Exploring Intersectionalities and Connections as Assignations for Developing a Transnational Feminist Relationality against Violence


Jane Ku, University of Windsor

This paper develops a decolonial anti-imperialist, anti-heteropatriarchal and antiracist feminist position against militarism and violence that have unequally parcelled out misery and suffering to people across the world. The paper explores how our local everyday experience is an entry point for a more sustainable way forward to intersectional histories, encounters and a creative imagination that makes it possible for us to confront each other’s experiences and differences not comparatively but relationally. While working autoethnographically, I want to go beyond de-authorizing our biographical accounts to explore moments and confrontations with various provocations and incidents that demand that we step out of ourselves to engage with the social, the geopolitical, the local and global processes that have framed modern conflicts and relations and cultures.  Beginning from our locations, how do we re-interpret our histories and unsettle our community boundaries and futures to interrogate our relationalities with peoples and events that seem to have no connections with us? I explore an ethical relationality that includes both attachment and detachment not only to rethink our encounters with different peoples and events but to see how we might use our everyday sites as places to intervene and interrogate violence and ideologies that promote hate and exclusion. Attending to my own reactions to and reflections on pre and post pandemic anti-Asian hate and violence, alongside of the depraved disregard of Muslim and Palestinian lives, and burgeoning attempts to draw parallels and comparisons that led me to take on the transnational feminist challenge of creating a more viable local and global relationality, the paper focuses on how we might act and think in our everyday spaces the fluctuating but deep interconnections among multiple histories and communities and to engage each other to develop a future built on solidarity, relationality and translational practices of difference that can counter the violence that we take for granted. The paper will draw from transnational feminist literature (e.g. Mohanty), Asian (North) American studies (Lowe), and Black feminist abolitionist scholars (Davis) to develop an explicitly decolonial anti-imperial and anti-violence framework.

This paper will be presented at the following session: