Global Feminism

Transnational Women's Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights

Myra Marx Ferree, Aili Mari Tripp

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814727942
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Increasingly feminists around the world have successfully campaigned for recognition of women's full personhood and empowerment. Global Feminism explores the social and political developments that have energized this movement. Drawn from an international group of scholars and activists, the authors of these original essays assess both the opportunities that transnationalism has created and the tensions it has inadvertently fostered. By focusing on both the local and global struggles of today's feminist activists this important volume reveals much about women's changing rights, treatment and impact in the global world.

Contributors: Melinda Adams, Aida Bagic, Yakin Ertürk, Myra Marx Ferree, Amy G. Mazur, Dorothy E. McBride, Hilkka Pietilä, Tetyana Pudrovska, Margaret Snyder, Sarah Swider, Aili Mari Tripp, Nira Yuval-Davis.

Part I

Recognizing Transnational Feminism

1

Globalization and Feminism

Opportunities and Obstacles for Activism in the Global Arena

Myra Marx Ferree

Globalization is the word of the decade. In newspapers as well as scientific journals, globalization is invoked in relation to everything from moviemaking to unemployment. Much of this discussion implies that globalization is a wholly new phenomenon, that this is only a top-down phenomenon that is happening to people rather than also a grassroots process in which individuals and groups are actively engaged, and that there is nothing particularly gendered about it. This book arises from our conviction that none of these three assumptions are true.

A variety of sociological statistics at the macro level suggest the extent of global integration of the early twenty-first century is more like that of the 1910s than of the 1950s. For example, in 1910 levels of global trade measured by imports and exports and of human interconnection in the form of immigration and transnational organizations were at levels very similar to those we experience today. Two violent world wars and a long cold war reduced these international ties to their low point in the 1950s and 1960s. It may be more accurate to see the end of the cold war as allowing the tide to turn back toward greater global interaction in 2000–2010.

To be sure, many linkages between states and across national boundaries have been created only relatively recently. The European Union is one of the most spectacular of these current experiments in reshaping the meaning of sovereignty, but the African Union (as Melinda Adams shows here) is also an important regional form of integration. These pacts follow in the footsteps of other, older links such as the World Council of Churches and the United Nations that continue to be important. Such continuing global associations should be understood in the context of other, now-obsolete efforts to integrate political and economic life across national borders, be it the Warsaw Pact or the British colonial system. The commitments, perspectives, and processes that connect the globe today are different in interesting ways from what has gone before, but they are not unprecedented in their scope or consequences, including their facilitation of feminist organization. Comparing 2005 to 1955 and 1905 suggests that feminist mobilization has always been increased by greater globalization.

One way in which global integration today does differ from that of the past is the extent to which it involves ordinary citizens and social movements, not merely governments and elites. Despite the typical assumption that globalization is a massive force bearing down on helpless populations, to look at the actual process is to see a great variety of social actors—including many who are not educational or political elites—engaging in diverse types of integrative work. Social movements of many kinds are finding a voice, alongside more privileged actors such as states and corporations. Certainly there are structures and processes at work here that are far larger than any one individual, group, or even state can control, but this has always been characteristic of the world since the age of global navigation and the emergence of industrialization. What is more striking in the present moment is the intersection of the global with the local, and the expansion of popular, decentralized, and democratic forms of interpreting and responding to the top-down challenges posed by a world economy.

Moreover, rather than a hierarchical colonial world system or the dueling blocs of the cold war, the reconfiguration of the world order is arising today from multiple locations and pulling in diverse directions. Because “the West” is no longer held together by its anticommunist mobilization, Europe and the United States are discovering new tensions and differences in their relationship. The “third world” is no longer merely defined by its history of colonization but by its own diversity, regionally, economically, and politically. Democratic India and authoritarian Pakistan, prosperous Singapore and economically ravaged Zimbabwe all came into the twentieth century as part of the British Empire, but they enter the twenty-first century with very different concerns. World bodies such as the UN are faced with new conflicts that include citizens challenging their national governments for democratic participation, ethnic conflicts within states, and gender conflicts fed by religious fundamentalisms, as well as the more familiar tensions among national and class interests. Globalization is today as much about the multiplicity of centers of power as it is about increases in their interrelationship.

