Gender and Global Restructuring

Sightings, Sites and Resistances

Marianne H. Marchand, Anne Sisson Runyan, Marianne H. Marchand, Anne Sisson Runyan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135970772
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

In this new edition of this best selling text, interdisciplinary feminist experts from around the world provide new analyses of the ongoing relationship between gender and neoliberal globalization under the new imperialism in the post-9/11 context.

Divided into Sightings, Sites and Resistances, this book examines:

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• the disciplining politics of race, sexuality and modernity under securitized globalization, including case studies on domestic workers in Hong Kong
• heteronormative development policies and responses to the crisis of social reproduction and colonizing responses to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa
• migration, human rights and citizenship, including studies on remittances, the emergence of neoliberal subjectivities among rural Mexican women, Filipina migrant workers and women's labor organizing in the Middle East and North Africa
• feminist resistance, incorporating the latest scholarship on transnational feminism and feminist critical globalization movement activism, including case studies on men's violence on the Mexico/US border, pan-indigenous women's movements and cyberfeminism.

Providing a coherent and challenging approach to the issues of gender and the processes of globalization in the new millennium, this important text will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE, international relations, economics, development and gender studies.

Part I
Sightings

How do feminist postcolonial, poststructural, critical, and queer lenses alter our vision of conventional accounts and permutations of “globalization” (or “empire”) and move us to more complex understandings of global restructuring? How are gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality shaped by ever-shifting global restructuring, and how is global restructuring shaped by these ever-shifting constructs? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this first set of contributions by Kimberly Chang and L.H.M. Ling (Chapter 1), Amy Lind (Chapter 2), Suzanne Bergeron (Chapter 3), and Michelle Rowley (Chapter 4). They take on differing but connected aspects of the restructuring of identities, agencies, structures, and policies. These “sightings” speak especially to the politics of race and sexuality and the latest manipulations of tradition and modernity at this juncture in the global restructuring process. It is no accident that postcolonial (or antiracist) and sexuality analyses are taking center stage in contemporary feminist readings of globalization and empire. On the one hand, new, potentially more liberating gender and sexuality subjectivities have been made possible by the destabilizations of traditional family forms by capital and labor migrations, but these also are either bound up in the production of neoliberal subjectivities that serve capital or disciplined by the state through appeals to tradition. On the other hand, the erosion of the neoliberal Washington Consensus forged during the late 1980s in the face of failing economies and the crisis of social reproduction was shored up by the introduction of the “new imperialism” (Harvey 2003) in the new millennium, which has heavily relied on the coercive force of the (US) state to exact the more “primitive” form of “accumulation through dispossession.” This has played and preyed much more on fear of the racialized “other,” requiring more overt, but nevertheless normalizing, racist and colonial discourses and practices to sustain capital accumulation.

In Chapter 1, the only reprinted piece from the first volume, Chang and Ling contest, through a gender lens, the universality of features usually ascribed to globalization in neoliberal and some structuralist accounts, particularly during the 1990s but enduring into the new millennium. These include the total integration of high technology, finance, and production; the complete “hollowing out” of states; the full embrace of liberal capitalism; and the omnipresence of postmodern individualism. They argue that these features are representative only of certain male-dominated sectors of the global political economy and the Western masculinist ideologies and identities that both arise from and reproduce them. They go on to reveal that this dominant, masculinist construction of globalization, depicted as a thorough-going process that is variously cosmopolitan, postmodern, or “freeing” in nature (and which they label “Global restructuring I” or “technomuscular capitalism” (TMC)), not only hides, but also rests upon another kind of globalization. What they label “Global restructuring II” or “regimes of labor intimacy” (RLI) is the low-wage and highly sexualized and racialized labor done largely by women workers in the Global South, which serves the cosmopolitanites of TMC and is enforced by still quite potent modernist and traditional forces of the state, culture, religion, and family. They refer to this underside of global restructuring as its “intimate other.” In Chang and Ling’s analysis, it is the lives of Filipina maids in Hong Kong that inform this very different picture of global restructuring. Although these women have crossed borders to work, they are still entrapped in old and new webs of oppression and exploitation which demand that they conform to traditional gender roles and identities that limit their agency. Nonetheless, Chang and Ling do provide some examples of their resistance, including developing same-sex relationships with each other while abroad to form relationships and express sexuality in comparatively safer spaces. However, most of these women’s strategies, including transgressive ones, still largely constitute coping strategies that offer only momentary escapes from, on the one hand, the relentless gendered and heteronormative messages from their home country for them to chastely serve God, country, and family, and, on the other hand, the racist and heterosexist expectations of wealthy employers in the host country for them to be subservient, but also hetero-sexually available. Thus, viewed from and through RLI, global restructuring is far from “freeing” for most (especially women in the Global South). Nor does it represent a significant dissolution of modern hierarchies and boundaries or traditional structures and ideologies. Rather, it often exacerbates them.

