817719

research-article2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918817719feminist reviewDeborah Rose Lunny

open space

Feminist Review

English hegemony, Anglo

Issue 121, 66­–80
© 2019 The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines:

privilege and the promise sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0141778918817719
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918817719
www.feministreview.com

of ‘allo’lingual citational
praxis in transnational
feminisms research

Deborah Rose Lunny

Japanese women have been collaborators in Japan’s aggression in other Asian countries for over a hundred years. The present
struggles of the women in these countries make this fact even clearer to us. … We want to express our sincere apologies to our
Asian sisters. We want to learn from and join in their struggles.

‘Sengen,’ Ajia onnatachi no kai (Declaration of the Asian Women’s Association)

Tokyo, Japan, 1 March 1977

Anglo-academic discussions of transnational feminisms often under-acknowledge transnational feminist activist

knowledges, epistemologies, texts, linguistic labours and non-Anglophone feminist thought. The knowledge practices
involved in everyday transnational women’s activism and required for the translation of feminist activist thought—
reading, interpreting, summarising, translating and editing—are forms of linguistic and intellectual labour through
which feminist ideas can travel transnationally.

I learned this by spending a number of years elbow-deep in activist texts,1 not as a researcher but as a language
worker (translator, interpreter, language teacher) in pre-internet era, Japan-based transnational feminist organising
(Lunny, 1995). In the early 1990s, feminist groups in Asia were developing the discourses and strategies of women’s
human rights, a process involving significant cultural and linguistic translation (See Josei no jinken iinkai [Women’s
Human Rights Committee] and Saito, 1994). I learned then to think of transnational feminisms and transnational
feminist thought as: 1) emerging out of in/formal networks and grassroots women’s movements; 2) developed and

1 Some of the bigger transnationally active international networks are still operating and have some older publications available
through online ordering or archives (http://dawnnet.org/, https://femnet.org/, http://www.wluml.org, http://isis.or.ug, https://
www.cladem.org/eng/, https://huairou.org/network/member-networks/groots/), but many newsletters and reports produced by
the smaller grassroots members of these networks are hard to find. A Philippines-based group, Isis International, announced in
August 2018 that it is hoping to continue its efforts to digitise defunct journals from feminist organisations (Somera, 2018).
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  67

spread by the everyday knowledge practices carried out in women’s movements; and 3) multilingual in origin yet often
dependent upon English, a colonial language, for cross-border diffusion. My experiential activist learning also
included lessons from translation work about the global hegemony and circulation of English(es), and later about the
under-recognition of transnational feminist activist knowledges (within the Anglo-academic discourses), and the
frequent failure of feminist scholarship to account for what I describe as ‘Anglo privilege’. By this I mean the oft-
unrecognised advantages and power that accrue to English speakers in many contexts, including benefits of time,
labour, access, voice and agency, which are differentially accessed and experienced by native and non-native English
speakers. I draw on these insights to suggest critical citational praxis as an everyday knowledge practice or intervention
for better engaging multilingual, movement-based transnational feminist knowledges and texts. We can therefore
decentre (somewhat), or at least resituate, Anglo-academic transnational feminisms within a more epistemologically
and linguistically diverse framework.

linguistic labour: translating activist texts and teaching feminist

English in Japan
Forum Yokohama was the international branch of Yokohama Women’s Association for Communication and Networking
(YWACN), a municipally funded not-for-profit organisation that administered two women’s centres providing
resources—texts, workshops, classes, printing machines and meeting rooms—to advance grassroots initiatives for
gender equality.2 YWACN had amassed hundreds of foreign newsletters through international exchanges with
grassroots women’s groups, as well as a large collection of Japanese minikomi (‘mini communications’, a play on
masukomi, ‘mass communications’). The bulk of the international materials were in English, yet most of the people
who came to our library were Japanese women with varying English abilities. They sought and studied information or
became involved in some form of women’s or community activities.

