Transnational feminism

Sometimes videos are bad quality, there is a lot of movement and people, each of whom seems to perform a different task and occupy a different place in the meandering structure. The space is filled with buzz, colourful ribbons cut through it, you can hear Polish and English. Is this a rehearsal, or a performance? Video footage from the presentation of ‘Whenever There Are People To Dance, Until Then We’re Gonna’ at Warsaw’s Karuzela Club seems to capture the spirit of the utopian feminist project of TERAZ POLIŻ and the Finnish-Swedish collective Blaue Frau. The Karuzela Club is located at Osiedle Przyjaźń (en. Friendship Estate) which was built for Soviet workers who were building the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. This fact (although it is only a vague theory) directs our thinking towards the intersections of international perspective, the ambiguities of history and the politics of affect present in the process of producing and sustaining the discourse.

In the context of feminism, a transnational perspective makes the history of emancipatory movements subject to negotiation, a positive suspicion of founding moments, breakthroughs and victories functioning as official. Naturalising the hegemonic order of history overshadows the potentialities that come from reading events backwards, redrawing them, thinking laterally.

Feminism has multiple cartographies produced by transferring ideas and benefiting from their flow. This is what frees us from the local/global dichotomy, as we can use local experiences and narratives to build transnational alliances. These, in turn, demonstrate that history neither has a central point nor unfolds along a single line, but is multiform and location-dependent.Transnational feminism – pursued, among other things, within the framework of creative collaborations – also encourages treating differences between the members of emancipation movements as a vital political force, rather than an argument to antagonise women.