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foreword from the panel ‘creating collectivities/doing transnational politics’, ESF 2004 (London) This paper was presented by our international corresponding editor from Dhaka, Firdous Azim, when she participated in the panel Creating Collectivities/Doing Transnational Politics at the European Social Forum on 16 November 2004. Her contribution is incredibly significant to the dialogue Feminist Review seeks across borders, globally. The panel was organised by Feminist Review in collaboration with Scovegno (Italy), NextGenderation London, the Turino SambaBand and the BSA Race Forum. It included people and groups who were already working or starting to work with each other. The event was an opportunity to ‘think’ together about creating collectivities/ doing transnational politics. The two words transnational and collective are often ‘doused in syrup’, they are often mentioned as good words and good ways of working. The discussions reflected on – What is the substance of local and transnational collectivities? What is their mood and how are they created? Why is the transnational sought? How do our local ways of organizing and connecting mediate these global relations? Within this there is a need to acknowledge and work with the ‘fragility’ and ‘precariousness’ of the collective. Nirmal Puwar

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feminist review 80 2005 c 2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com (194–197)

Women’s movements in countries such as Bangladesh can be seen to operate within a cleft stick – under the shadow of a growing Islamization, on the one hand, and under Western eyes on the other. Women’s movements have to grapple with issues such as violence, women’s subordination, the special religious strictures on women, as well as social practices that keep women in a position of subservience. As women highlight incidences of dowry death or acid-throwing, or of women being stoned to death, the Western representation of eastern or ‘Islamic’ societies as backward and barbaric seems to be vindicated. At the same time, feminists are branded as Western within their own societies, and as complicit with the Western stereotyping of women from ‘Islamic’ and ‘third world’ countries. The case of Taslima Nasreen immediately comes to mind in this context. She has been celebrated in the west as a brave lone voice who has protested against Islamic strictures on women, and who has had to pay the price of exile as a result. Within Bangladesh, extreme religious groups have not surprisingly castigated Taslima Nasreen as a woman who has gone against her own religion and people. But what has been surprising is that other writers or women’s groups have not championed her cause either. It seems that she was seen to be somehow complicit with the prevalent Islam-bashing. The feminist task is indeed very difficult – to constantly hold the critical mirror upto social inequities which keep gender discrimination in place, but not to fall into the global vilification that Muslim cultures and so-called backward cultures are subject to. Feminist and nati