This chapter is an interview conversation with feminist performance studies scholar Swati Arora who shares her thoughts on transnational and decolonial feminisms and epistemes. The conversation draws on Swati’s research on performance cultures, her activist engagements with ”Decolonize the University” movement, and her experiences from her intertwined academic and political trajectory, informed by embodied experiences of inhabiting a multiplicity of different geopolitical locations in the Global South (Delhi and Cape Town) and the Global North (Amsterdam and London). Interweaving Swati’s highly charged descriptions of activist practices and performances with her in-depth theoretical reflections, the interview digs into the ways in which her transnational trajectory and overlapping situatednesses have made her very aware of epistemic differences, erasures, and the urgent need for deploying the tricksterous feminist practice of translations as a point of departure for pluriversal dialogues, and a conscious move away from monologic universality. In the interview, Swati shares insights from her forthcoming book on performance cultures in Delhi, a manifesto she wrote to decentre Theatre and Performance Studies, and her research on a feminist performance Walk by the Indian performer and playwright Maya Rao, which engaged with translation as an act of transnational solidarity in highly complex ways.  

Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with diffi cult ex-periences and memories of Othering and racialization? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racial-ization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidenti-fying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions (capital initials). Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajecto-ries as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, reflections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.

Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with diffi cult ex-periences and memories of Othering and racialization? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racial-ization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidenti-fying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions (capital initials). Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajecto-ries as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, reflections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.

The interview conversation focuses on Victoria Kawesa’s take on African and decolonial feminism, discussed against the backdrop of her life story as an anti-racist, feminist activist, writer and scholar. Victoria has been based in Sweden since she arrived there as nine-year-old in 1984 together with her mother and siblings, coming as political refugees from Uganda, a country steeped in civil war at the time. As a practising Catholic, Victoria’s father had been brutally murdered by the secret police of the then Ugandan leader, Idi Amin. The interview aligns itself with the personal-political-theoretical startingpoints of Victoria’s research, working its way from her childhood in black-normative Uganda to her experiences of racism in white-normative Sweden. It links glimpses of her life history narrative, as told in her forthcoming dissertation, Black Masks/White Sins: Becoming a Black Obuntu Feminist, with the theoretical and political perspectives she also develops there. The conversation focuses on corpo- and geopolitical situatedness, and how it matters for transnational feminist cartographies, onto-epistemologies, and possibilities for alliance building. From her situated perspective, Victoria emphasizes the need for differentiation within Black Feminism to make space for African and decolonial feminisms, based on other genealogies than the middle-passage epistemologies that dominate US contexts.  

Geographical and political locations affect and shape feminist imaginaries as well as stories of feminist activism and theorizing. Postsocialist space gets lost because it is “largely presumed to be a process of democratization or Europeanization and thus uncritically positioned vis-a-vis the first world”. The concept of disidentification has been used as a theoretical tool to grasp the intersections of gender and generation and to critically conceptualize political tensions among different feminist waves. Embodying a character is an important theme in Anna-Stina Treumund’s work, increasingly so in her work since Drag. In the case of Treumund in Drag, there is no clear referent, no person in particular into whom she is trying to morph herself. Framing is unavoidable. It is how cultural life works. To some extent, then, it can be argued that reading images is not always dependent on the intentions of the one who made them.

Drawing on interviews with women who identify as feminists in Estonia, this article explores how the stories we tell about feminism and its past influence the kind of theoretical and political work we are able to do. Zooming in on the story of the emergence of feminisms in postsocialist Estonia which has not been thoroughly researched yet, this article calls upon feminists in Estonia to reflect critically on how they conceptualize feminisms, while at the same time building a framework to think about local feminism within transnational feminist context. Starting from stories of how women became feminists in Estonia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, I reflect on the gaps, chance encounters and tensions that my fieldwork revealed to narrate feminism differently, to bring forth new aspects of feminism in this context. In particular, I focus on two moments: the common imaginary of real feminism as Western mass movement and the tensions between the local context and Western feminism. I complicate the narrative in the article through including interludes in between the main text to highlight how the incidents that happened outside and around the interviews shape my story of feminism in Estonia.