The analysis of globalization’s “intimate other” shifts to neoliberal globalization’s “governance of intimacy” in Chapter 2 by Amy Lind. According to Lind, the paucity of queer perspectives on globalization contributes to the general non-recognition of sexual minorities in the Global South in most globalization and development literature. This is a result of the hetero-normativity built into globalization and development thinking and discourses, including some feminist approaches-a heteronormativity which also rests on racist and classist assumptions that sexual minority practices and identities are only possible in modern, Northern/Western, and relatively privileged contexts. The results of this (racist and classist) heteronormativity include the enactment of neoliberal development policies that either ignore (and, therefore, withhold support for) same-sex households and women in lesbian relationships, who are seen as non-reproductive (even when they are mothers), or target gay men (often through coercive development interventions) for the threat of HIV/AIDS they are perceived to represent. At the same time, such policies seek to reinforce “good” heterosexual relationships as the development solution, urging women to “work harder” in the “productive” economy and men to “love” their women “better” by shoulder-ing more reproductive tasks and ceasing domestic violence in order to release women to enter the labor market. While Lind identifies a range of queer movements at local and global levels that are resisting these heteronormative sins of omission and commission, she acknowledges that globalization is also implicated in enabling their new visibility and transnational activism. She also points to the overhang of Orientalism present in some (white) gay male tourism practices that exoticize sexual minorities in the Global South for Northern sexual consumption. Such practices make it more difficult to forge North/South Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer (LGBTQ) alliances, but there are many avenues open for research and activism to connect the production of queer sexual subjectivities and sexual minority resistances to global restructuring.

The shift to the “governance of intimacy” by the World Bank through its new-found recognition of the crisis of social reproduction is the subject of Chapter 3 by Suzanne Bergeron. While this shift, and the concomitant shift in mainstream economic theories that take the gender question seriously in household bargaining models, is, in some sense, laudable and partly the result of feminist agitation, Bergeron argues that these new hegemonic economic theories nevertheless are “performative” of neoliberal “imperatives.” These imperatives entail the (intensification of the) privatization of social reproduction through re-engineering (assumed heterosexual) households and the subjectivities of individuals within them in such a way that men will take on more “caring” tasks within the household to release women for market production, which, in turn, will give them more leverage in the household to insist on more private realm labor from men. Like Lind, Bergeron points to the problematics of heteronormative assumptions about poor households upon which this privatized solution rests, especially in light of the vast numbers of female-headed households. But even more problematic is the insidious assumption that “the problem of care can be resolved through self-management in the private realm of the household” at no public cost and with no public responsibility, thereby enabling even more primitive accumulation by dispossession. The silver lining is that, despite the normative power of this neoliberal economic thought, the contradictions to it “on the ground” reveal its weaknesses both as a method of social re-engineering and as a purported solution to gender inequity, impoverishment, and the crisis of social reproduction it produces.

Michelle Rowley, in Chapter 4, questions what she sees as the ersatz intimacy set up between “African” AIDS sufferers and “hip” and supposedly socially-conscious, young Western consumers by corporatized celebrity philanthropy campaigns orchestrated particularly by pop-star Bono. She sees a fundamental contradiction in the ways such campaigns, which raise money for HIV/AIDS drugs through selling logoed paraphernalia, especially on US college campuses, displace any knowledge of the “laboring bodies in pain” in the Global South who produce these paraphernalia for the corporations involved with these campaigns. These invisible subjects are put at risk of HIV/ AIDS and other diseases as a result of an impoverishing global production regime, in favor of creating fanciful spectacles of the power of private philanthropy to save “Africans” through Western consumption. In the process, consumers are led to believe that they have a direct and socially conscious relationship to those who live under the sign of “Africa,” which is rendered homogeneous, relatively faceless and bodiless, and, thus, sanitized for Western and corporatized philanthropic consumption.

