070045 UE Guided Reading Women's and Gender History (2022W)

"We should all be feminists", declared the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a lecture in the USA in 2013 - two years later, the text was distributed to all 16-year-old schoolgirls in Sweden. Women's movements argue and act transnationally - not only in the global media landscapes of the 21st century, but since the early feminist activism of the 19th century, which emerged, among other things, in the context of movements to abolish slavery. Yet despite their equality ethic, feminist movements are also riddled with economic inequality, cultural hierarchisation, (neo-)colonial exploitation and racism. So much so, for example, that the Pakistani-born human rights lawyer Rafia Zakaria recently declared that "white feminism" prevents equality and should therefore be fought on principle. How can historical scholarship approach these contradictions? How can the global spread, differences and conflicts surrounding the movements that have appeared in many languages under the label "feminism" since the early 20th century be adequately studied, and the interconnections of women's movements across the borders of languages, cultures and countries analysed? The related methodological questions are relevant not only for the history of women's movements, but of fundamental relevance for the analysis of transnational civil society spaces. The course will engage with recent historical accounts of feminism as a global movement through shared readings. The focus will be on the book 'Feminisms - a Global History' by Lucy Delap, published in 2020 and in German translation in 2022. In the course, we will not only analyse Delap's strategies for connecting different social and political spaces over a period of almost 200 years and her concept of a popular history of a political movement, but also contextualise her account with current feminist debates and with historical transnational histories of feminism.