This edited volume combines cutting-edge research on feminist and intersectional writing methodologies with explorations of links between academic and creative writing practices. Contributors discuss what it means for academic writing processes to explore intersectional in-between spaces between monolithic identity markers and power differentials such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality. How does such a frame change academic writing? How does it make it pertinent to explore new synergies between academic and creative writing? In answer to these questions, the book offers theories, methodologies, political and ethical considerations, as well as reflections on writing strategies. Suggestions for writing exercises, developed against the background of the contributors' individual and joint teaching practices, will inspire readers to engage in alternative writing practices themselves.

In this paper, I explore the question of geopolitics of knowledge in feminist studies together with the notion that the visual arts are an important starting point for the decolonization of knowledge and imagination. In particular, I discuss a series of self-portrait photographs by AnnaStina Treumund, a feminist and lesbian identified artist from postsocialist Estonia, and see if and how her work helps to reconfigure the lag discourse often associated with the former Eastern Europe within feminist theorizing. I zoom in on the artwork entitled Woman in the Corner of Mutsu’s Drawings (2010), an homage to Estonian graphic artist Marju Mutsu’s three ink drawings from 1972, and its connections with the recent turn towards history and reconceptualizing normative models of time in queer theory. Through Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “erotohistoriography”, I will argue that Treumund’s impulse to start “making connections across time” [5] reveals a resistance to “chrononormative” models of history [9; 10] and to a tendency to view the present of feminist thought and queer art in Eastern Europe as always already one step behind the West.

Den här doktorsavhandlingen handlar om geopolitik i feministisk kunskap och bildkonstens roll i förståelse och omskapande av postsocialistiska feministiska föreställningar. Dess huvudsakliga fokus handlar om att bestrida den i västerländsk feministisk teori ofta förekommande fantasin om att före detta Östeuropa på olika sätt ”släpar efter” i relation till väst. Doktorsavhandlingen utforskar dessa föreställningar på mikronivå då den zoomar in på det djupt personliga och politiska bildkonstarbete utfört av den samtida feministiska och självidentifierat lesbiska estniska konstnärinnan Anna-Stina Treumund. Avhandlingens partiella fokus på Treumunds fotografier i form av självporträtt möjliggör för oss att få inblick i de intensiteter och specifika förhållanden som utgör en individuell erfarenhet av att befinna sig i det postsocialistiska rummet. Genomgående i doktorsavhandlingen används det virvlande subjektet som feministisk figuration. Figurationen innebär simultant en referens till den förkroppsligade och den relationella aspekten av kunskapssystem och skapande av världen.

Med utgångspunkt i postsocialistiska, postkoloniala, queera och feministiska studier av visuell kultur argumenterar författaren att Treumunds bildkonst alltid redan är inbäddad i en lokal kontext, detta sedan den växer fram ur och problematiserar de diskussioner som pågår mellan feministiska generationer, i teori, aktivism och bland konstutövare. Genom att kombinera närläsning av Treumunds konstnärliga arbete med samtida teoretisk debatt inom feministiska studier, med möten med konstnärinnan, och med självbiografiska berättelser, försäkrar denna avhandling: det finns ingen “eftersläpning”. Än mer väsentligt är att betona att det är av yttersta etisk och politisk vikt att ägna mer uppmärksamhet åt geopolitiska lokaliseringar som skillnadsskapande faktor i samtida feministisk teoribildning.

Visual literacy is important for understanding the role of visual culture as a key factor in processes of globalization, technologization and multiculturalization, which are all part of our historicity. Certainly, the study of the visual is not limited to the study of images, but also of their effects, material practices they entail and creative potential they offer. Therefore, it is of critical importance to work out new approaches to study both epistemologies and ontologies of the visual. This book weaves together various critical paradigms, theories and methodologies within the common field of feminist visual culture. By doing so, it demonstrates the importance of the analysis of the visual for feminist studies as well as the need to increase visual literacy in general. The volume provides theoretical and methodological support and examples of possible analyses for researchers and students interested in the field of feminist visual culture or, more generally, women's studies, gender studies, visual studies, art studies and science studies. It presents feminist theories and methodologies, which were influential for the field of visual culture and encourages readers to think critically about the visual.

The article explores the location of Central and Eastern Europe in transnational feminist studies. Despite the acknowledgement of the situatedness of knowledge, feminist theorising nevertheless seems to continue to be organised around a limited number of central axes and internalised progress narratives. The authors argue that there is a pressing need for theories which can approach the near absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives from transnational feminist theorising, and challenge the limited number of discursive tropes associated with post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe – especially that of a ‘lag’, where difference is translated into a temporal distance. Instead, the authors suggest that a more inclusive vision of transnational feminist studies can be achieved by applying the decolonial framework to the post-socialist context, as explicated in the work of Madina Tlostanova.