I was hired in 1991 to prepare for the opening of Forum Yokohama as a foreign contract worker. My job involved making
the primarily English materials more accessible to Japanese readers. This involved reading through a stack of
newsletters from women’s groups, assigning key words to the publication and ferreting out details about the
organisation. I would then synthesise this information into an organisational ‘bio’ with mandate and contact details,
as well as a short ‘newsletter synopsis’ that characterised the topics covered. Once translated from English into
Japanese, this information was displayed with the most recent issue of a given newsletter in the library.

The Japanese and international newsletter collections balanced an Anglo-academic, Western-centric presentation of
feminist thought within the library’s collection. Having been suggested by a US university-based feminist research
centre, most of the feminist books were American academic and popular feminist texts written in English. My colleagues
asked me to teach an English course using newsletter articles as texts, hoping that a guided introduction to global
grassroots women’s thought would encourage greater use of the collection. These various forms of linguistic labour
profoundly shaped how I came to understand transnational feminist activisms and knowledges.

learning from transnational feminist activisms, knowledges and texts

My extensive reading of the alternative body of feminist thought found in grassroots publications revealed the limits of
my understanding of feminisms, raising uncomfortable questions about how my own privilege and knowledge gaps were
shaping my presentation of organisations and issues. Furthermore, working as an ally/volunteer with other local
feminist groups by providing translation/interpretation services for Asian women’s human rights meetings introduced
me to long-time activists from all over Asia. I learned that much of the world’s feminist thought and practices emerged
from multisited, multilingual, locally grounded and transnationally networked collective struggles. It was a very

2 Forum Yokohama operated from 1993 until 2005.

68    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

different view of feminisms, activisms and epistemologies than I had encountered in North American feminist classrooms
in the late 1980s. Beyond the emerging intersectional focus on race, gender, class and sometimes sexual orientation,
my first on-the-ground encounter with transnational feminisms taught me to recognise global English hegemony and
Anglo privilege as powerful forces within transnational feminisms. I carried these concerns with me when I encountered
Anglo-academic transnational feminisms scholarship after beginning my doctoral studies in 2004.

lesson 1: transnational feminist activisms produce knowledges that

deserve recognition—as such
M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2010) have called for alternative and movement-based
genealogies of transnational feminist thought. Grassroots feminist newsletters are a good place to start. These
newsletters published from at least the 1970s onwards are evidence that women all over the world were actively
theorising their situations by documenting, researching, analysing and strategising, much like their Western
counterparts were, and that they were exchanging ideas transnationally (see Figures 2,3,5,6,7,8). While there are
important specificities of activist epistemologies addressed more directly in the social movement literature (Barker
and Cox, 2002; Bevington and Dixon, 2005; Lunny, 2006; Choudry and Kapoor, 2010; Lunny, 2016), these activist texts
were, I believe, theoretical. By this, I mean that these activist texts described and analysed the problems women
faced and prescribed solutions, which is what I had learnt to expect from feminist theories in North American feminist
classrooms (Tong, 1989). Newsletters and reports described problems women faced and the actions they took to
respond to them (see Figures 1 and 4 for Japanese domestic circulation examples). They drew on formal and informal
research to examine and theorise local, cultural, regional, national and global root causes of such problems. They
were pedagogical, with key words unpacked in text boxes and glossaries. Books, reports and videos offered for sale
promoted knowledge diffusion. Finally, these activist texts were action-orientated: through them, transnational
networks shared updates on projects that spanned multiple contexts and recorded many non-textual knowledge
practices involved in grassroots organising (for example, interrupting and shaming perpetrators of domestic violence
after being alerted by a woman blowing a whistle, literally). The details of the struggles and the ingenuity of the
tactics captured in these early 1990s women’s and NGO newsletters were often new to me. Yet, arguably, these
documents employed recognisable modes of feminist knowledge-making—theory, research and pedagogy.