From these diverse local centers, a variety of nongovernmental groups are engaging in the complex process of political renegotiation that hides under the label of globalization. Social movements like Attac, an international mobilization for democratic control of financial markets and their institutions that was founded in France in 1998, raise questions about the justice of international debt management and call for a “Tobin tax” (a fee placed on economic transactions to help defray the costs of development). Such groups are listened to by governments from Iceland to South Africa, although they are less well known in the United States. The World Social Forum connects social justice activists globally, allowing for a sharing of tactics and resources. Democracy movements in Ukraine, China, and Syria have used both mass media and Internet connectivity to draw popular support from abroad in struggles with their own governments. Globalization is also a form of political mobilization, and this grassroots involvement is also growing in scope and significance in many parts of the world.

Among the social actors most mobilized in the context of global opportunity structures are women’s movements worldwide. We emphasize that women’s global mobilization is neither something wholly new and unprecedented nor unconnected to the variety of local and regional conflicts that are part of the process of reshaping the world system. Gender is very much a part of the structure of the social order globally. Gender is therefore also part of what is being remade in the current reconfiguration of power relations. As with other aspects of this global reorganization, this restructuring involves women and men in a variety of local and transnational settings. Some of these women’s movements are feminist, but others are not.

This book looks at this diverse and contested process called globalization from the vantage point of feminism and women’s movements. This chapter has three specific goals and sections. First, I offer a conceptual definition of both feminism and women’s movements, and an argument about why it is important to distinguish between them. Second, I discuss the transnational opportunity structure that affects how even local feminists act, and I raise some questions about what its most promising and most dangerous features may be. Third, I present an overview of the chapters that follow and discuss why they offer important and complementary insights into how the process of globalization matters for feminism.

Feminism and Women’s Movements:
A Difference That Makes a Difference

Although some scholars use the terms “feminism” and “women’s movement” interchangeably, this usage creates certain problems. In some contexts, it makes it seem doubtful that men can be feminists, since how can they be members of a “woman’s movement”? In other contexts it can seem problematic to apply the label “feminist” to activist women, whether because they refuse to use this term for themselves or because the women’s movement in which they are engaged has other goals, even ones in opposition to any change toward greater gender equality. When women mobilize, as they do, to pursue a wide variety of interests, are all such “women’s movements” automatically to be considered feminist?

To make clearer just what kinds of activism are feminist, it is helpful to separate this concept from that of a women’s movement. Organizing women explicitly as women to make social change is what makes a “women’s movement.” It is defined as such because of the constituency being organized, not the specific targets of the activists’ change efforts at any particular time. The movement, as an organizational strategy, addresses its constituents as women, mothers, sisters, daughters. By using the language of gender, it constructs women as a distinctive interest group, even when it may define the interests that this group shares as diverse and not necessarily centered on gender. Naming “women” as a constituency to be mobilized and building a strategy, organization, and politics around issues defined as being particularly “women’s” concerns are the two factors that make a women’s movement, not a statistical head count of the gender of the membership, though typically women are the activists in such movements. This definition of “women’s movement” explicitly recognizes that many mobilizations of women as women start out with a non-gender-directed goal, such as peace, antiracism, or social justice, and only later develop an interest in changing gender relations.

