In a gender and women’s studies class I took last semester, we read about migrant domestic workers — women from the Global South who leave their families to clean other people’s homes across the world. It was one of my favorite readings all semester. But when we started discussing it, I felt like my classmates had read an entirely different article than I had.
My classmates described their households as relatively equal, called uneven domestic labor distribution interesting and noted that being a “trad wife” is basically a privilege nowadays because they have the choice to not work. I was stunned. We had just read about women who cross oceans not because they chose to, but because the alternative was worse. Nobody bothered to connect the discussion to the stories we had just read, so I said it myself: Not everyone has the privilege of choice. For most women in this world, the options are to stay home without pay or leave home to become someone else’s underpaid servant.
This was not a one-time thing. I’ve encountered it across campuses, and international friends have described similar experiences. In our classes, women from the Global South get read and sympathized with; then, when the conversation begins, they are left behind. Their stories become a brief roadblock for students on the way back to more familiar ground. We leave class, and the awareness of experiences beyond our own fades.
The disappearance points to something structural. Feminist discourse at the 5Cs largely lacks a transnational perspective: The recognition that women’s lives are shaped by forces that do not stop at national borders and that a feminist framework that only sees one correct answer to liberation will exclude most of the world’s women.
Understanding the person you are reading about and seeing her within her own context is what makes feminist discourse valuable, and is something we have the responsibility to work toward. Without this practice, feminism becomes an empty conversation about liberation that only a fraction of the world’s women can hear themselves in.
In retrospect, what strikes me is not that my classmates lacked empathy. Rather, it is that they did not notice the gap in their own understanding — they failed to realize that other women could have experiences of oppression fundamentally different from their own. Growing up in a particular environment naturally shapes your perspective, but that does not mean it has to be your only perspective. We had the material right in front of us and still, the women we had just read about disappeared as the discussion began.
Coming from the Global South myself, I experience feminism very differently. Being called a feminist back home was closer to an accusation than an identity. Feminism implies something disruptive and unwelcome, something worth insulting someone over. Finding people back home who shared that commitment genuinely meant something to me, as nobody fakes being a feminist for reputation.
When I follow news about feminist movements in Iran, I feel something that I rarely feel in classrooms here. Not because our experiences are identical, but because women from the Global South share something with each other that cuts across our differences: a history of being cast as those who need saving and those who are behind. That shared position is structural, and it is exactly what gets lost in feminist studies at the 5Cs.
Within the transnational framework, feminism cannot be understood in isolation from global systems of power because these forces shape women’s lives differently across locations and histories. This framework challenges mainstream Western feminist discourse that treats its own frameworks as universally applicable or insists that non-Western women lack agency, knowledge and forms of resistance. There is no single valid or correct way to be a liberated woman. The goal of feminist work is not to interpret women from afar, but to work in ways that acknowledge women’s ability to see themselves as experts of their own experiences.
Without genuinely engaging with the lived experiences of women different from us, campus feminist discourse risks becoming something that celebrates empowerment in the abstract. It speaks to the small fraction of the world’s women whose lives happen to resemble the model of liberation that Western feminism already imagines, while leaving those who do not fit that model behind. What gets lost is not just academic complexity; it is accountability. Feminist politics in places like the 5Cs must be shaped by global powers and contexts, because the influence of our discourse will eventually escape these campuses as we leave them and enter the real world.
At the 5Cs, accountability can begin in the classroom. When you read about women from the Global South, or any women who have experiences different from your own, read with effort to understand where she is coming from — not to compare her life to your own, but to let her reality be unfamiliar and recognize the difference without rushing to explain it. When a conversation turns to women’s experiences, correct your instinct to reach for frameworks built on Western assumptions. When someone in the room starts talking about what it means to be a woman in a place you have never been, engage with her experiences: nod, make space, let her finish.
These female experiences belong in the conversation, not as background context, but as knowledge that is important to the feminist challenge as a whole.
The next time a woman in the room talks about what it means to be a feminist in China, let her finish — what she is describing is not an exception to feminist discourse, but a part of it.
Catarina Shi SC ’29 is very grateful to no longer be in high school.
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