, or assert their right to leadership, on a global level. This collection fits into the robust research area of international political women and their use of language in gaining and maintaining political power. It casts a wider net in terms of discussing women’s efforts to assert and preserve their roles of authority, particularly when their audiences may perceive their authority as illegitimate due to gender. Chapters dedicated to Elizabeth II and Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser discuss the more traditional ways in which women leaders use language to construct political power. Other chapters focus on women who serve as political activists, either individually or as part of a group, including Aasma Mahfouz of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and the women who help direct United Nations policy through their speeches in the General Assembly. Global Women Leaders will appeal to scholars of political communication and international rhetoric.

Networking Arguments presents an original study on the use and misuse of global institutional rhetoric and the effects of these practices on women, particularly in developing countries. Using a feminist lens, Rebecca Dingo views the complex networks that rhetoric flows through, globally and nationally, and how it’s often reconfigured to work both for and against women and to maintain existing power structures. To see how rhetorics travel, Dingo deconstructs the central terminology employed by global institutions—mainstreaming, fitness, and empowerment—and shows how their meanings shift depending on the contexts in which they’re used. She studies programs by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the United States, among others, to view the original policies, then follows the trail of their diffusion and manipulation and the ultimate consequences for individuals. To analyze transnational rhetorical processes, Dingo builds a theoretical framework by employing concepts of transcoding, ideological traffic, and interarticulation to uncover the intricacies of power relationships at work within networks. She also views transnational capitalism, neoliberal economics, and neocolonial ideologies as primary determinants of policy and arguments over women’s roles in the global economy. Networking Arguments offers a new method of feminist rhetorical analysis that allows for an increased understanding of global gender policies and encourages strategies to counteract the negative effects they can create.

This thoroughly updated editionprovides a comprehensive overview of two centuries of transnational feminist efforts to produce a more just global order. Mary Hawkesworth explores how social, economic, and political inequalities between men and women of different races, classes, ethnicities, and nationalities have been transformed over two centuries of globalization. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, she demonstrates how women have forged international networks and alliances to address specific women’s issues beyond the borders of the nation-state, crafting policies to mitigate pressing abuses and devising alternatives to liberal and neo-liberal agendas. The book considers innovative feminist tactics to produce global change, carefully tracing the structural forces that constrain transnational feminist activism. Hawkesworth illuminates the complexity of feminist strategies to influence international agencies and foundations, national governments, and transnational NGOs. By providing critical new insights into the gendered nature of the global system and the gendered dynamics of international institutions and nation states, this work will be invaluable for all those engaged in the interdisciplinary fields of globalization studies and feminist studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements explores the historical, political, economic and social contexts in which transnational feminist movements have emerged and spread, and the contributions they have made to global knowledge, power and social change over the past half century. The publication of the handbook in 2015 marks the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations International Women's Year, the thirtieth anniversary of the Third World Conference on Women held in Nairobi, the twentieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and the fifteenth anniversaries of the Millennium Development Goals and of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on 'women, peace and security'. The editors and contributors critically interrogate transnational feminist movements from a broad spectrum of locations in the global South and North: feminist organizations and networks at all levels (local, national, regional, global and 'glocal'); wider civil society organizations and networks; governmental and multilateral agencies; and academic and research institutions, among others. The handbook reflects candidly on what we have learned about transnational feminist movements. What are the different spaces from which transnational feminisms have operated and in what ways? How have they contributed to our understanding of the myriad formal and informal ways in which gendered power relations define and inform everyday life? To what extent have they destabilized or transformed the global hegemonic systems that constitute patriarchy? From a position of fifty years of knowledge production, activism, working with institutions, and critical reflection, the handbook recognizes that transnational feminist movements form a key epistemic community that can inspire and provide leadership in shaping political spaces and institutions at all levels, and transforming international political economy, development and peace processes. The handbook is organized into ten sections, each beginning with an introduction by the editors. The sections explore the main themes that have emerged from transnational feminist movements: knowledge, theory and praxis; organizing for change; body politics, health and well-being; human rights and human security; economic and social justice; citizenship and statebuilding; militarism and religious fundamentalisms; peace movements, UNSCR 1325 and postconflict rebuilding; feminist political ecology; and digital-age transformations and future trajectories.

The global political arena is (again) in a time of crisis. Different sources pay attention to different crises: the Global Financial Crisis, the Debt Crisis, the Crisis of ISIL/Daesh in Iraq and Syria, the Crisis of Israel and Palestine, and the Iran Nuclear Crisis have gotten significant attention in media coverage of global politics. But those are not the only crises that scholars and practitioners discuss. Environmentalists warn of ecological crisis, health scholars warn of disease crises, cyber-security experts suggest a coming information crisis, and migration experts warn of population crises. Feminist work on global politics has addressed many of these crises - historical and contemporary - in crisis language and without it, as well as a number of the non-crises that looking for women and gender in the international arena draws into focus. That work, however, had generally not explicitly theorized the conceptualization of crisis, its gendered dimensions, and/or gender-based crises as such. Across this book, feminist conversations about crisis in global politics suggests that a single feminist approach to, definition of, or politics of crisis is impossible to find. That same variety of work, though, makes a strong case that paying attention to crises in the world and to the manufacture of crisis rhetoric alongside events in global politics is not only generally important but an important place for feminist scholarship, feminist political activism, and direct attention. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Winner of the Victoria Schuck award given by the American Political Science Association and an Honorable Mention in the Distinguished Book Award given by the Political Economy of World Systems section of the American Sociological Association Globalization may offer modern feminism its greatest opportunity and greatest challenge. Allowing communication and information exchange while also exacerbating economic and social inequalities, globalization has fostered the growth of transnational feminist networks (TFNs). These groups have used the Internet to build coalitions, lobby governments, and advance the goals of feminism. Globalizing Women explains how the negative and positive aspects of globalization have helped to create transnational networks of activists and organizations with common agendas. Sociologist Valentine M. Moghadam discusses six such feminist networks to analyze the organization, objectives, programs, and outcomes of these groups in their effort to improve conditions for women throughout the world. Moghadam also examines how "globalizing women" are responding to and resisting growing inequalities, the exploitation of female labor, and patriarchal fundamentalisms. This book is an important addition to literature exploring feminism as well as to the broader discussion of the impact of transnational social movements and organizations in the globalized world.