The ‘Platform for Action’ was criticized by
indigenous women’s groups, including Native
American women who contest dominant notions
of women’s community roles, economic develop-
ment, traditional lifestyles and family values. It
was also criticized by coalitions, such as the
International Network of Women of Colour and
various ‘Third World’ women’s groups, as being
Eurocentric and privileged, especially on issues
such as abortion, sexuality, marriage, mother-
hood and reproductive rights. Islamic groups
criticized it for trying to impose western European
notions of modernity on Islamic countries, ignor-
ing the role of religion and the importance of
moral and spiritual values in all aspects of life in
these cultures. Less privileged women were
more concerned with issues such as the negative
effects of structural adjustment, global econo-
mics, basic needs like the right to land, citizen-
ship, clean water, food and shelter, education and
primary healthcare. Amadiume argues that elite
women within poorer countries, who attend these
conferences and help set the agenda, have
become divorced from the real issues affecting
less privileged women within their own countries
and are therefore complicit in maintaining global
power relations. The shift from grassroots-
articulated focus to professional leadership
imposed from above means that goals and issues
have become repetitive in a fixed global language,
and are controlled by paid UN and other donor
advisers, consultants and workers (2000: 14–15).
On occasion, feminist theoretical concerns
have been translated into practice, and some-
times they are not solely the product of dominant
western discourses. This has certainly been evi-
dent in the gender, geography and development
literature. The way in which the binary model of
‘practical’ and ‘strategic’ gender interests
became central to gender and development
approaches is but one example. This evolved
from the strong grassroots women’s movements
developed in Brazil in the 1980s around initia-
tives aimed at structural change at specific points
(Alvarez, 1990; Alvarez and Escobar, 1992; Jelin,
1990). These notions were then adopted (some
might say appropriated) by western theorists and
seemed to predetermine what feminist concerns
were during the early 1990s (Moser, 1993).
Therefore, despite the persistent problems in
attempting to produce a global agenda for inter-
national feminisms, some commentators are
more positive than Amadiume. They argue that it
is through creating politics of difference, and
politics of inclusion, that feminist networks have
managed to create the bridges and multilevel
connections from local organizations to inter-
national networks. As Braidotti (1995: 188) argues,this is at the core of emancipatory globalization.
In addition, while the turn to cultural politics
within international feminism might seem to
reinforce western-centric feminisms, a sense of
the possibilities for a different kind of alliance
among feminisms is also signalled by critiques
from within western discourses. One example is
Judith Butler’s (1990) critique of representation
in feminist politics. Butler critiques the represen-
tation of an entity called ‘woman’ and the idea
that feminist theory often assumes that the
female subject already exists rather than being
produced in and through the cultural politics of
identities, and produced differently in different
places, always with the possibility of contesta-
tion. These radical notions of identity suggest
that there is a need for a stronger sense of what a
feminist politics might look like in different
places.
Assuming that feminism is a cultural construct
that does not accept unquestioned transference of
thoughts and answers from one area of the world
to another, the key question for Lavrin (1999:
175) is: is it possible to save its ‘international’
character without losing the wealth generated by
its internal diversity? Race and class remain the
biggest sources of division within national and
international feminisms, and there are major
divisions between academics and women with-
out formal education in most cultures. Lavrin
argues:The articulation of the personal, the regional, and the
national into a universal formula understood by the
largest number of women remains the most elusive
objective of the feminist search for an international
consensus. Yet there is hope. While in the past the
difficulty of global communication hindered the search
for mutual recognition, today we have much better tools
to engage in the process of understanding the differ-
ences among the multiple manifestations of women’s
activities and the place that ‘feminism’ occupies in their
agenda. (1999: 186–7)The international feminist movement has taken
up new information and communications tools to
support global networking. The Beijing confer-
ence was a catalyst for women’s electronic
activism, particularly in setting an agenda for a
global communications network for women
(Harcourt, 1999). There are obvious problems
that women in poorer countries might be further
marginalized by these new technologies, since
they do not share the same access. However, by
linking women’s practical experience with an
increasing need to influence national and global
policy, the new communications provide a
means through which women across the world
can improve and enhance their attempts to bringTHE WEST AND OTHER FEMINISMS 4133029-ch21.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 413