Pre-internet era feminist and NGO newsletters provide evidence of alternative transnational feminist knowledge
practices and dissemination systems. As a language worker immersed in the textual evidence of transnational feminist
activist thought, I was curious about what, where and how feminist knowledges travelled. I began to recognise
transnational feminist knowledge production as grounded in the everyday knowledge practices required to transmit
feminist thought across cultural and linguistic borders. These practices produced feminist knowledges and texts
intended primarily for other grassroots and NGO women activists. This pre-internet production and exchange of
activist texts was a main means of disseminating transnational feminist activist knowledges from at least 1975. Not
always able to travel to meetings, far-flung activists used newsletters and reports to learn from and about each
other’s struggles, facilitating collective feminist knowledge-making across borders, and groups were as concerned
with sharing their own analyses as they were with learning from other women’s movements.3

3 For example, see the newsletter Ajia to Josei Kaihoh (Asia and Women’s Liberation), first published in 1977 by Ajia onnatachi
no kai (Asian Women’s Organization), http://ajwrc.org/jp/modules/myalbum/viewcat.php?cid=5 [last accessed 16 September
2018]. The English version of this newsletter, Asian Women’s Liberation, is archived at http://www.ajwrc.org/eng/modules/myal-
bum/viewcat.php?cid=3 [last accessed 16 Sept 2018]. See also The Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center’s Joseitachi no nijuis-
seki (Women’s 21st Century), http://ajwrc.org/jp/modules/myalbum/viewcat.php?cid=1[last accessed 16 September 2018]. Note
that the title of the English version of this publication is not a translation of the Japanese title but Voices from Japan. This English
title was chosen by Matsui Yayori to emphasise the importance of the transnational flow of feminist activist thought being from,
and not simply to, Japan (see Figures 2,3,5).
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  69

Yet, there is little citational evidence that North American feminist scholars were reading early transnational
feminist movement-generated literature or engaging it as a heterogeneous body of feminist thought. This is
somewhat understandable given the circulation patterns of early international women’s newsletters. For many
activists, Western-based scholars were not seen as primary interlocutors. For their part, critical Anglo-American
university-based scholars do reference movements ‘elsewhere’ quite consistently from at least the early 1990s
onwards, though often as case studies or touch stones; whereas movement knowledges, activist epistemologies
and the learning that transpires through transnational feminist activisms are far less commonly engaged as such
(Lunny, 2016). Although the more recent anticolonial and anti-racist scholarly knowledge project of Anglo-
American ‘transnational feminisms’ offers a compelling comparative, relational and intersectional analysis of
transnational relations of power, it nevertheless seems to recentre the North American university-based
positionalities in understandings of transnational feminist knowledge-making, for example by usually involving
a North American university-based research partner in transnational feminist knowledge creation projects (as
seen in Nagar and Lock Swarr, 2010). On the other hand, feminist newsletters show that activist knowledge
partnerships were often regional, for instance Asia-specific, and also often South–South. The ‘global feminisms’
scholarship, often differentiated by its engagement with United Nations-related advocacy, more often references
activist texts, though usually as primary data; it less often cites the concerns and ideas raised in activist texts in
research-shaping and research-situating ways. Activists ‘elsewhere’ and their ideas become objects of study
rather than knowledge-producing interlocutors (Lunny, 2016). Exceptions that grapple overtly with transnational
feminist activist knowledges, epistemologies and pedagogies as such highlight the relative absence or
instrumentalisation of activist knowledges (Alvarez, 2002; Ackerly, 2004; Dubois et al., 2005; Hewitt, 2009;
Alexander and Mohanty, 2010; Conway 2011, 2013). Transnational feminist movement knowledges were thus
subsumed or marginalised in North American feminist classrooms and scholarship even as the transnational and
global feminisms frames were being developed, and a review of references and bibliographies in recent
publications suggests not much has changed.

