Global feminism

Global feminism is a feminist theory closely aligned with post-colonial theory and postcolonial feminism. It concerns itself primarily with the forward movement of women's rights on a global scale. Using different historical lenses from the legacy of colonialism, global feminists adopt global causes and start movements which seek to dismantle what they argue are the currently predominant structures of global patriarchy. Global feminism is also known as world feminism and international feminism.

Two historical examples Global Feminists might use to expose patriarchal structures at work in colonized groups or societies are medieval Spain (late eleventh to thirteenth centuries) and nineteenth-century Cuba. The former example concerns women of the Mudejar communities of Islamic Spain and the strict sexual codes through which their social activity was regulated. Mudejar women could be sold into slavery as a result of sexual activity with a Christian man; this was to escape the deemed punishment accorded by the Sunnah, or Islamic law. Because of their simultaneous roles as upholding one's family honor and one of "conquered status and gender", "Mudejar women suffered double jeopardy in their sexual contact with Christians [in Spain]".

Nineteenth-century Cuba can be looked at as an example of colonialism and neocolonialism working together in a slave-based society to affect women's lives under patriarchy, where Cuba "remained a Spanish colony while enduring a neocolonial relationship with the United States". Havana, a city noted for its "absence of the female form", had, "of all the major cities in the West...the most strict social restrictions on the female portion of its population". Upper-class Cuban women were "a constant visual reminder of the separation between elite white society and the people of color they ruled".

Forced commitment to double shifts, struggle for individual autonomy, and blurring the private and public sphere of labor are all additional concerns to the primary issue for migrant women, which is the right to motherhood. The phenomena of motherhood in a transnational and contemporary time creates structural constraints for migrant women. Abusive employers and intimate violence is not the only problem these women have to face, but there are structural issues regarding the right to motherhood in this transnational era. Women immigrants leave their chance overseas at an idealized motherhood of watching their children grow up while performing their gender role, and deport to be the breadwinner. The restructuring of care from the effects of globalization and neoliberalism institutionalizes these women.

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