The Unhappy Marriage between Gender and Globalisation

Abstract

This article examines the rather awkward relationship between gender and globalisation. In particular, within development studies, doubts and confusion with respect to the coherence and interpretation of gender as a concept underlie this uneasy relationship. We demonstrate how persistent orthodoxies and dichotomous thinking characterise the unhappy marriage between gender and globalisation. Instead of doing away with gender, we elaborate a multidimensional gender approach, which is much needed from a scientific perspective as well as to enhance the political potential of feminist positions and analyses. Our approach situates gender within the global/local nexus; this is illustrated by a case study of gender and political representation in Mexico.

Notes

1 C Freeman, ‘Is local:global as feminine:masculine? Rethinking the gender of globalization’, Signs, 26(4), 2001, p 1007.

2 A Cornwall, E Harrison & A Whitehead, ‘Gender myths and feminist fables: the struggle for interpretative power in gender and development’, Development and Change, 38 (1), 2007, pp 1–20.

3 Ibid, p 17.

4 P Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p 169.

5 Cornwall et al, ‘Gender myths and feminist fables’.

6 Cf A Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality, London: Duke University Press, 1999; KA Chang & LHM Ling, ‘Globalization and its intimate other: Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong’, in MH Marchand & AS Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances, London: Routledge, 2000, pp 27–43.

7 C Wichterich, The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality, London: Zed Books, 2000.

8 S Rowbotham & S Linkogle, ‘Introduction’, in Rowbotham & Linkogle (eds), Women Resist Globalization, London: Zed Books, 2001, pp 1–12.

9 M Molyneux, Change and Continuity in Social Protection in Latin America: Mothers at the Service of the State?, Gender and Development Programme paper no 1, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, May 2007.

10 S Chant, Gender, Generation and Poverty: Exploring the ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007; and M Medeiros & J Costa, ‘Is there a feminization of poverty in Latin America?’, World Development, 36 (1), 2008, pp 115–127.

11 C Jackson, ‘Resolving risk? Marriage and creative conjugality’, Development and Change, 38 (1), 2007, pp 108–109. These intersections, though, are largely silenced in research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (ifpri) and the World Bank, according to Jackson. These development institutes are important stakeholders in the persistence of the feminisation of poverty thesis.

12 T Davids & F van Driel, ‘Globalization and gender: beyond dichotomies’, in FJ Schuurman (ed), Globalization and Development Studies: Challenges for the 21st Century, London: Sage, 2001, pp 153–177.

13 Cf E Rathgeber, ‘wid, wad, gad: trends in research and practice’, Journal of Development Areas, 24 (4), 1990, pp 489–502; and I Tinker, ‘The making of a field: advocates, practitioners, and scholars’, in Tinker (ed), Persistent Inequalities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp 27–53.

14 C Pateman, The Disorder of Women, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989, p 2.

15 HL Moore, ‘Global anxieties’, Anthropological Theory, 4 (1), 2004, pp 71–88.

16 See also Freeman, ‘Is local:global as feminine:masculine?’.

17 JH Bayes, ME Hawkesworth & RM Kelly, ‘Globalization, democratization and gender regimes’, in RM Kelley, JH Bayes, ME Hawkesworth & B Young (eds), Gender, Globalization and Democratization, Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, p 3.

18 CT Mohanty, ‘“Under western eyes” revisited: feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles’, Signs, 28 (2), 2002, pp 528–529.

19 Ibid, p 525.

20 Ibid, p 528.

21 See H Afshar & S Barrientos, ‘Introduction: women, globalization and fragmentation’, in Afshar & Barrientos (eds), Women, Globalization and Fragmentation in the Developing World, London: Macmillan Press, 1999, pp 1–17; MH Marchand & AS Runyan, ‘Introduction: feminist insights of global restructuring: conceptualizations and reconceptualizations’, in Marchand & Runyan, Gender and Global Restructuring, pp 1–22; and B Young, ‘Globalization and gender: a European perspective’, in Kelly et al, Gender, Globalization and Democratization, pp 27–47.

22 J Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Globalization and culture: three paradigms’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31 (23), 1996, pp 1389–1393; A Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, in M Featherstone (ed), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage, 1999, pp 295–310; U Hannerz, ‘The world in creolization’, Africa, 57 (4), 1987, pp 546–559; and P Geschiere & B Meyer, ‘Globalization and identity: dialectics of flows and closures—introduction’, Development and Change, 29 (4), 1998, pp 601–615.

23 Here we follow Giddens and Held et al in defining modernity as an epoch, rather than restricting it to a particular period set by specific dates of specific developments, for instance the Industrial Revolution. The time–space distantiation that characterices this modern epoch has to be considered as the effect of the intersection of different key institutions of modernity, among which are standardisation, rationalisation, capitalism, militarisation, and the installation of the nation-state. A Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, London: Polity Press, 1990; and D Held, A McGrew, D Goldblatt & J Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. See also J Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

24 See the contributions in T Davids & F van Driel (eds), The Gender Question in Globalization: Changing Perspectives and Practices, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

25 J Comaroff & J Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992, p xiii.

26 See also A Tsing, ‘The global situation’, Cultural Anthropology, 15 (3), 2000, pp 327–360.

27 DL Hodgson, ‘Of modernity/modernities, gender, and ethnography’, in Hodgson (ed), Gendered Modernities and Ethnographic Perspectives, New York: Palgrave, 2001, p 7; and B Larkin, ‘Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities’, Africa, 67 (3), 1997, pp 406–440.

28 F Anthias, ‘Belongings in a globalising and unequal world: rethinking translocations’, in N Yuval-Davis, K Kannabiran & U Vieten (eds), The Situated Politics of Belonging, London: Sage, 2006, pp 17–31.

29 A Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

30 Freeman, ‘Is local:global as feminine:masculine?’, p 1013.

31 T Davids & F van Driel, ‘Changing perspectives’, in Davids & van Driel, The Gender Question in Globalization, pp 3–22.

32 The gender lens is inspired and based on the work of S Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, London: Cornell University Press, 1986; JW Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category for historical analysis’, in Scott (ed), Feminism and History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp 152–183.; CT Mohanty, ‘Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, in CT Mohanty, A Russo & L Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp 51–80; HL Moore, A Passion for Difference, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994; and R Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

33 N Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and feminist politics’, European Journal of Women's Studies, 13 (3), 2006, pp 193–209.

34 JW Scott, ‘Feminist reverberations’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13 (3), 2003, pp 1–23.

35 N Craske, ‘Ambiguities and ambivalences in making the nation: women and politics in 20th-century Mexico’, Feminist Review, 79 (1), 2005, pp 116–133.

36 Anne Marie Goetz also points out different political and policy arrangements that thrive on the gender-related assumption that women are less corrupt than men, connected to their traditional roles as wives and mothers, reaching mythical proportions. She mentions for example the announcement by the Mexican Customs Service in 2003 that its new crack force of anti-corruption officers on land and sea borders would be entirely female. AM Goetz, ‘Women as the new anti-corruption force?’, Development and Change, 38 (1), 2007, pp 87–105.

37 T Davids, ‘Political representation and the ambiguity of Mexican motherhood’, in Davids & van Driel, The Gender Question in Globalization, pp 179–197.

38 Cornwall et al, ‘Gender myths and feminist fables’.