Interrogating the Selective Plot of Women’s Rights Solidarity

Tuesday, October 28, 6:00-8:00pm. DePaul University—Lincoln Park Campus, Levan Center, Room 100.

About the talk: Dr. Minoo Moallem interrogates the contested terrain of women’s rights solidarity, analyzing how hegemonic frameworks have historically privileged specific subjects while marginalizing others. Drawing on critiques of feminist oppositional consciousness, the problematic notion of “Global Sisterhood,” and transnational feminist engagements with gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and nation, this work highlights how selective solidarities obscure geopolitical hierarchies and foreclose questions of sovereignty. Using Maria Agustin’s concept of the “rescue industry,” and selective notions of solidarity, Moallem illustrates, through a few examples from our current context, how the reference to women as universal victims of patriarchy embeds solidarity by reinvesting in a logic of “sisterhood in victimization.” In response to hegemonic narratives of victimhood and rescue, which are increasingly being recuperated by both neoliberal and conservative women’s rights advocates, the paper calls for reconceptualizing feminist solidarity as relational, situated, and transformative. It advances practices attentive to multiplicity, contradiction, asymmetry, and the power relations that shape struggles within “the colonial present.”

About Dr. Minoo Moallem: Minoo Moallem is a Gender & Women's Studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the director of the Iranian Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the director of the Media Studies Program from 2017 to 2023, and the department chair from 2010 to 2012. She is the co-editor of Fatema Mernissi for Our Times( with Paola Bachetta) (Syracuse University Press, 2025)(2025, Syracuse University Press). She is the author of Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge, 2018). Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, (the University of California Press, 2005 ), and the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and The State, Duke University Press, 1999. She is the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on Iranian Immigrants, Exiles, and Refugees.Professor Moallem is currently working on the following projects: a co-edited anthology entitled Fatima Mernissi For Our Times (Forthcoming in Spring 2025 from Syracuse University Press). A book manuscript provisionally entitled Filmic Archive, National Memory, and Iran-Iraq War Movies; a research project on Woven connectivities and Ecological Imagination; and another project on Gender and The Politics of Petroleum. Professor Moallem is affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Berkeley Center for New Media; Center for the Study of Race and Gender, Science, Technology and Society Center, Department of Near Eastern Studies; Blum Center for Developing Economies; Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies; Folklore Graduate Group, Graduate Group in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and Center for New Racial Studies, A Multi-Campus Research Program.