How might Anglo-academic transnational feminist scholarship better account for the multilingual, multisited
movement-based genealogies, methodologies and epistemologies of transnational feminisms, broadly conceived?
Citational praxis—reflection, theorising and action on everyday citational practices—is promising. Scholarly citational
practices likely played a part in how, actually, Anglo-academic transnational and other feminist scholarship
developed with little direct or sustained interlocution with transnational feminist activists and their ideas. Laura
Briggs (2008, p. 79), aware that the ideas for which scholars are credited (cited) often emerged from movement-
generated analyses, asks: ‘How do we cite movement knowledges?’. Certainly, it is complicated to credit the seemingly
ephemeral and distant collective insights that inform the theories within which transnational feminist scholars broker.
Movement knowledges are under-archived. I have struggled to find citations for ideas learned through the daily work
of activism. Nevertheless, as scholars, we need to reflect upon our own citational choices, asking whose knowledge we
use to construct our research and syllabi. We can examine what sources we read, assign and cite, looking for the
presence of movement-generated, non-English or translated texts. We can also begin to recognise theory, research
and pedagogy in less familiar formats, such as placards, chants, blogs, posts and newsletters (Bevington and Dixon,
2005). The #MeToo movement has demonstrated this by using social media to share stories and analyses that have
generated collective descriptions and analyses of, and strategies for resistance to, sexual violence. Teachers can also
assign more activist texts as course readings, with an eye towards highlighting their theoretical contributions.
Monolingual Anglophones can read translated or English sources, while multilingual students can work on texts from
feminist groups that are in other languages.

Scholars can, in short, begin to better integrate alternative movement-generated transnational feminist thought.
Reading, summarising, quoting, annotating, assigning, debating, critiquing and citing—familiar everyday knowledge
practices—are entry points to this shift. By changing the objects of our citational practices, we can collectively rethink
the ‘hierarchisation’ of transnational feminist knowledges, recognising the contributions and weaknesses of
transnational feminist thought and activist knowledges, beyond Anglo-academic norms.
70    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

lesson 2: the strategic use of global English(es) as a medium of

transnational feminist exchange increases reach yet (re)produces
English hegemony
In transnational feminist activist milieux, I learned to question the global hegemony of English, English linguistic
imperialism and the common-sense assumption of the ‘natural, neutral and beneficial’ (Pennycook, 1994, p. 7) use of
English as a global language. English ability did facilitate participation in transnational feminist deliberations, but it
could also create tensions between allies internationally and locally. Furthermore, defaulting to preferred English
terms when translating can lead to the overwriting of important non-Anglophone feminist insights. Many transnational
activists and bi- or multilingual scholars know that ‘at the international level, feminism happens in English’,4 but
English hegemony has not been a main concern in Anglo-academic transnational feminisms scholarship.

The foreign academic and local grassroots texts in Forum Yokohama’s library were primarily in English, which provided
evidence for the reach of English across the region. Depending on national contexts and colonial legacies, English might
be a mother tongue, a medium of education, an official language, used in NGO sectors or heard in daily life. English
language ability might cleave class or ethnic identities. Therefore, grassroots groups consciously and pragmatically
used accessibly written English for international newsletters. Even so, using English to communicate transnational
feminist thought was fraught. My nakama (colleagues) were both awed and intimidated by the English fluency of other
Asian activists, particularly from the Philippines and India. Some tensions existed amongst Japan-based activists as
well. Bilingual women were more likely to attend international gatherings and to participate in conversations shaping
transnational strategies, whereas monolingual activists were more concerned with local manifestations of human
rights violations—which they sometimes felt were overshadowed at transnationally-focused events.

English hegemony also risks overwriting meanings and homogenising otherwise diverse culturally and linguistically
specific feminist thought. For example, at the time, Western feminists favoured the blunt term seiteki dorei (‘military
sexual slavery’). However, zainichi (Korean residents of Japan) and some Japanese activists preferred to use jugun
ianfu (‘military comfort women’) prefaced with iwayuru (‘so-called’); they explained that erasing ian from this term
problematically obscures the concept of ‘comfort’—often provided by way of sex with Asian women5—as a kind of
compensation provided by corporations and the military to Japanese sarariman (salarymen or office workers) and
soldiers for their loyal labour.6 Such erasure thereby undercut an important feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial
critique of transhistorical patriarchal practices.

