Abstract
It would be hard to read this collection and not sit up, set aside our global assembly line clothes and corporate coffee, and begin taking responsibility for how the world is developing. Taken as a whole, this is a pounding collection of global South-focused articles that can engross researchers, activists, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
Focusing on women in the post-1970s period in the Third World, as seen within a global system, the collection contains five theoretical and contextual chapters on women’s resistance (Martha Gimenez) and six historically specific chapters about women’s struggles against the exploitation of labor, land, and resources in Southern Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ecuador, and the Philippines and South Asia. Methods include the analysis of secondary literature (Robert Dibie), archival research, newspapers, state records, UNIFEM reports (Christobel Asiedu), and field research.
Key frameworks draw on gender-extended definitions of neo-liberalism and globalization (Ligaya Lindio-McGovern and Isidor Wallimann) and a global analysis of corporate- and state-imposed mixtures of waged and non-waged work, with the emergence of commoners’ movements as alternatives (Leigh Brownhill and Terisa Turner). Bringing back the importance of globally situated, regional core-satellite relations (as formulated by Gunder Frank in the 1970s), many writers examine how sub-imperial orbits form an integral part of global extraction and exploitation. For example, profit-makers operate within regional orbits of power when they bond, send and receive women in the sex trafficking industry (Bandana Purkayastha and Shweta Majumdar). Resistance to imperialism, including through regional organizing against sub-imperialism, helps to explain why ideas of national liberation often shape women’s transnational organizing. This affects how U.S. women from various diasporas connect to Third World homelands (Shireen Ally, Robin Magalit Rodriguez, and Anne Lacsamana). Intra-labor’s global relations also have enabled women in cooperatives to envision and build commons by working with middle-income supporters and consumers who live in the region and in the global North (Ann Ferguson).
Women’s resistance to exploitation in the Third World addresses how neo-liberal accumulation rests on their backs. Globalization and development turn out to be the same side of the coin, and not different sides (p. 5); one side enriches the center’s corporations and the other impoverishes the South’s women and men, including through re-enclosures and state cutbacks.
The theoretical introduction by Lindio-McGovern and Wallimann locates Third World women’s resistance to exploitation within the context of uneven, gendered, neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism is said to be part of a global political economy that has a core and periphery/semi-periphery, but the theoretical power of this formulation is pushed just so far, minimizing novel insights into gendered neoliberalism and failing to uncover new shifts in waged and non-waged relations that have reshaped politics and the formation of alternatives. As the writers demonstrate, women whose lives have been torn asunder by corporate, state, and competing laboring groups have both responded to and reshaped social relations within the context of global and regional changes. But this does not mean that migrating women have reshaped the overall social context, as suggested at one point by the editors. They write, “The presence of these [South African migrating domestic] women bifurcates the reproductive labor market and (its) wage structure . . . where migrant women are placed at the lower end” (p. 3, my emphasis). Complex social processes created this bifurcation. Theory was not deployed as deeply as it could have been, overgeneralizations were made (Third World women are “birthing” an “Earth Community,” pp. 11–12), and a closer reading of and referral to related feminist and households scholarship would have helped.
But finally this book is powerful because the writers accomplished what they wanted to do: to de-marginalize Third World women’s “experience, voice, and politics,” especially with regard to regional knowledge and its relationship to transnational understandings, and to include all of this in “knowledge construction about neoliberal globalization” (p. 2). The writers demonstrate that values embedded within resistance movements “form the basis or foundation for the alternative institutional arrangements emanating from below” (p. 11). Lindio-McGovern, Wallimann, and contributors to this collection have succeeded in doing something else that is rare: they have put together a conceptual and empirical book that gets readers to question their passivity and to energize them in a world that is now being remade.