d the concept of the “Other” and called for women to liberate themselves from the modern shackles of patriarchy. The Women’s liberation movement that emerged in the 1960s sought to implement the social and political implications of the Second Wave in feminism. The American Second Wave generated analyses of the oppression of middle-class American women (Friedan, 1962) and patriarchal knowledge systems that objectified “woman” and sexual difference (Millett, 1970). In the 1980s as feminism began to become institutionalized as an academic field (de Lauretis, 1986), it was questioned as a white, middle-class, Western idea (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981; hooks,  1986; Spivak, 1987; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, 1991). Western feminism was displaced by multicultural and postcolonial “feminisms” (Warhol and Herndl, 1997; Narayan and Harding, 2000).
The concept of gender as a criterion of analysis (Scott, 1988) was also subverted and destabilized as resting on a male/female, masculinity/femininity dualism that cannot account for the politics of sexual difference (Butler, 1990; Weedon, 1999). Poststructuralist analyses of gender and feminism raised the question of language as the inescapable mediation of the politics of sexual identity (Spivak, 1997).
The debates between identity politics and poststructuralist feminism (Nicholson, 1990), black and white, “first” world and “third” world feminists, brought to the fore the politics of difference within feminism. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994, 1–36) proposed a theory of “scattered hegemonies” that will displace the hegemonic, homogenizing, and mystifying divisions of “Western” versus “non-Western” feminisms. Susan S. Friedman (1998) argued for a deconstruction of oppositional essentialisms, and for a feminist practice of border crossing and epistemological encounter. Chandra T. Mohanty (2006) argued for decolonizing feminism and demystifying capitalism through struggles of solidarity across borders in her reconfiguration of “feminism without borders.”
In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest Anne McClintock (1995, 352) states, “All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous.” McClintock clarifies that as “imagined communities” (Anderson,  2006) nations are not simply phantasmagoria but rather systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community. Nations are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed. “Nationalism becomes as a result, radically constitutive of people’s identities through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered” (McClintock, 1995, 353). Despite rhetorical assertions regarding the nation-state’s investment in equality, no nation in the world gives the same access to rights and resources to women as to men. While subsumed symbolically into the body politic, women are excluded from direct action as national citizens. “Nationalism is thus constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse and cannot be understood without a theory of gender power” (McClintock, 1995, 355). In light of the fact that all nations are gendered, just as all feminisms are inevitably nationalized, Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal (2006, 66–81) propose the term “transnational feminism” as an appropriate replacement for the contentious, totalizing, and homogenizing concepts of “global” or “international” feminism. “Transnational” as a term is useful only when it signals attention to uneven and dissimilar circuits of culture and capital. Through such critical recognition, the links among patriarchies, colonialisms, racisms, and feminisms become more apparent and available for critique or appropriation. The history of the term “international,” by contrast, is quite different. Internationalism as a concept is based on existing configurations of nation-states as discrete and sovereign entities (Kaplan and Grewal, 1999). The concept of transnational feminism marks critical practices that bring the e