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S. women’s movement and in academic feminist discourses. The painful splits created by these struggles forced the white feminist mainstream to turn its attention away from assertions of similarity and homogeneity to examinations of difference—“an uneven, divisive, and slow process of shifts” that remains incomplete in both theoretical and political terms (Kaplan 1994, 140). S. multiracial feminists continued to shake the epistemological ground on which Eurocentric feminist critique was raised and to erase the silences about the gulfs that divide women on the basis of race, class, and national positioning in the global relations between “sovereign” nation-states (Mohanty et al.

As some have indicated, marginal locations do not always indicate processes of exclusion (Liu 1998; see also K. Mitchell 1997a for critical readings of hybridity and diaspora). This demonstrates the need to move between metaphor and materiality when locating gendered subjects and articulating feminist politics. Some of the concerns of feminist political geography provide important entries into such an agenda. They provide ways of beginning to unravel the transformed set of gendered social and political relationships shaped by the ongoing process of globalization.

Jamila Jaffer noted, A lot of well-off Ithnasheri men are doing it and their homes have become battlefields. But where can their wives go with their complaints? The religious leaders themselves say that it’s okay to have two mut’as at the same time as you have a wife at home! (Interview, 31 July 1993) Working-class women such as Jamila felt that they could not publicly oppose mut’a because of their dependence on important men in the Jamaat. A similar fear was echoed by Rukhsana Banu, who lived in the Jamaat-run house for destitute widows.