Activism for the purpose of challenging and changing women’s subordination to men is what defines “feminism.” Feminism is a goal, a target for social change, a purpose informing activism, not a constituency or a strategy. Feminist mobilizations are informed by feminist theory, beliefs, and practices, but they may take place in a variety of organizational contexts, from women’s movements to positions within governments. Feminism as a goal often informs all or part of the agenda of mixed-gender organizations such as socialist, pacifist, and democratization movements. Because feminism challenges all of gender relations, it also addresses those norms and processes of gender construction and oppression that differentially advantage some women and men relative to others, such as devaluing “sissy” men or the women who do care work for others. There is no claim being made that one or another particular aspect of gender relations, be it paid work or sexuality, motherhood or militarization, is the best, most “radical,” or most authentic feminism. Feminism as a goal can be adopted by individuals of any gender, as well as by groups with any degree of institutionalization, from informal, face-to-face, temporary associations to a legally constituted national or transnational governing body.

Feminist activists and activism typically are embedded in organizations and institutions with multiple goals. To have a feminist goal is in no way inconsistent with having other political and social goals as well. The question of where feminism stands on the list of priorities of any individual or group is an empirical one. It is not true by definition that a person or group that calls itself feminist necessarily puts this particular goal in first place, since in practice it could be discovered to be displaced by other values (such as achieving or redistributing power or wealth, defending racial privilege, or fighting racial discrimination). Nor is it true by definition that a person or group that does not call itself feminist does not have feminist goals, since the identity can carry other connotations in a local setting (whether of radicalism or exclusivity or cultural difference) that an activist may seek to avoid by choosing another label.

These two definitions together generate a dynamic picture of both feminism and women’s movements. On the one hand, women’s movements are mobilizations understood to be in a process of flux in which feminism may be becoming more or less of a priority issue for them. Regardless of their goals, mobilizations that use gender to mobilize women are likely to bring their constituents into more explicitly political activities, empower women to challenge limitations on their roles and lives, and create networks among women that enhance their ability to recognize existing gender relations as oppressive and in need of change. Thus the question of when and how women’s movements contribute to increases in feminism is a meaningful one.

On the other hand, feminism circulates within and among movements, takes more or less priority among their goals, and may generate new social movements, including women’s movements. Successful feminist mobilization creates more places and spaces for feminism to accomplish its aims, within movements and within institutional power structures. Thus, for example, feminism can percolate into organized medicine, where activists may then construct women’s movement associations of doctors, nurses, or patients, develop new tools to recognize and treat illnesses that affect women and men differently, and make institutions deliver services more appropriately to women in their communities. Feminist mobilizations often intersect with other forms of transformative struggles. Activists originally inspired by feminism may expand their goals to challenge racism, colonialism, and other oppressions, and activists with other primary agendas may be persuaded to adopt feminism as one of their objectives, especially as feminist activists show them how mutually supportive all these goals may be. Thus, it is also a meaningful question to ask how feminism contributes to creating and expanding social movements, including women’s movements.

As a consequence of both these processes, feminism and women’s movements dynamically affect each other. In this set of changing relations, to restrict analysis to only those temporary phases in which women’s movements have chosen to focus exclusively on challenging gender subordination or seeking equality with men of their own group marginalizes the ongoing intersectional elements of both. Distinguishing between feminism and women’s movements, and then relating them empirically, moves the multiplicity of constituencies and dynamic changes in goals among activists “from margin to center” among the questions for analysis. When and why do women’s movements embrace feminist goals—and when not? When and why do feminists choose to work in women’s movements rather than in mixed-gendered ones or policymaking institutions—and when not? When and why do democratization, peace, or economic justice movements make feminism part of their agenda—and when not? These are important questions that can only be asked, let alone answered, if there is a clear definitional distinction between feminism and women’s movements. The scope of feminist theory and its overall social critique is also obscured if the difference between feminism and women’s movements is not made explicit. For some feminists, feminism means simultaneously combating other forms of political and social subordination, since for many women, embracing the goal of equality with the men of their class, race, or nation would mean accepting a still-oppressed status. For some feminists, feminism means recognizing ways in which male-dominated institutions have promoted values fundamentally destructive for all people, such as militarism, environmental exploitation, or competitive global capitalism, and associating the alternative values and social relations with women and women-led groups. To define feminism in a way that limits its applicability only to those mobilizations that exclusively focus on challenging women’s subordination to men would exclude both these types of feminism.