Realising that although translation into English is intended to facilitate transnational exchange, it also involves the
threat of subsuming local insights under English discourses, I began to question the ideological weight not just of
Western feminism but also of ‘feminist English’. I worried that my own linguistic and conceptual limitations played a
kind of gatekeeping role, especially when I had to suggest which newsletters to synopsise and display, or to describe a
grassroots group as ‘feminist’ based upon its direct critique of patriarchy and sexism, without knowing their stance on
the use of the word. Likewise, activist translators have had long discussions about how best to translate terms such as
sex, gender, feminism, accountability and human rights, often resorting to hybrid notations possible in Japanese by
using the language’s three different writing scripts: kanji (Chinese character with Japanese pronunciation), cursive
ひらがな (hiragana) for Japanese words, and angular カタカナ (katakana) for foreign loan words. 性 is

4 Dr Homa Hoodfar, personal communication, 14 August 2018.

5 The term ‘Asian’ is sometimes used in Japanese in a implicitly derogatory way to imply ‘non-Japanese’ Asians. Here, feminists were

acknowledging the sexist but also racist and colonialist overtones of the way in which sex with women from other Asian countries
was and is seen as an earned ‘comfort’ owed to hardworking soldiers/businessmen.
6 I do not have access to the newsletter article that made the connection between the corporate and military control of male sexu-

ality. This connection was discussed in meetings and eventually made its way into a newsletter article.
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  71

Figure 1  Japanese version of the inaugural issue of the Women’s Asia 21: Voices from Japan newsletter, produced by Asia-
Japan Women’s Resource Center prior to the NGO Forum on Women in Huairou, China, 1995
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis

pronounced as sei and can be written in hiragana as せい, referring ambiguously to sex, gender, sexuality as well as
a person’s nature. Conventionally, gender is translated as 性別 (seibetsu), with betsu emphasising the difference
and distinctiveness of sex. Feminists often choose to use katakana ジェンダー (pronounced genda- not sei) either
instead of the kanji 性 or by using a katakana subscript under the kanji that overwrites its pronunciation to genda-,
creating a subversive feminist meaning of gender expressible through katakana as borrowed from English, yet
exceeding the possibilities of English in some ways.

English remains a rarely problematised default in North American feminist scholarship. Anglo-American
geographers, multicultural educationalists and some North America-based Indigenous, Latina and Francophone/
Quebec scholars have offered episodic incisive interventions that have attempted to provoke deeper reflection and
72    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

Figure 2  English version of the inaugural issue of Women’s Asia 21: Voices from Japan with content for international
feminist audiences, published by Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center just prior to the NGO Forum on Women in Huairou,
China, 1995
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis

critical theorising of English linguistic privilege, Anglophone hegemony, ‘Anglo-normativity’, Anglo-American

privilege, English monolingualism and how much feminist thought gets lost in translation to English (Baril, 2016 is
especially good; see also Descarries, 2003, 2014; Gallagher-Geurtsen, 2007; Pereira, 2014; Browne, 2015; Hassan,
2015). Despite the actual multilingualism of feminisms worldwide, the ‘Anglo-normativity’ of transnational
feminist scholarship is rarely critiqued, though recently Sylvanna M. Falcón (2016) made a promising intervention
emphasising the importance of translation, multilingualism and awareness of imperial privilege in transnational
feminist research practices. As of yet, these interventions have not resulted in a visible collective investment in
challenging English hegemony by promoting self-reflexive critique or citational praxis in Anglo-American
transnational feminist scholarship.
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  73

Figure 3  English version of Women’s Asia 21: Voices from Japan’s thematic issue on ‘Globalization and women’s human rights’, 1998
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis
74    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

