Nancy A. Naples - Womens Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics

ROUTLEDGE
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Published in 2002 by
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

Copyright 2002 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Womens activism and globalization: linking local struggles and transnational politics/edited by Nancy A.Naples and Manisha Desai.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93144-4ISBN 0-415-93145-2 (pbk.)
1. Women social reformers. 2. Women political activists. 3. Globalization.
I. Naples, Nancy A. II. Desai, Manisha.
HQ1236 .W596 2002
303.484-dc21 2001045728

ISBN 0-203-80069-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-80072-9 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-93145-2 (Print Edition)

THIS COLLECTION IS A RESULT OF COLLABORATION AMONG MANY SCHOLARS INTERested in documenting the diverse ways women in different parts of the world creatively and heroically face the challenges posed by the global economic and political changes associated with globalization. We include case studies of community-based, cross-national, regional, and transnational organizing to highlight the multiple sites in which women confront the oppressive features of the global expansion of capitalism and the neoliberal policies that support it. In choosing the chapters, we were primarily interested in identifying cases that demonstrate the intersection of the local, regional, and global dimensions of restructuring and resistance strategies. We take as our starting point the fact that globalization is a result of particular actions taken by identifiable actors, and that it lands in particular places. Rather than view globalization as something that occurs out there and that is therefore distant from the everyday lives and activities of particular actors, we seek to demonstrate how global economic and political change are manifest in the daily lives and struggles of women and other members of communities in different parts of the world in ways that are often hidden from view in analyses of globalization that start from the perspective of multinational corporations, transnational organizations, and international political institutions.

Our goal in this collection is to render visible the limits and possibilities of womens organizing in the context of globalization. Women in communities all around the world are fighting the negative effects of globalization and are using the transnational political stage to press for social, economic, environmental, and political justice. This collection documents effective organizing efforts in all of these realms. It also highlights the dilemmas of feminist praxis in the context of globalization. In this regard, it builds on coeditor Nancy Napless collection Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing across Race, Class, and Gender (1998), which emphasized womens community- based organizing in the United States with particular concern for cross-class and cross- race coalition-building efforts. This new collection is designed to reach beyond a specific national border and demonstrate how most local organizing campaigns are, in many ways, responses to broader social, economic, and political changes.

Space constraints prohibit us from including all of the case studies we have identified in the course of putting this book together. We would like to thank those authors who worked with us over the past two years, including those whose work we could not incorporate here. Our thanks also go out to University of California, Irvine, graduate student Trish Erwin for her editorial assistance. Our special thanks to Bandana Purkayastha, Mangala Subramaniam, Mary Bernstein, and Nicole Bennett who helped us think through an organization of the book. Nancy would also like to express her special thanks to students in her graduate seminar Postcolonial, Transnational Feminism, and Community Activism for their comments on earlier drafts of each of the chapters. We are grateful to Jill Bystydzienski and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an early draft of the book. Our special thanks to Kimberly Guinta for her valuable editorial assistance. We are most appreciative of the support given us by Ilene Kalish, our editor at Routledge, for all her work to make this collection a reality.

COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL CHANGE EFFORTS SEEM ALL TOO LIMITED WHEN PLACED up against the structures of inequality that shape the wider political and economic context. Global processes of economic restructuring are undermining unionization, job security, sustainability of communities and the environment, and social supports, especially those provided through the so-called welfare state. However, political activism designed to challenge the expansion of global inequality has generated worldwide attention, as evident in protests against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Toronto, and many non-Western locales that receive little if any media attention. Furthermore, community actions on behalf of progressive agendas remain salient features of local encounters with the state, with corporations, with employers, and with racist and sexist forces pervading many spheres of social life. This book seeks to make visible the relationship between local organizing efforts and global economic restructuring as well to highlight the contradictions of transnational feminist politics.

Much of the literature on globalization concentrates on the broader economic, social, and political dimensions of contemporary global changes and neglects the ways in which these changes reshape the everyday lives of women in different parts of the world, except to highlight the increased participation of women in the labor force and the feminization of poverty among other dimensions of womens economic oppression. The case studies presented in this book demonstrate the diverse ways women respond to these powerful forces as well as how their activism can pose challenges to the scattered hegemonies (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) associated with the global expansion of capitalism. While transnational organizing has a long feminist history that the contemporary emphasis on globalization might obscure, processes associated with globalization are changing the terms of feminist politics (Krause 1996, 225). As Mary Meyer and Elisabeth Prgl (1999) observe in the introduction to their edited collection Gender Politics in Global Governance, international economic and political crises destabilize entrenched institutions, including institutions of gender, thus opening up opportunities for emancipatory politics (16).