‘What Difference Does Difference Make?’
In recent discussions on gender justice, there has been increasing focus on transnational feminist networks as facilitating ‘solidarity across borders’. In the face of growing global interdependence, the hope is that a transnational citizen’s movement could potentially galvanise global cooperation in overcoming gender violence and promoting gender equality.
In my talk, I will argue that while new modes of collective agency can emerge by drawing on gendered vulnerability as a site of political agency, ‘global sisterhood’ can inadvertently also function as a tactic of neoliberal governmentality. My talk will critically engage with the promises and limits of global gender justice from a postcolonial perspective.
Tashweesh is funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, Civil Service and Sport.
holds the Political Theory and History of Ideas Chair at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focus on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonisation. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York, USA. Selected publications include Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming). She has been awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship at Stanford University for the Winter academic quarter of 2023.
In English