This panel considers the usefulness of the global as a frame of analysis in the history of feminism and in feminist thinking, theorizing, activism, and teaching more broadly. The panelists present the varying critiques and insights that appear in a newly-published 40-essay anthology on global feminism. These essays cover feminism globally, locally, topically, and across time. Panelists examine the resulting view of North American feminism not as necessarily reflecting national or class interests but as a “mestiza phenomenon” based on multiple foundations and interests. When viewed by feminists from the Global South the very idea of revolution also metamorphoses into something entirely different from the standard views in the United States. In fact, as our panelists reflect, the disability movement finds new goals from its refusals of standard ideas of inclusion and incorporation (for example, into the medical-industrial complex), embracing instead Black abolitionist feminism and rejecting as well traditional classed and raced feminist view of rights. Moreover as working people’s feminism integrates sexual rights into its program it too appears transformed into a still other intersectional feminism. As these panelists’ contributions reveal, studying feminism globally uncovers fragmentations, pluralities, new boundaries, migrations, and disaggregations.

During the roundtable discussion, the audience and panelists will debate the value of the global when intertwined with the multiplicity it generates. Are global feminist solidarities and syntheses possible or even desirable and on what grounds would they be made? It appears that in light of global scholarship terms need redefinition and new affinity groups need to be formed. Our panelists discuss the possibility and desirability of such affinities or of the perpetuation of metissage or aggregation of any kind, especially in a world where the smoothing out of difference supports neoliberalism and its attendant oppressions or where those oppressions become disciplinary tools of population management. A further topic for discussion is whether there is an overall feminist dynamism that is lost in the particular or whether the global itself is so overpowering as to silence affinities—both “natural” and created. Our roundtable commentator, himself a scholar of sexuality and decolonization, will also help animate the discussion.