Sociology, Feminisms and the Global South: Back to the Future

Sociologists located in and working from the Global South are caught in a vicious bind.   On the one hand, they operate in a system still governed by hegemonic Euro-American paradigms of knowledge production, publication and circulation. Yet their work and scholarship continues to be marginal and in many ways dependent (Hountondji , 2009). Recent work on ‘Southern Theory’ (Connell, 2013) and on Postcolonialism and Sociology (Bhambra, 2007)   reflect critically on the impact of colonial histories and continuing neo-colonial and neo-liberal realities of post-colonial societies. Yet structurally, Sociology as a system of knowledge production has proven very difficult to transform. This paper examines the gendered development of sociologies in the Global South and asks the questions - What of the feminist sociological knowledge created in the Global South by scholars of the Global South?  Is a truly global and feminist future for sociology possible?  What role for the International Sociological Association in this process?