The Feminization of Globalization

Abstract

Research and teaching about globalization verges on disciplinary status. In this, the contemporary position of global studies (and globalism) is not unlike that of postcolonial studies in the 1970s. As with that earlier field of inquiry, the study of globalization has come under considerable pressure from critics both friendly and antagonistic toward its foundational claims. contention that globalization represents the decline of the nation-state, for example, was no sooner offered as axiomatic than it was targeted for critique.' Likewise, commentators have had serious questions about the stipulation that contemporary migrancy is of revolutionary scale and scope.2 As the study of globalization spawns the study of globalization studies, it has become clear that there is a good deal to ask of this incipient field. In this article, I consider some of the criteria used to identify and evaluate the newness of recent geopolitical trends. Specifically, I interrogate the rhetorical utility of using the fate of the world's as a measuring stick for historical change. For any number of scholars and critics, the novelty of globalization must be articulated to gender. To Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the question the new diasporas quite new? has only one answer: The only significant difference is the use, abuse, participation, and role of women (92). Writing in the disciplinary vernacular of development, Amartya Sen makes a related claim: Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic and social participation and leadership of women (203). For Arjun Appadurai, the fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which money, commodities, and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, is symbolized by the young women of the sex trade who, barely competent in Bombay's metropolitan glitz, come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes (38). And Barbara Ehrenreich goes