Figure 4  Japanese edition of Women’s Asia 21: Voices from Japan’s thematic issue on ‘Women’s human rights—from defending
to creating’ (my translation), 1997
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  75

Figure 5  English edition of Women’s Asia 21: Voices from Japan on ‘Violence against women: battles on women’s body in
Japan’, 2001
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis

So how can feminist scholars—monolinguists, multilinguists, native English speakers and non-Anglophones—undertake
such theorising? English hegemony can be theorised in tension with an understanding of Englishes—de-homogenised and
pluralised—as potent and fraught tools in activist struggles. Drawing on my own Canadian/Quebec context, I suggest the
use of the term ‘allo’lingual as one possibility. In Quebec, the relationship between language, cultural dominance and
power is inescapable. Here, one often hears the word ‘allophone’ (Office québécois de la langue française, 2005) used to
refer to native speakers of a language other than French or English who are linguistic and ethnic minorities in Quebec. This
‘other than’ emphasis might be appropriated as a reminder of English-language dominance within transnational feminist
studies. I propose the subversive use of the term ‘allo’lingual to refer to texts/knowledges ‘other than’ those written in
English. With the quotation marks around ‘allo’ (‘other’) signalling the power relations that create language hierarchies,
using the term ‘allo’lingual can serve as a reminder of English hegemony in a way that the term ‘multilingual’ does not.
While admittedly rather binary, exploring the dynamics of ‘allo’lingualism can begin an important conversation.
76    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

Figure 6  Second English edition of Asian Women’s Liberation by Asian Women’s Association, Tokyo, 1980; the inaugural issue
was published in 1977
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis

lesson 3: Anglo privilege must be addressed in transnational feminist

knowledge-making
As fault lines among women, English language abilities reveal inequities of time, labour and agency. In Japan, I learned
that the linguistic labour of Anglicising transnational feminisms was unevenly distributed, draining some non-
Anglophone women of time, energy and money, even as it gave them greater agency in transnational gatherings. Park
Hwami (1999),7 Zainichi founder of the anti-racist English benkyo-kai (study circle) the Colours of English and my

7 For Japanese and Zainichi Korean names, surnames appear first as is standard practice.
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  77

Figure 7  Japanese edition of Asian Women’s Liberation on ‘Asian women and population policy’ by Asian Women’s Association,
Tokyo, 1986
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis

activist mentor, pragmatically determined ‘to make English into my anticolonial weapon’ and was only able to
actualise this strategy through a large investment of her own personal resources. As a native English speaker, I realised
that I had never had to make a similar investment simply to access transnational conversations. Learning Japanese,
however time-consuming, did not provide that kind of access. Furthermore, whereas my activist counterparts paid to
learn, as a native speaker I was paid to teach feminist English by a number of groups. This arrangement invited
intersectional reflection on power inequities and Anglophone privilege.

My informal activist learning made me acutely aware of how my fluency in English augmented privileges afforded
to me due to my whiteness, academic training and middle-class background. At Forum Yokohama, I was hired
78    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

Figure 8  English edition of Asian Women’s Liberation on ‘Women in development: Japanese foreign aid-helping or hurting
women in Asia’ by Asian Women’s Association, Tokyo, 1992
Source: Courtesy of Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center, photographed by Maria Giabouranis

ostensibly for my speed in processing the high volume of feminist materials in English but also, I suspect, for what
I represented: a foreign feminist. In Japan, whiteness and English-speaking are routinely elevated and conflated.
White, English speaking, fluent in Japanese, functional in French and trained in feminist and Japanese studies, I
brought a knowledge base that bridged Japanese and Western feminisms. Yet, even in areas where my knowledge
base was shaky—such as global grassroots feminisms—my perspective, whether regarding word choice or
subscription to a foreign newsletter, was (over)valued. As usually the only available native speaker, I received
English texts for a neitibu chekku (‘native check’), and I was often entrusted to know best when translating ideas
generated in other languages into feminist English. Consequently, I learned first-hand how Anglo privilege
operated in transnational feminist milieux.
 Deborah Rose Lunny    121  79