Rowley contrasts this image production and the fallacious intimacy (and false sense of “development”) it generates with the work of Malian film director Abderrahmane Sissako in his film, Bamako. Here, the reader (or viewer) is transported into a much more complicated and critical reading of the relationship between the local and global, one which shows how intimate lives and locales are bound up with and resist the neoliberal imperatives of IFIs. As the film chronicles a trial against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) set in a domestic compound in a Malian village, “we” see and hear “laboring bodies in pain” (no longer faceless or mute) who bear witness to the crimes of globalization in the midst of everyday life made much harder by those crimes. These characters, thereby, defy abstract and instrumentalist representations and appropriations of their lives, and reveal how familial and community intimacies and empathies are actually attenuated by global restructuring. This exposes both the mythology and the actual destructiveness of Western “intimacy” with the “other” through corporatized and celebrity-driven philanthropy.

Thus, taken as a whole, the contributions in Part I cause us to rethink the relationship between the “intimate” and the “global” in recent phases of global restructuring, revealing how essential biopolitics is to the restructuring process. As Pratt and Rosner argue, feminist inquiry is uniquely oriented to reveal the false dichotomy between the “intimate” and the “global” in that “global forces penetrate and haunt the intimate spaces of our psyches and bodies in ways that we can only intimate, and there is no territorial defense of privacy or domesticity that protects the intimate from the global” (2006: 18). When feminists lose sight of this, they can become unwitting partners in the destructive aspects of neoliberal restructuring. By the same token, the “intimate,” particularly in its heteronormative form, is deployed globally as a “‘sentimental politics’…a fantasy that displaces notions of justice and prepares the way for a geopolitics of love and hate, home and danger” (Pratt and Rosner 2006: 19), and a global economy based on primitive capital accumulation through privatization done in the name of “care” and affectivity. This is why it is so important for feminists to continue to critique and to “queer” dominant constructions of the intimate to make it less available for global (and national) deployments. Recognizing the intimacy between the global and the intimate offers continued openings for resistance.

1
Globalization and its intimate other

Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong

Kimberly A. Chang and L.H.M. Ling

Introduction

At least two processes of globalization or global restructuring operate in the world political economy today. One reflects a glitzy, internet-surfing, structurally integrated world of global finance, production, trade, and telecommunications. Populated primarily by men at its top rungs of decision-making, this global restructuring valorizes all those norms and practices usually associated with Western capitalist masculinity – “deregulation,” “privatization,” “strategic alliances,” “core regions,” “deadlands” – but masked as global or universal. Like the colonial rhetoric of old, it claims to subsume all local cultures under a global umbrella of aggressive market competition – only now with technology driving the latest stage of capitalism. We refer to this global restructuring as “technomuscular” capitalism (TMC).¹

There is a second process of global restructuring. It is more explicitly sexualized, racialized, and class-based than TMC and concentrates on low-wage, low-skilled menial service provided by mostly female migrant workers. They perform intimate, household services: e.g. caring for the young and elderly, cleaning house, washing clothes, preparing food, and generally providing domestic comfort and care. This service economy involves other intimacies as well: leaving home, living among strangers, facing sexual harassment and abuse, making moral choices. We refer to this second global restructuring as a “regime of labor intimacy” (RLI). It is, in every sense, an intimate other to TMC.

Filipina migrant workers in Hong Kong stand at the nexus of these two globalization processes.² They inhabit the RLI needed and created by TMC. These women work at low-wage, low- to semi-skilled jobs as nannies, nurses, maids, entertainers, and/or hostesses to the upwardly mobile, technically linked, high-salaried cosmopolitans of TMC. While they can earn up to six times what they would make at home, Filipina domestic workers often find themselves incarcerated within this regime of “labor intimacy.” Sending and receiving states promise them wealth and mobility through domestic work, but deliver instead a sentence of sexualized, racialized service. In this way, the twin processes of globalization exacerbate a growing gap between cosmopolitans and those who toil in the intimacy of their homes.

In this chapter, we ask: Why are certain segments of the world population geared towards the high-tech, high-wage world of TMC, while others are assigned to a low-tech, low-wage RLI? How do these different positionings within a globalized political economy affect subjectivity in general, and that of the subaltern woman, in particular? And what implications can we draw about the nature of global restructuring as it polarizes TMC from labor intimacy even while sustaining both?

We rely on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Kimberly Chang and Julian Groves (2000) on Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997. Their research includes various media sources on the Filipina migrant community from both the Hong Kong press and Filipino publications. One such source, Tinig Filipino, is published by and for the Filipino migrant community overseas. We conclude w...