Part of panel "Gendered bodies online: representation in text, photography and animation", together with Monica Obreja and Katherine Harrison from Linköping University and Jennie Olofsson from Luleå University of Technology.

Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the postcolonial and the postsocialist in feminist theorizing and practice. While postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives have been explored in feminist studies, the two analytics tend to be viewed separately. This volume brings together attempts to understand if and how postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions of the human condition - historical, existential, political, and ideological - intersect and correlate in feminist experiences, identities, and struggles. In the three sections that probe the intersections, opacities and challenges between the two discourses, the authors put under pressure what postcolonialism and postsocialism mean for feminist scholarship and activism. The contributions address the emergence of new political and cultural formations as well as circuits of bodies and capital in post-Cold War and postcolonial era in currently re-emerging neo-colonial and imperial conflicts. They engage with issues of gender, sexuality, race, migration, diasporas, indigeneity, and disability, while also developing new analytical tools such as postsocialist precarity, queer postsocialist coloniality, uneventful feminism, feminist opacity, feminist queer crip epistemologies. The collection will be of interest for postcolonial and postsocialist researchers, students of gender studies, feminist activists and scholars

This edited volume combines cutting-edge research on feminist and intersectional writing methodologies with explorations of links between academic and creative writing practices. Contributors discuss what it means for academic writing processes to explore intersectional in-between spaces between monolithic identity markers and power differentials such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality. How does such a frame change academic writing? How does it make it pertinent to explore new synergies between academic and creative writing? In answer to these questions, the book offers theories, methodologies, political and ethical considerations, as well as reflections on writing strategies. Suggestions for writing exercises, developed against the background of the contributors' individual and joint teaching practices, will inspire readers to engage in alternative writing practices themselves.

The chapter accounts for the book’s theoretical and methodological framework, and main ambitions. Its foundation in pluriversal conversations on transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms is foregrounded, and related to the overall aim: to reflect upon and analytically practice transgressions of the methodological nationalist approaches that are ingrained in much contemporary humanities and social science research. The concept of pluriversality is presented as an alternative to the universalisms of Western modernity, and transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms are introduced as frameworks which can help critical scholars to push their research beyond conventional disciplinary reliance on methodologically nationalist traditions. The volume’s commitment to postdisciplinarity and emergent, explorative methodologies, including experiments with a blurring of boundaries between academic and creative writing genres, is emphasized. It is argued that such approaches are needed to transgress the limitations of methodologically nationalist outlooks. The chapter’s reflections on transgressive methodological frameworks is presented as a pluriversal conversation between members of the editorial team. Finally, the chapter tells the  story of the volume’s coming into being through encounters between scholars of different academic ages, affiliated with universities located along Global South/North/East/West axes, who met to establish multiply situated reflections on border transgressing research methodologies.   

This edited volume brings transnational feminisms in conversation with intersectional and decolonial approaches. The conversation is pluriversal; it voices and reflects upon a plurality of geo- and corpopolitical as well as epistemic locations in specific Global South/East/North/West contexts. The aim is to explore analytical modes that encourage transgressing methodological nationalisms which sustain unequal global power relations, and which are still ingrained in the disciplinary perspectives that define much social science and humanities research.

A main focus of the volume is methodological. It asks how an engagement with transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms can stimulate border-crossings. Boundaries in academic knowledge-building, shaped by the limitations imposed by methodological nationalisms, are challenged in the book. The same applies to boundaries of conventional – disembodied and ethically un-affected – academic writing modes. The transgressive methodological aims are also pursued through mixing genres and shifting boundaries between academic and creative writing.  

Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, students (from undergraduate to postgraduate levels), activists and NGOs, interested in questions about decoloniality, intersectionality, and transnational feminisms, as well as in methodologies for boundary transgressing knowledge-building.

The article talks about the divide between feminism and neoliberalism in post-state socialist Estonia in the 1990s. It states that neoliberal framework has had an impact on alternative social philosophies and movements, which covered individual rights of women. Topics include postsocialism in political landscape, corporate capitalism, and individualism and free markets.

In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western others to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others vis-a-vis the dominant Western/Northern gender studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such transformative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle.