Global Gender Research

Transnational Perspectives

Christine Bose, Minjeong Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136083549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

Readers of Global Gender Research will learn to compare and contrast feminist concerns globally, gain familiarity with the breadth of gender research, and understand the national contexts that produced it.

This volume provides an in-depth comparative picture of the current state of feminist sociological gender and women's studies research in four regions of the world—Africa, Asia, Latin America/the Caribbean, and Europe—as represented by many countries. The introductory essay to each region explains how social science research on women and/or gender issues has been shaped by economics, politics, and culture, and by trends that are simultaneously local, regional, and global. It familiarizes readers with the wide range of salient issues, research methods, writing styles, and leading authors from around the globe.

Each regional section includes several chapters on gender research in specific countries that represent the region's diversity and cover the major theoretical and empirical trends that have emerged over time, as well as the relationship of key research questions to feminist activism and women's or gender studies. Next, the editors illustrate this new wave of gender scholarship with translated/reprinted samples of research articles from additional countries in the region, that cover a wide range of important global topics—such as work, sexuality, masculinities, childcare and family issues, religion, violence, law and gender policies. Finally, this volume provides scholars with extensive bibliographies and a listing of web sites for women's and gender research centers in 85 countries.

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Transnational and Local Issues

Christine E. Bose and Minjeong Kim

Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives presents transnational and local views of social science gender and women's studies research by analyzing the historical, economic and political trends that shape the trajectory of these investigations around the world. We describe some of the major unique theoretical and empirical issues that emerge in gender and women's research in various countries and regions, as well as several common threads that are found across multiple regions. In doing so, we consider the intertwined relationship of gender research to women's and feminist social movements, and point out the most typical methods used in such research. Of course, in many countries gender and feminist perspectives are well integrated into the social science disciplines, particularly sociology, but in others, they are isolated in the interdisciplinary field of women's studies. Because we know that the category “women” encompasses a great diversity of experiences, understanding global variation is important in order to comprehend why some research questions (and feminist issues) are of greater concern in one locale versus another.

The four regions that we cover in this volume are Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe—we chose these regional country groupings to match those used by the United Nations in their statistical summaries of women's status.

LINKAGES BETWEEN FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIC WOMEN'S STUDIES/GENDER RESEARCH

As Sagot and Escalante (Chapter 15) describe in this volume, when women's studies and gender research began during the mid-twentieth century “second wave” of feminism, just describing women's issues and conditions was enough to engage in dialogue and debate. In fact, as Ezazi (Chapter 10) notes, in some countries like Iran where gender issues are a critical topic of contention, that might still be true. Yet, on the whole, a panoramic view of the evolution of scholarship on women and gender issues reveals that research has evolved and become much more nuanced and sophisticated since the global pioneering stages of the early 1970s, basically aimed at unveiling, incorporating, and documenting the presence and contributions of women to the history and productive lives of their respective societies, and exposing the major sources of their oppression, as well as their most pressing conditions.

The overall process of inclusiveness and redefining or transforming knowledge on women's livelihoods and experiences has been accompanied by an engaged and persistent effort by many feminist and gender studies scholars to address and challenge the historical exclusions, biases, patriarchal power structures, and androcentric perspectives of the past, and confront the realities, conditions, and different forms of oppression that continue to shape women's lives and perpetuate their subordination in the present. They have introduced new perspectives and approaches that are now inescapably crucial to the analysis of a wide-range of differences in women's experiences, social, economic, and political conditions, and manifestations of feminism that rely on diverse visions and strategies in the pursuit of their claims for meaningful social change.

Even if one accepts the debatable notion that since the U.N. Decade for Women (1975–1985) feminism has become a global project of social transformation or a generalized consensus to liberate women from the subordinate and unequal conditions they experience in nearly all societies, most feminists would concur that whatever progress has been made in the recent past—in freeing women from full-time domestic work, in increasing their visibility and participation in the public sphere, and in addressing a whole gamut of critical women and gender issues—is still far from subverting or transforming the entrenched sexist and unequal power structures and relations that prevail all over the world. The latter continue to be reinforced by the prevailing hierarchical and polarizing relations between capital and labor, developed and developing countries and regions, and a globalized and more integrated capitalist system that continues to reproduce and perpetuate different forms of subordination. This system also promotes policies that, for the most part, are weakening national and regional power, and fostering the subordinate integration of developing countries into the world's dominant capitalist economies. Thus any advances or transformative changes in the status of women are more a result of their unrelenting articulation of demands and responses from state or institutional power structures that generally attempt to negotiate, co-opt, or accommodate them without any significant transformations in these male-dominated spaces.

The world is now caught up in new dynamics and forms of capitalist globalization that are only exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities, poverty, health problems, and environmental degradation, as well as generating a vast displacement of workers and unprecedented migration throughout different countries and regions of the planet. In confronting these critical issues feminist activism comes and goes in waves or spurts carried out by different generations of women making modest inroads at local or national levels, but without being able to forge a broader consensus about a bold and multifaceted women-focused agenda for change, in part because women's conditions and needs vary by the region, country, or locality in which they live. Even within the major metropolitan centers of world capital (such as in Europe, Chapters 22 to 28), where women have become a more visible presence in public life and have achieved notable progress in a few vital areas—such as education, political representation, and reproductive rights—they continue to fight to mainstream their agendas into public life, to develop policy that truly integrates work and family for both men and women, or to attain an income and overall status equal to that of their male counterparts. What this relative progress illustrates is that even when some women are able to penetrate the dominant patriarchal power structures sexism and patriarchy persist in myriad and constantly changing forms.

Still, as history demonstrates, struggling against the odds is an intrinsic part of women's movements for social justice and equality, and the assertion that women have come a long way since the suffragist movements would be hard to refute. Qualified progress has been made in some countries to combat violence against women, improve their health status, their rights to control their own bodies and express their sexuality, their access to jobs and education, and to other basic human rights, and in enacting new laws to protect their civil liberties and alleviate past discrimination. Equally important is how researchers and activists have brought a considerable level of legitimacy and innovative approaches to the analysis of women and gender issues. Notwithstanding, in many other ways the struggle towards eradicating prevailing gender inequalities is still largely a work in progress. Thus it would be a fallacy for the younger generations of women to simply assume that they have an easier path to full equality and liberation than women did just a few decades ago, as Reddock duly observes (Chapter 18). Indeed, as some of the Women's Studies pioneers in various nations enter international activism or official government positions in their home countries, they can leave a void in domestic activism (see Reddock, Chapter 18). On the other hand, since the early 1970s the proliferation of women's studies programs and gender-focused research, and the rise of transnational women's organizations and solidarity networks has allowed women to “connect” more easily with the realities and challenges faced by other women around the globe, and with the work that is being carried out to deal with some of the most pressing and vital issues, which despite some obvious common strands, vary significantly from the conditions found in a country's local communities and those that are of a broader national or international nature. But if there is an indisputable fact, it is that during the last four decades women and gender have become indispensable categories of analysis in conducting research or formulating public policies. Hampering this progress, however, are the expanding media technologies and the unrelenting ideological diffusion of gender relations debased by the implicit or explicit subordination of women or objectification and commodification of their bodies that continue to spread globally like a persistent and insidious pandemic. Yet, paradoxically, these same technologies are being used—albeit, not necessarily with the same reach or popular appeal—by organizations worldwide to engage in networking and in carrying out their respective messages for the improvement of different aspects of women's lives.

The United Nations' Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) and its Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) have been around since 1946, but it was not until after the first Women's World Conference, held in Mexico in 1975, that they became more relevant and visible in formulating some semblance of “a global agenda” on women's rights and in fostering the proliferation and active participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in this process, many of which had been successful in dealing with specific localized women's concerns. Overall, the four Women's World Conferences sponsored by the United Nations from 1975 to 1995 have had a significant impact in gathering data about the status of women around the world, and monitoring their progress in more measurable areas, such as demography, reproductive health, education, work, and political representation (Ashford and Clifton 2005). Agencies such as the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) have played an active role in promoting the goal of gender equality and in developing specific Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that include decreasing the feminiza-tion of poverty, combating violence against women and epidemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and advocating for gender equality and the advancement of women. It is worth noticing that feminists and women's organizations in developing countries tend to be more aware of these international agencies and efforts than their counterparts in the United States. For example, Chow et al. (Chapter 8) describe the importance of the U.N. world conferences in helping to legitimize gender/women's studies in China.

The actual status of women's studies and women's research is quite diverse across regions and within regions, as described in the introductions to each regional section of this volume.

FEMINIST RESEARCH APPROACHES

Just as the countries of the world take different paths to activism, there are also differences in feminist research approaches, such as the choice of research methodology and style. As reflected in many of this volume's chapters, qualitative methods are common, while quantitative methods are utilized less frequently (for an exception, see Chapter 20). Indeed, some authors, such as Núñez Sarmiento, writing about Cuba (Chapter 17), argue that qualitative methods better assess women's true concerns and situations. In Cuba's case, lack of research funds for large-scale surveys also render the usage of in-depth interviews or participant observation more expedient. Evidently, a wide range of qualitative methods is used in gender research. For example, Darkwah's (Chapter 4) research on market women uses life histories, Crespo-Kebler's (Chapter 21) research on reproductive rights uses an historical approach, with a focus on the media, Nguyen et al. (Chapter 12) discuss HIV/AIDS using a policy perspective, and Lombardo (Chapter 28) uses a textual analysis of the European constitution to study gender mainstreaming. Qualitative methods have been critical both to unravel the complex issues in women's private and public sphere lives and to challenge the “objective” and “scientific” stance of quantitative studies. Recently, as qualitative methods have become important in the fields of sociology of gender and women's studies, feminists gradually call for more balance by integrating quantitative methods into feminist studies.

As the focus in feminist studies shifts from women to gender, research on men and masculinities is slowly gaining ground in this field. Valiente (Chapter 24) points out that men's studies in Spain is still in an embryonic state, but attention to the construction of masculinity demonstrates the significance of the intrinsic connection between gender (masculinity) and sexuality (heterosexuality). In addition, Reddock (Chapter 18) shows that applying an intersectionality approach to the analysis of masculinity reveals how gender relations are deeply complicated by racial and class inequalities. And, as an illustrative example, Kwon (Chapter 11) describes the contested masculinities of Korean and U.S. soldiers within complex military power relations that are shaped by the global hierarchies of race, class, education, and political economy.

In addition to research methods and agendas, language is another issue that emerges in feminist research and theorizing. It is undeniable that the feminist intellectual articulations drawn from Anglo-American contexts have had a significant impact on feminist studies in many other countries, often through the dynamics of the global political economy, as well as through transnational feminist linkages. As a result, one of the issues raised in feminist studies pertains to language and terminology. For example, as described in the case of China (Chapter 8), the term “gender” is novel in countries whose language is not rooted in a Latin or romance language system. In those countries, feminists deal with the issue of terminology either by inventing new terms or adapting existing ones, while also trying to avoid linguistic post-colonialism. As Knapp (Chapter 23) points out, language barriers can hinder feminist thoughts developed in non-English speaking countries from traveling back to feminists in the global North.

Language is not the only barrier that can block feminist work from being widely disseminated. Once the research is completed, the global economic status of a country, and its political climate or relative wealth/poverty, can limit the number of outlets in which to publish feminist/gender research. Consequently, research results may be published in the journals of more developed countries outside of the region, reducing local access to knowledge, which occurs for some of the research on Africa; or results may not be published until funds are available, which happened in some resource-poor time periods in Cuba; or research is distributed via the world wide web or in feminist magazines, rather than in poorly supported or non-existent local academic journals—in this case, allowing the research to reach a wide feminist activist audience. It is for this reason that we have included an Appendix on websites for women's research centers in many countries of the world.

GLOBAL TRENDS, REGIONAL TRENDS, AND OTHER DYNAMICS

Just as there is diversity among individual women, based on their intersecting axes of age, race or ethnicity, class, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or other characteristics, gender research in any specific country will emphasize different issues depending upon that nation's economic, political, social, or cultural setting and history. As a result, one can think about there being transnational, regional, thematic, and unique national trajectories of global gender research.

First, some feminist/gender research concerns are worldwide—and the most universal and critical issue is violence against women. However, the form of violence that becomes a primary feminist activist and research concern may focus on various particular national issues including, wife beating, date rape or rape during war, military prostitution, genital mutilation, bride burning (when dowries are perceived as being too small), and many others.

Second, some feminist activist and research concerns are regional priorities. Many of these regional priorities are defined by economic conditions, such as the influence of neo-liberal reform in Latin America (Chapters 14 and 19), structural adjustment programs in Africa (Chapter 4), post-communist economic changes in Eastern Europe (Chapter 25), or integrating work and family life in Northern Europe (Chapter 27).

Third, some gender research concerns are based on cross-cutting themes that influence a few countries in many regions. For example, health issues such as the transmission of HIV/AIDS to women is especially importa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Note on Text Edits
• 1 Introduction to Transnational and Local Issues
• SECTION 1: AFRICA
• SECTION 2: ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
• SECTION 3: LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
• SECTION 4: EUROPE
• Appendix: Websites of International Women’s Research Centers
• Contributors
• Reprint Permission List
• Index