Feminist Politics for a Multipolar World? a Speculative Paper from a Transnational Feminist Perspective.

Scholarly and popular analysis related to the emergence of a ‘multipolar world’ tends to focus on the political and economic aspects of the relative decline of the US-dominated “Rules-Based International Order.” Highlighting the need for more scholarly attention to the social and cultural implications of these developments, this paper speculates on the possibilities for feminist space/s in an emerging multipolar world. Rather than offering a framework for action my aim is to elicit feminist debate around the questions: What kinds of alternatives might open for anti-oppressive feminist politics to dismantle discursive cultural and civilizational dualities rooted in histories of European colonialism and post-Cold War US hegemony? How can vernacularize the universalist/hegemonic framing of human rights, gender justice and freedom and so on? How can we ensure that the nascent transnational and global solidarities related to BLM and Settler Colonialism are prioritized in the anticipated South-South solidarity? The context for these questions is my interest in decolonial transnational feminisms, my decades of research with both ‘secular’ Muslim feminists and ‘Islamist’ women in South Asia and Canada, and my insight that many Muslim and Arab societies are increasingly invested in a multipolar political order.