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Class ground rules Grab a partner. Brainstorm an idea.

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Gender, Race, GlobalizationThe Feminization of Transnational Labor

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gender

How do we define “gender”? How is it different from sex?

“gender ideology produces the epistemological framework within which sex takes on meaning rather than the other way around” (Halberstam 117)

Gender is (118): “a marker of social difference” “a bodily performance of normativity and

the challenges made to it” “a social relation that subjects often

experience as organic, ingrained, ‘real,’ invisible, and immutable”

“a primary mode of oppression that sorts human bodies into binary categories in order to assign labor, responsibilities, moral attributes, and emotional styles”

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race

Race and gender both “render the body into a text upon which histories of [(racial)] differentiation, exclusion and violence are inscribed” (Ferguson 192)

Biological inheritance vs racial formations naturalization of subjugation vs analyses of freedom & power

“’[Race] has established who can be imported and who exported, who are immigrants and who are indigenous, who may be property and who are citizens; and among the latter who get to vote and who do not, who are protected by the law and who are its objects, who are employable and who are not, who have access, and privilege and who are (to be) marginalized’” (192)

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intersectionality

Parallel processes of racialization and gendering should not blind us to the fact that anti-racist projects can uphold patriarchy and heteronormativity

Race can never be divorced from gender; gender can never be divorced from race

“’We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless, workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives’” (Ferguson 195)

Gendered and racialized bodies are marked for certain forms of labor; certain forms of labor become defined by gendered and racialized assumptions

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globalization

The late 20th century conditions of “economic, social, and political interdependence across cultures, societies, nations, and regions precipitated by an unprecedented expansion of capitalism on a global scale” (Lowe 120)

Globalization = the feminization of transnational labor

Flows of globalization depend on rootedness of global city = explosion in low-skilled, invisible, service & informal industries

Debt burden, structural adjustment programs, foreign investments, austerity measures (cuts to public programs) in developing nations forge survival circuits = women bear burden of holding up developing nations