15
Several scholars have shown the ways in which transnational networks of culture
and social activism may provide a degree of autonomy to local actors as they confront
problems and power relations within their society.
30
In this presentation, I have also
talked about the ways in which new transnational methods of organizing, as well as
global cultural flows, give Cuban women new means to challenge stereotypical and
debasing images of women in the media, advertising, and in popular culture. Although
networks of international solidarity have been strong throughout the years of the Cuban
revolution, they have mostly been initiated by state-led organizations such as the FMC.
The new tendencies generated by contemporary globalization offer genuine possibilities
for creating networks between feminist activists from the ground up, the kinds of
“transnationalism-from-below” movements that scholars have begun to theorize.
31
It also
seems that at this particular moment there may be more options for women to sustain
alternative channels of social activism through film, popular culture, and the arts.
Following the kind of flexibility that scholars have noted in the global market economy,
feminist activists seem to display a corresponding ability to build dialogic networks to
achieve strategic aims, shifting their focus to other means of organizing when certain
ones become exhausted or dissolved by the state.
30
See, for instance, Arjun Appadurai (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,”
Public Culture 2(2):1-24; Paul Gilroy (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Routledge, London.
31
See the volume edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (1998), Transnationalism
From Below, Transaction Publishers, New Jersey.
Convention