towards collective citational praxis

Although I had read Mohanty’s (1984) ‘Under Western eyes’ and had academic training in East Asian Studies and
Women’s and Gender Studies, I was unprepared for the breadth of perspectives and depth of analyses apparent in the
array of women’s collective knowledge-making and resistance that I encountered a quarter of a century ago. That
experience permanently altered my understanding of feminisms, activisms and how certain knowledges travel.
Multilingual transnational feminist activist knowledges irrevocably decentred Western and Anglophone feminisms for
me. While my own informal activist learning was transformative, I also realised that even many such isolated
decentrings cannot truly budge dominant ways of feminist knowing. Instead, a broad-scale shift in knowledge-making
practices must occur. Collective scholarly citational praxis, whereby feminist scholars more routinely read and cite
‘allo’ligual and activist texts, offers a method for decentring Anglo-academic norms in feminist research. Case
studies and invocations of ‘allo’lingual transnational feminist activisms are not enough. Citational praxis that
integrates transnational feminist activist knowledges, especially ‘allo’lingual texts, can resituate Anglo-academic
norms within transnational feminisms contextually, as but a few of the many multilingual, heterogeneous,
transnational bodies of feminist thought and action.

acknowledgements
Most of the ideas in this piece originated in my twelve years in Japan. To my nakama, I offer my heartful gratitude for
the many lessons and laughs along the way: tanoshikatta, osewaninarimashita, ganbatte kudasai! I am particularly
indebted to Park Hwami, Yayoi Taguchi, YWACN, AJWRC and the Tokyo lesbian/queer community. Dr Homa Hoodfar, Dr
Rachel Berger, Dr Gada Mahrouse, Dr Viviane Namaste and Dr Natalie Khouri-Towe offered helpful feedback on the
ideas in this article, as did my lovely partner, Nisha, aka Dr Tanisha Ramachandran. My thanks to Erica Still for editing.

author biography
Deborah Rose Lunny has a PhD from Concordia University in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her fields are: transnational
feminisms, social movement learning and social justice pedagogies. Her dissertation ‘Citing/siting transnational
feminisms: academic and activist epistemologies’ negotiates the tensions between Anglo-academic and movement-
based iterations of transnational feminisms. Debbie also has a BA Honours in Japanese Studies from McGill University
and an MA in Japanese Literature from Chicago University. She worked in queer and women’s human rights Japan-
based activism for over a decade. She teaches Humanities full-time at John Abbott College. Her research projects
include ‘decolonising’ college education and social justice pedagogies, and integrating transnational feminist and
social movement learning frameworks.

references
Ackerly, B.A., 2004. Women’s human rights activists as political theorists. In L. Ricciutelli, A.R. Miles and M. McFadden, eds., Feminist
Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges. Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education, pp. 284–312.
Alexander, M.J. and Mohanty, C.T., 2010. Cartographies of knowledge and power: transnational feminism as radical praxis. In R.
Nagar and A. Lock Swarr, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 23–45.
Alvarez, S., 2000. Translating the global: effects of transnational organizing on Latin American feminist discourses and practices.
Meridians: A Journal of Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism, 1(1), pp. 29–67.
Baril, A., 2016. “Doctor, am I an Anglophone trapped in a Francophone body?”: an intersectional analysis of “trans-crip-t time” in
ableist, cisnormative, anglonormative societies. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 10(2), pp. 155–172.
Barker, C. and Cox, L., 2002. What have the Romans ever done for us? Activist and academic forms of theorizing. Paper presented
at the 8th Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference, April. Manchester.
Bevington, D. and Dixon, C., 2005. Movement-relevant theory: rethinking social movement scholarship and activism. Social
Movement Studies, 4(3), pp. 185–208.
80    121  English hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of ‘allo’lingual citational praxis

