including a clear explication of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw's founding formulation of the concept by offering “a shortcut that built on existing sensibilities in order to see interconnections” between gender and race. It also offers a framework for deepening analysis to incorporate sexuality, class, and other dimensions of difference and power inequality. Collins (2019) argues that given the importance of intersectional epistemology, it should become a central framing within contemporary “critical social theory that keeps critical analysis and social action in play” (p. 3).
Chapter 8 explores the significance of the contributions to feminist epistemologies of “Queer, Trans and Transfeminist Theories.” Author Ute Bettray discusses the diverse origins and key premises of these interrelated approaches that theorize the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and challenge the binary and heteronormative approaches of other feminist frameworks. She concludes by discussing the ways in which transfeminism decouples feminine gender and female sex. She also emphasizes the significance of notions of queer space and time and deconstructive modes of queering “as a critical mode of the deconstruction of patriarchal, heteronormative, neoliberal late capitalism.” Bettray also examines transing as a process that “reveal[s] the socially constructed nature of categories and histories that can be reconceptualized in radically different ways.”
The final three chapters in Part II attend to the important insights drawn from the positionality of postcolonial, comparative, and transnational feminists. In Chapter 9, Umme Al‐wazedi explains that postcolonial feminism developed in reaction to the lack of attention to the dynamics of colonialism and empire in shaping postcolonial gender relations and global dimensions of inequalities, including “the hegemonic power established by indigenous men after the Empire.” Al‐wazedi argues that postcolonial feminism attends to the significance of caste, religion, and other dimensions of social, political, and cultural differences that shape the lives of non‐Western women.
In Chapter 10, Anne Sisson Runyan and coauthors compare approaches to feminism across different regions, which arose along with the expansion of regional governance and international non‐governmental organizations. Sisson et al. identify the resistance of activists and analyses of local conflicts, migrations, and economic shifts, as well as the diverse challenges and common themes in feminisms that are evident across regions. The authors highlight the importance of neoliberalism and the influence and resistance to Western feminism in shaping local feminisms that contribute to the “complex terrain of feminisms beyond binaries and borders.”
In the final chapter in this part (Chapter 11), Gul Aldikacti Marshall defines transnational feminism “as a theory developed against white Western feminism's notion of global sisterhood, which assumes a common patriarchal oppression faced by all women.” Transnational feminism is a powerful framework that attends to both local expressions of feminism and resistance, as discussed in the previous chapter, and incorporates understandings developed in postcolonial feminist theory. It includes critique of neoliberal globalization, colonialism and imperialism as well as Western‐centric expressions of feminism. Marshall notes that transnational feminism allows for the possibility of “dialog and coalition building,” and solidarity among women in their contextual particularities that are based on the intersection of social locations, such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality.
In Part III, we focus on the diversity of methodologies developed by feminist scholars in response to the limits of approaches that rely on traditional positivist or androcentric scientific methods (see Chapter 12 by Cynthia Deitch). Despite these critiques, feminist empiricist scholars continue to draw on positivist methods in the fields of demography, geography, economics and sociology to document the ways in which gender and other systems of difference and inequality are expressed in aggregate data. In Chapter 13, Gina Marie Longo details the premises and research strategies adopted by feminist empiricists who apply positivist approaches but also acknowledge the role of values in scientific research practices in order to minimize their negative effects. However, she also notes that feminist empiricism has been criticized for “lacking a radical approach to deconstructing the power hierarchies and systems of oppressions that exist within and are upheld by science.” Longo then presents two different feminist modes of knowledge generation: standpoint epistemology and postmodern feminism. Feminist standpoint analysis begins in the lived experience of socially located actors. They are especially attentive to the perspectives of marginalized knowers who experientially understand the “relations of power” (Chapter 13) or “relations of ruling” (Smith 1989) that contour social life. In contrast, feminist empiricists focus on the diverse interests and values that are constructed as rational products of deliberative discourse, rather than an expression or reflection of lived experiences.
In addition to debates about what counts as knowledge and how to conduct research, contemporary interdisciplinary scholars (Chapter 14) discuss the significance of the lack of women and women‐identified people working as scientists in academia and other research positions. They also consider more recent critical approaches which incorporate methodological strategies informed by postcolonial, critical race disability, and queer theories. Drawing on two contemporary case studies, Samantha M. Archer and A.E. Kohler demonstrate the power of feminist science studies to challenge some of the taken‐for‐granted findings of archeological and genetic research on gender to address “controversial bioethical dilemmas regarding intellectual disability and clinical practice.” In Chapter 15, Valeria Esquivel discusses how feminist economists contest “the gender‐blindness of economic thinking and have developed new analytical frameworks and methodologies to examine gender relations in economic institutions and economic functioning.”
In their overview of feminist approaches to ethnography in anthropology, Dána‐Ain Davis and Christa Craven (Chapter 16) emphasize the diversity of feminist ethnographic innovations. Despite these differences, Davis and Craven find that there are overlapping “commitment[s] to paying attention to marginality and power differentials, attending to a feminist intellectual history, seeking justice, and producing scholarship in various creative forms that can contribute to movement building and/or be in the service of the people, communities, organizations, and issues we study.”
Ariella Rotramel examines “Feminist Historiography” in Chapter 17. Rotramel explains that this methodological approach can best be understood as a form of feminist praxis, namely, one that is shaped by the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. For example, knowledge generated by social activism is then used to inform the development or reformulation of social theory, which, in turn, informs future activist strategies and engagement. Feminist historians who adopt this approach have been at the forefront of revealing the relations of power embedded in the archives that are used to generate knowledge about the past. Rotramel also notes that feminist historians have expanded their approach by drawing on literary studies and digital humanities to alter how scholars approach analysis of historical texts.
Feminist scholars debate both the subjects for analysis and the methods utilized within the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. Culture and media are topics that are approached in a variety of ways in different disciplines. In Chapter 18, the final chapter in Part III, Diane Grossman explains how feminist scholars effectively shifted cultural analysis to center gender and alter how scholars approach cultural texts and study cultural artifacts in the area of popular
