Gender, Capitalism and Globalization.pdf

1 Gender, Capitalism and Globalization Joan Acker, Feminist scholars have been producing research and theoretical reflections on women, gender, and global transformations at least since 1970, the date of publication of Ester Boserup’s ground-breaking Woman’s Role in Economic Development. In this essay, I discuss some aspects of the mostly Western feminist scholarship on gender and globalization to provide a context for the papers in this volume. Although I do not attempt to summarize what is now a very large literature,1 I briefly look at how gender is implicated in globalization processes, asking whether and how these processes are gendered and what gendered effects result from these processes. Because both “globalization” and “gender” are contested concepts, I begin with a discussion of how I define them. Gendering Globalization “Globalization” captures a multiplicity of changes that are, it is claimed, altering the contours of economies, polities, and social life in general at the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century. Influential male theorists in the social sciences argue about the meaning of the term, the processes involved and the likely outcomes. (e.g. Giddens 1999; Bauman 1998; Beck 2000; Sen 2002; Wallerstein 1974; Hardt and Negri 2000). Disagreements exist about whether present globalization is a new stage in capitalist development or a continuation of globalizing processes that have been characteristic of capitalism from its emergence in the 15th Century. Or, possibly, globalizing processes began much earlier and are not inevitably tied to capitalism (Sen 2002). Other disagreements have to do with how total is the economic and cultural