When analysts do this, they discover that the groups that are left to study are typically mobilizations of relatively privileged women who are seeking access to the opportunities provided by social, political, and economic institutions to men of their nationality, class, race, ethnicity, and religion.¹ The middle-class, white, Western bias observed in studies of “feminism” is at least in part a result of such an inappropriately narrow and static definition of the object of study (“feminism”). Defining feminism should not be confounded with other criteria such as the preferred constituency addressed (women or both genders), the organizational form preferred (social movement, community group, state or transnational authority), the strategy pursued (working inside or outside institutions, more or less collectively, with transgressive or demonstrative protest activities or not), or the priority feminism takes in relation to other goals (antiracism, environmentalism, pacifism, neoliberalism, etc.). Feminists do many different things in real political contexts in order to accomplish their goals, and working in and through women’s movements can be very important strategically. But especially when trying to see just how feminism as a goal is being advanced in and through a variety of transnational strategies, it becomes self-defeating to presuppose that only women’s movements can be the carriers of feminism.

Moreover, by stressing how feminism as a goal is characteristically combined with other goals and making its relative priority a question open to empirical examination, this approach more readily looks at the influence of the transnational opportunity structure upon both feminism and women’s movements. “Political opportunity structure” (POS) is the preferred term among scholars interested in the positive opportunities and the obstacles provided by a specific political and social structure. Globalization is made concretely meaningful by seeing it as a process that increases the importance and level of integration of transnational political structures. At this transnational level, the POS can vary substantially from that provided at the local level alone. Thus Zapatista rebels reach out through the Internet for support from people and groups spread around the world to counter the repressive power exercised locally by the Mexican government.

The transnational opportunity structure is a political context that seems open to feminism, particularly as it takes up the discourses of human rights and development, as Pietilä argues in her chapter. What other goals are combined with feminism in which local contexts, and how does that help or hinder these ideas to travel transnationally? For example, if feminism is connected to the defense of class privilege, and upper-middle-class women’s ability to enter the paid labor market is given priority over migrant women’s ability to earn a living wage by their domestic work, then feminism is not going to be an appealing identity for those who do not already enjoy economic advantages.

The intersectionality of social movements characterizes them and shapes how they position themselves in the transnational arena in which they operate. Intersectionality means that privilege and oppression, and movements to defend and combat these relations, are not in fact singular. No one has a gender but not a race, a nationality but not a gender, an education but not an age. The location of people and groups within relations of production, reproduction, and representation (relations that are organized worldwide in terms of gender inequality) is inherently multiple. These multiple social locations are often—not, as is often assumed, atypically—contradictory. Organizations as well as individuals hold multiple positions in regard to social relations of power and injustice, and typically enjoy privilege on some dimensions even while they struggle with oppression on another. This multiplicity and the contradictions to which it gives rise are rarely acknowledged theoretically. As Ferree and Roth (1998) argue, scholars of social movements have instead tended to construct ideal-typical movements, envisioning these as composed of ideal-typical constituents: thus “worker’s” movements are imagined as organizations of and for white men, “nationalist” movements as of and for indigenous men, “feminist” movements as of and for white, middle-class women.² The reality is of course, much more complex, but it only emerges clearly when the goals and constituents of movements are acknowledged as distinct.

In sum, this book approaches feminism as one important goal of social change. It asks the question of how feminism is being related to women’s movements and other organizational strategies that are being pursued locally and in transnational spaces, as well as to the various other goals that specific women and men have when they engage in social and political activities. And it looks especially at globalization as a process that is potentially empowering as well as disempowering women as they look for effective strategies to make feminist social change, includ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Recognizing Transnational Feminism
• Part II Local Experiences
• Part III Activism in Transnational Space
• Part IV Conclusions
• About the Contributors
• Index