From Beijing 1995 to the Hague 2006-The Transnational Activism of the Dalit Women's Movement presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Conference in Vancouver, BC, June 3-6, 2008

Abstract

Recently, Manisha Desai asserted that “transnational feminist practices have become the dominant modality of feminist movements across the world, since the Fourth Women’s World Conference in Beijing.” In this paper I shall argue that transnational activism has played a significant role in shaping the activism and the organizational formation of the Dalit (formerly untouchables) Women’s movement (DWM) of India. The DWM first took specific organizational form with the creation of the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW) one month prior to the UN Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing. Since then the DWM and NFDW have taken advantage of a wide range of international and global venues to demand recognition of their oppression, identity and rights as citizens including World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban in September 2001, the World Social Forum, and the International Conference on the Human Rights of Dalit Women held at the Hague in November 2006. All this to pressure the government of India to live up to international norms in human rights. I will use an intersectional gender-caste-class analysis to reveal the various forms of power that oppress Dalit women. I will stress how recent UN decisions have served to re-map caste as race in terms of discrimination based on work and descent thus facilitating solidarity between the Dalit women of India and other similarly situated women in Asia and Africa. This paper builds on my recent research on the transnational politics of the Dalit movement (forthcoming Globalizations January 2008)