Briggs, L., 2008. Activisms and epistemologies: problems for transnationalisms. Social Text, 26(4), pp. 79–95.
Browne, K., 2015. Contesting Anglo-American privilege in the production of knowledge in geographies of sexualities and genders.
Revista Latino-Americana de Geografia e Gênero, 6(2), pp. 250–270.
Choudry, A.A. and Kapoor, D., eds., 2010. Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge
Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Conway, J.M., 2011. Activist knowledges on the anti-globalization terrain: transnational feminisms at the World Social Forum.
Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, 3(2), pp. 33–64.
Conway, J.M., 2013. Edges of Global Justice: The World Social Forum and Its “Others”. London: Routledge.
Descarries, F., 2003. The hegemony of the English language in the academy: the damaging impact of the sociocultural and
linguistic barriers on the development of feminist sociological knowledge, theories and strategies. Current Sociology,
51(6), pp. 625–636.
Descarries, F., 2014. Language is not neutral: the construction of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, 39(3), pp. 564–569.
DuBois, E., Tohidi, N., Peterson, S., Blackwell, M. and Rupp, L., 2005. Transnational Feminism: A Range of Disciplinary Perspectives.
Los Angeles: UCLA International Institute. Available at: http://international.ucla.edu/media/files/060518_transnational_
feminism.pdf [last accessed 6 December 2018].
Falcón, S.M., 2016. Transnational feminism as a paradigm for decolonizing the practice of research: identifying feminist principles
and methodology criteria for US-based scholars. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 37(1), pp. 174–194.
Gallagher-Geurtsen, T., 2007. Linguistic privilege: why educators should be concerned. Multicultural Perspectives, 9(1), pp. 40–44.
Hassan, J.N., 2015. De-colonizing gender in Indigenous language revitalization efforts. Western Papers in Linguistics / Cahiers
linguistiques de Western, 1(2). Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wpl_clw/vol1/iss2/4. [last accessed 23 October 2018].
Hewitt, L., 2009. The Politics of Transnational Feminist Discourse: Framing Across Differences, Building Solidarities. PhD. Nashville:
Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University.
Josei no jinken iinkai [Women’s Human Rights Committee] and Saito, K., 1994. Josei no jinken ajia houtei no kiroku
[Record of the Asian Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights]. Tokyo: Ajia Josei Shiryo Senta [Asia-Japan Women’s Resource
Center] [in Japanese].
Lunny, D., 1995. Women’s movement in Japan: looking inward, looking outward. Women’s Asia: Voices from Japan, 1, pp. 60–62.
Lunny, D., 2006. Out of Canada: the pedagogy of transnational feminist activism. Canadian Woman Studies, 25(3–4), pp. 85–90.
Lunny, D., 2016. Citing/Siting Transnational Feminisms: Academic and Activist Epistemologies. PhD. Montreal: Humanities,
Concordia University.
Mohanty, C.T., 1984. Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. boundary 2, 12/13(3), pp. 333–358.
Nagar, R. and Lock Swarr, A., eds., 2010. Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Albany: SUNY Press.
Office québécois de la langue française [Quebec Office of the French Language], 2005. Allophone. Fiche terminologique
[Terminology Index], 9 February. Available at: http://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=8359640 [last accessed
23 October 2018] [in French].
Park, H., 1999. Colors of English to watashi [Colors of English and I]. We: Kurashi to kyoiku wo tsunagu [We: Connecting Life and
Education], February, pp. 23–28 [in Japanese].
Pennycook, A., 1994. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Pereira, M.D.M., 2014. The importance of being “modern” and foreign: feminist scholarship and the epistemic status of nations.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39(3), pp. 627–657.
Somera, N., 2018. Changing times for the Isis Resource Center. Isis International, 20 August. Available at: https://www.
isiswomen.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1797:changing-times-for-the-isis-resource-
center&catid=153&Itemid=261 [last accessed 16 September 2018].
Tong, R., 1989. Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction. Boulder: Westview Press.