Transnational feminisms and cosmopolitan feelings Maree Pardy Deakin University, Australia abstract article info Article history: Received 31 October 2016 Received in revised form 13 May 2017 Accepted 23 May 2017 Available online xxxx This article explores the feminist cosmopolitics of women's rights and solidarity campaigning, particularly those that focus on violence against women. I observe how in contrast to the mainstream theories of cosmopolitanism, feminist solidarity is an embodied cosmopolitics of emotion, affect and atmosphere. Emotion is an important reg- ister through which to examine feminist cosmopolitics: to not only demonstrate some of the successes and fail- ures of such politics, but also to suggest that its inclusion in cosmopolitan literature might enable sharper attention to the contradictions that continue to plague the political credentials of cosmopolitanism. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Classical cosmopolitanism, broadly conceived as a politics of world citizenship based on an ethic of openness and hospitality, posits shared humanity as the platform for building a more peaceful and sustainable world. Recent cosmopolitan scholarship takes place at a much lower level of abstraction, finding opportunities to engage diversity, explore difference and examine acts of political solidarity. Less encumbered by the utopian aspiration of founding a global cosmopolis, “new” cosmo- politanisms represent what Eduardo Mendieta (2009) casts as the move from “imperial to dialogic cosmopolitanism.” The claim here is that whereas Kantian cosmopolitanism both denies and dismisses its imperial origins, the recent grounded and reflective forms of “new” cos- mopolitanism reject Eurocentrism, and stress instead the mutual en- gagement and transformation of self and other through cosmopolitan encounter (Beck, 2006; Fine, 2003; Robbins, 1998; Werbner, 2008). “Critical cosmopolitanism” shares a similar impulse to reject a universalising cosmopolitan narrative and reminds that colonialism, empire, slavery, capitalism and war are its products (Delanty, 2006; Prakash, 2014; Schiller & Irving, 2014). Nonetheless, the essential con- tradictions of its European origins continue to haunt cosmopolitan the- ory and politics. Not withstanding the voluminous and burgeoning literature on cos- mopolitanism, I begin here by noting two serious absences from its oeu- vre. First, the peculiar absence of gender from cosmopolitan scholarship, even in the face of feminist global solidarity campaigns that resemble the kind of cosmopolitics that the new dialogic and critical approaches appear to advocate. Unlike cosmopolitanism, feminism has always been a project of both theory and political engagement. Cosmopolitan theorists therefore might have much to learn from analysing the trans- formations that have emerged through ongoing transnational feminist practice. Unlike cosmopolitanism, feminism's way of knowing, argues Ram (2006: 205) and is thus driven by an “existential urgency” (Ram, 2006: 206). Second, the politics and experience of emotions is also miss- ing from the literature, even though the sorts of openness and convivi- ality advocated by the new cosmopolitanists occur in a field of emotion. Feminist transnational practice has been subject to constant internal cri- tique and transformation and might be an example par excellence of the painful and emotional terrain that cosmopolitan politics and projects will face as they attempt to engage critically with current “plural and discrepant conditions” (Prakash, 2014). Stivens (2008) discusses the remarkable gender absences in this body of work, also noting the feminist wariness about adopting cosmo- politanism as a frame for their work: as she suggests “…[P]ainful de- bates within recent women's movements about the proper path to gender justice and rights offer many lessons for the theoretical, political and moral projects of cosmopolitanisms” (2008: 89). Niamh Reilly re- proaches the leading theorists of cosmopolitanism for a number of fail- ings: they rarely highlight the gendered power dynamics at play in their abstractions or propositions; they elide feminist critiques of globaliza- tion and theorizing on cosmopolitanism; and, probably most important- ly, in contrast to feminist movements, they largely avoid any discussion of the concrete global issues that their cosmopolitanism seeks to ad- dress (Reilly, 2007: 181). Building on these observations, I explore the feminist cosmopolitics of women's rights and solidarity campaigning, particularly those that focus on violence against women. I observe how, in contrast to mainstream theories of cosmopolitanism, feminist solidarity has presented as an engaged and embodied cosmopolitics of emotion, affect and atmosphere. 1 Emotion and affect, also the subject of an intellectual renaissance, are important registers through which to examine feminist cosmopolitics: to not only demonstrate some of the successes and failures of such politics, but also to suggest that its in- clusion in the cosmopolitanism literature might enable sharper Women's Studies International Forum xxx (2017) xxx–xxx E-mail address: maree.pardy@deakin.edu.au. 1 See Masumi (1987) for a discussion of the difference and relations between feeling, af- fect, sensation and emotion. WSIF-02029; No of Pages 8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.05.005 0277-5395/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif Please cite this article as: Pardy, M., Transnational feminisms and cosmopolitan feelings, Women's Studies International Forum (2017), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.05.005