Reconceptualizing Liberation: Towards a Transnational Feminist Psychology, Jill Betz Bloom PhD

In honor of Women’s History Month, Jill Betz Bloom, PhD invited the William James College community to Reconceptualiz[e] Liberation: Towards a Transnational Feminism  on Thursday, March 6. Delivered on the eve of  International Women’s Day—a celebration whose origin came on the heels of labor movements across Europe and North America in the early 20th century—Bloom, director of the Global Mental Health Program and professor in the Clinical Psychology department, drew a through line between her early work in feminist theory and current work in global mental health in order to demonstrate how transnational feminism grew out of the history of feminism. 

“Feminist theories, like all theories that challenge prevailing ideas or ways of thinking, in time, too, are revealed to have shortcomings,” says Bloom, offering a point of orientation for the discussion at hand: Who is included in making knowledge claims and who is excluded? 

Feminism: A Brief History 

The Suffragist Movement, referred to as first wave feminism (a term coined in 1910 when women coalesced to gain the right to vote), “was really one of the first times women came together after [an era of] very repressive roles during the 19th century,” says Bloom. Second wave feminism, The Women’s Movement (or Women’s Lib), arose in the 1960s and ‘70s and broadened the purview to include workplace discrimination, unequal pay, access to childcare, and reproductive rights “which were all major areas of contention,” says Bloom who had scoured her bookshelves for tangible evidence of how feminism evolved. 

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1953,  “launched a widespread discussion about women's roles, particularly suburban women who had been relegated to the margins, and developed a groundswell of activism among women within consciousness-raising groups,” says Bloom, of a collective conversing about, marching for, and ultimately demanding equal pay. (It was not until 1963 that the Equal Pay Act prohibited sex-based wage discrimination.) Other major milestones came in June 1966, when NOW, the National Organization of Women—a major force in advocating for both legal and social changes—was established; and in December 1971 when Gloria Steinem founded Ms. Magazine. 

Tensions Arise

Burgeoning activism among women was not free from tension, as evidenced by the Essentialist vs. Social Constructivism Feminism camps. The former asserts that women and men have essential natures that make them inherently different; the latter attributes an external, social-political context as responsible for creating gender roles. Into the 1980s and through the ‘90s, naming and critiquing feminism as white intensified, as evidenced by the 1981 publication of Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives by Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, followed by Elizabeth V. Spelman’s Inessential Woman in 1990, increased awareness about who was being excluded in the discussion of feminism. 

In the mid 1990s, third wave feminism—dubbed The Era of Intersectionality—shed light on the need for inclusivity, activism, “and advocating for more voices,” says Bloom, underscoring that psychology and feminism have historically had a contentious relationship.

 “In my own work, I  moved away from [many] of those in psychology because of the narrowness in their essentialist view,” says Bloom, citing a deviation from the path on which she began. (Bloom was hired to teach women’s psychology and feminist theory at what was then MSPP.) Books by sociologist Nancy Chodorow (Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, 1978); psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, 1988); and philosopher Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990) proved groundbreaking to the field and opened up feminist critiques of science which very much influenced psychology.

Culture and History: Important Perspectives

 Among the various schools of feminism, there is general agreement in man’s dominance of women. “They tend to pathologize women's experience, by portraying them as ‘other’ in relation to men,” says Bloom of the ensuing illumination and critique of conventional thinking and practice. That said, transnational feminism began to address two notable shortcomings: the conventional tendency to either ignore majority world women's experience or to define them as other in relation to an ethnocentric norm; and  second, disagreement about the definition of many of the key concepts of feminism—among them gender, oppression, and liberation. As such, a new shift began in the late ‘90s into the 2000s and continues today. 

 “Transnational feminism is informed by a re-centering, [and by extension] a de-centering of the world,” says Bloom, pointing to Western perspectives that divide the world into categories (first world, third world, developing world, etc.) steeped in a colonial orientation—a superior versus inferior way of thinking, if you will. Transnational global perspectives use demographic terms (like the West and the rest) to describe, and reorient, the world. “The majority world emphasizes interdependence while the West emphasizes independence,” says Bloom of a shift in perspectives—one made evident by Sonali Kolhatkar, vice president of the Afghan Women’s Mission, who says: 

 “Isn't it imperative, and a little bit obvious, that when we speak of Afghan women and their rights, we must listen carefully to what they themselves have to say about it? As the admirable struggles of women of color, particularly in the Global South, come to the knowledge of the West, we must remind ourselves of the validity of their views and hopes, over our perceptions of what they should say and do, how they should dress and whether or not their oppression stems from being able to have an orgasm.”

 Bloom went on to illustrate what she calls “cultural myopia” with a cartoon by Malcolm Evans (depicting a bikini-clad American woman next to a Muslim woman wearing a niqab), serving as an invaluable reminder that each culture sees the world through different eyes.

 “It all depends on perspective,” says Bloom, of what dominates a cruel, male-dominated culture, emphasizing that mainstream feminisms take their insights about Western oppression from WEIRD countries—an acronym for those that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—“and impose these ideas as the standard for understanding universal gender oppression,” says Bloom.

Transnational and Global Feminism emerged in the late ‘90s and challenged assumptions of most Western feminist theories—that women face similar oppressions all over the world, due to their sex and gender. Bloom shares a common insight, “that majority world women suffer from multiple forms of oppression, and are qualitatively different from the gender oppression experienced by women in the West. She then quoted Cheryl Johnson-Odim who said: “For those who are committed to feminist and anti-colonial struggles, they must strive to see the world through non-colonial eyes,” something leading figure and feminist critic Gayatri Spivak has done to inform this new wave.

Liberating Liberation

Bloom asserts that Western feminism is grounded in a liberal conception of the person, characterized by autonomy, rationality, and agency. “Feminism and feminist psychology's focus on liberation is not compatible with global struggles for decolonization, largely because of feminism's grounding in neo-colonial legacies,” she explains, underscoring the need for an alternative vision for human liberation, one emphasizing that the “struggle for liberation is one of global social justice, rather than the liberal quest for individual human rights.” In other words, a real appreciation for and acknowledgment of the striving for collective liberty—which, Bloom emphasizes, is not limited to women's rights, but to multiple ways of being human.

Bloom concluded her discussion by underscoring transnational feminism as a means of rethinking conventional notions of women's liberation, by imagining “new models of the person that attend to voices in majority world settings as a resource for more inclusive, relational, sustainable, and humane models [for all] (Kurtiș, 2015).”

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