Globalization Feminism And Power

This thoroughly updated editionprovides a comprehensive overview of two centuries of transnational feminist efforts to produce a more just global order. Mary Hawkesworth explores how social, economic, and political inequalities between men and women of different races, classes, ethnicities, and nationalities have been transformed over two centuries of globalization. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, she demonstrates how women have forged international networks and alliances to address specific women’s issues beyond the borders of the nation-state, crafting policies to mitigate pressing abuses and devising alternatives to liberal and neo-liberal agendas. The book considers innovative feminist tactics to produce global change, carefully tracing the structural forces that constrain transnational feminist activism. Hawkesworth illuminates the complexity of feminist strategies to influence international agencies and foundations, national governments, and transnational NGOs. By providing critical new insights into the gendered nature of the global system and the gendered dynamics of international institutions and nation states, this work will be invaluable for all those engaged in the interdisciplinary fields of globalization studies and feminist studies.

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues. Transnational feminist perspectives have provided a unique outlook on women’s lives and have deepened our understanding of the gendered nature of global processes. Transnational Feminism in the United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national narratives and public discourses within the country itself. An innovative theoretical project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist thought, primarily through case studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully contributes to the field of Women’s Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and gender from a global perspective.

Globalization, Gender, and Media tackles the emergence of “sexy violence” imagery and the coalescence of the sexual and violent meanings in contemporary global mainstream news, television, film, and social media. Tuija Parikka analyzes how such imagery advances particular interpretations of globalization, and the role of gender in such projects. Cases range from serious news journalism and film to social media spectacles, brought under the umbrellas of media production, contents, and perception. These versatile cases introduce issues revealing the limits of Western freedom discourse in the social media; universalizing an idea of motherhood and ethnicity in news production; time, home, and class in the formation of global imbalances of power online and in reality TV; instability of sex and gender in discourses of rape and porn; politicizing majority-minority relations in the social media. Globalization, Gender, and Media emphasizes the need to consider the interconnectedness and material - discursive aspects of globalization and the reality of gender in the media.

The State will not protect us from gender violence. Our feminism must be anti-racist and decolonial, and must fight for everyone's safety

In a time of globalization, what does an inclusive feminist politics entail? This accessible volume addresses the key issues in, and most significant challenges for, contemporary transnational feminist politics and political theory. Ideal for courses in Gender and Globalization, Transnational Feminism and Feminist Theory.

Calling for inclusion and dialogue, these essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists stress the need to put into relation seemingly discrepant approaches to reality and to scholarship in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South and East/West divides. This diverse group of authors, who spent fourteen weeks working collaboratively, dispense with unity and seek instead to use dialogue and difference in their production of knowledge about effective political action. The dialogues materialized here among women's movements that have emerged within different contexts and cosmologies take feminisms' challenges to contemporary corporate globalization in new empirical and theoretical directions.

Feminism and Power: the Need for Critical Theory is a six-chapter manuscript which offers an important critique of “power feminism.” The latter, having produced such spinoffs as “grrrl power,” “choice,” “babe,” “lipstick,” and “stiletto” feminisms, encourages women to be strong, self-sufficient, feisty, and independent. While I have no argument with much of that tough-minded ideal, I ask whether this “brave new girl” doesn’t too readily acquiesce in a neo-liberal ideology whose underlying tenets derive from American rugged individualism. At its worst, this strain within Third Wave feminism contains no critique of capitalism, no distance on neoliberal theory, no effort to address the injustices contained in globalization’s asymmetries and the industrialized North’s exploitation of developing countries. Feminism and Power: the Need for Critical Theory therefore argues that the critical theories of Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida have much to offer feminism, and a feminist understanding of female empowerment. Its pages rely on Adorno’s assertion that it is only by allowing the sufferer to speak that we can unveil social truth rather than be duped by the bravado of victory culture. Similarly, it demonstrates how Derrida’s insistence on the trace, as well as the asymmetries of friendship and hospitality, lead feminism away from the perils of contented triumphalism. The book promotes listening as a paradigmatic feminist gesture, rather than always speaking up and out.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

From advertising to television and film, feminist media scholars have examined the changing nature of media representations form the 1990’s onwards in comparison to the 1950s in the UK and the US. Many debates focus on the current ambiguity surrounding media representations which are inserted within post-feminist texts that tend to equate female empowerment with choice, individualism and consumerism. This has occurred in a context where there have been some achievements in gender equality worldwide, with women occupying more spaces in the marketplace, business and government. In the last decades, Latin America has been through many changes. Inequality levels have been reduced and political trends have resulted in the election of female politicians throughout the continent, corresponding with a revival of gender politics and feminist movements. At the same time, however, countries like Brazil are still home to gender discrimination and inequality, with high levels of domestic violence towards women, low levels of political representation, a culture of machismo, and the enduring predominance of stereotypical gender representations in the media. Globalization, Gender Politics, and the Media looks at the correlation between gender inequality in society with media representations, situating the case of Brazil and Latin America within the global quest for gender justice. It emphasizes the need to equate material and economic concerns with the examination of the reproduction of values and beliefs on gender through cultural and media outlets. Questions that are asked include, how can the media better contribute to assist in gender development and nation-building? How can online platforms make a difference? What can be done within the mainstream media to advance women’s rights? What is understood by the myth of the “Brazilian woman,” and how does this connect to other notions of what the “Third World woman” is? Using a triangulation methodology, this book includes a small selection of interviews with experts from international organizations, politicians in Brazil, and bloggers, as well as a sample of media analysis of ads, commercials, posters, campaign material, and feminist blogs to examine the challenges that gender equality faces in this country and the ways in which the media can make a difference.