CIAO DATE: 11/2008
March 2007
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
In this Working Paper, Professor Nancy Cook wishes to address the frequent absence of gender in studies of globalization. She notes that globalization processes are often seen somehow as gender neutral. Or, as she and others have noted, the macroeconomic and macropolitical processes associated with globalization are masculinised, so that we are left with a mapping of globalization onto the following binary: global:masculine, local:feminine. In opposition to these kinds of arguments, Professor Cook suggests that globalisation and gender relations are mutually constitutive.
Drawing from feminist scholarship, she sees this mutually constitutive character of globalizationgender relations in a complex four-way relationship that she outlines in the first section of the paper. She suggests that globalization reinforces or reshapes gender relations, institutions and inequalities in particular places. She adds that gender actually facilitates the production of globalization, particularly through gender hierarchies. Professor Cook notes that globalization has differential effects on women and men. Finally, she observes that globalization is often discursively gendered.
Responding to Carli Freeman's call for more micro-level analyses that actually specify how global processes play out in particular locales for particular groups of people with particular consequences, Professor Cook then explores these types of relationships between gender and globalization through a case study of Western women working in Gilgit, Pakistan as development workers. In a careful analysis, she traces how former imperial practices related to constructing domesticity as a racial, class and gender barrier are reproduced in this postcolonial setting. In her words, "Home, as a unit of civilisation, is . . . where racial, class, and imperial identities are constructed." After looking at various ways domesticity is constructed, she then turns her attention to see how governmentality operates when it comes to the relations between western women and servants who work both outside and inside the home.
The ethnographic detail in this examination of domesticity, whether in the building of home or the governance of servants in the home is impressive and effectively organized and presented. Consequently, Professor Cook provides a model for thinking about gender and globalization and for studying how these phenomena are mutually constitutive.
Resource link: Gendering Globalization: Imperial Domesticity and Identity in Northern Pakistan [PDF] - 463K