Failure to attune scholarship to the gendered nature of globalization results in massive structural violence

(Mary, Prof @ Rutgers, Policy discourse as sanctioned ignorance: theorizing the erasure of feminist knowledge Critical Policy Studies Vol. 3, Nos. 3–4, October–December 2009 )

The feminization of poverty refers to more than the fact that 70% of the poor globally are women; the ‘poor’ are constituted as a ‘feminized’ category, as dependent, subrational, and in need of direction (Kingfisher 2002). The transnational marketization of the care economy provides that direction through ‘the return of the serving classes’ (Sassen 2002, p. 259). The increase in low-wage work globally constitutes a ‘feminization of job supply’ (Sassen 2002, p. 259), as poorly paid workers are expected to adopt the self-sacrificing demeanor of the subaltern. Informalization and casualization constitute a ‘feminization of business opportunities’ (Sassen 2002, p. 263), as microfinance subjects increasing numbers of women to the stern discipline of the market’s ‘Invisible Hand’. The World Bank (2002) promotes the ‘feminization of survival’ as the solution to the problem of global poverty, and households, communities, and governments become increasingly dependent on women for their survival as the structural forces of globalization make the possibilities of poverty alleviation increasingly remote. The logic of ‘feminization’ is complex and contradictory. Women are simultaneously hailed as resourceful providers, reliable micro-entrepreneurs, cosmopolitan citizens, and positioned as ‘disposable domestics’, the exploited global workforce, and as displaced, devalued, and disenfranchised diasporic citizens. In the early 1980s, Christine Delphy (1984) argued that what made ‘women’s work’ distinctive was not the particular tasks involved but the requirement that those tasks be done in a relation of subservience. ‘Feminization’ replicates a mandate of subservience. Regardless of the tasks involved, feminization entails a logic of menialization, requiring that tasks be performed with a measure of servility. Where patriarchy required women’s generic subservience to men, feminization renders the ‘feminized’ (men and women) subservient to market imperatives, profit maximization, and commodification. Tim Kaufman-Osborn (2005, p. 5) has suggested that ‘feminization’ is a ‘strategy of power’ involving ‘scripted practices of subordination’, which work by cutting people off from the known and reassuring, casting them into the strange, and disorienting them to foster compliance. There is much about globalization that fits this description. Transnational migrants quite literally are cut off from all that is known and familiar, cast into strange homes in strange lands. Marketization in former socialist states superimposes the strange upon the remnants of a lost way of life. Deindustrialization and flexibilization of labor in emergent service economies disorients workers who can no longer rely on longterm employment at living wages. Structural adjustment policies cut people in the global south off from livelihoods built upon subsistence agriculture and subject them to the vicissitudes of export cropping, off-shore enterprises, urban and transnational migration, and radical restructuring of family and community life. The dimensions of feminization contrast starkly with neoliberal claims concerning the beneficial effects of globalization. Rather than promoting freedom, equality, self-determination, maximization of self-interest, and individual flourishing, feminization produces marked inequalities, which workers rendered docile and subservient accept with resignation. Rather than conforming to the ‘developmental logic’ of modernization discourses (CruzMalavé and Manalansan 2002), which suggests that the market obliterates ‘traditional’ cultures and relations, and establishes liberal individual freedoms in their place, feminization restores features of oppressive feudal relations, such as indentured servitude, servile relations, political disenfranchisement, and sexual slavery. Feminization challenges the central logic and the purported benefits of globalization and raises important questions about the long term prospects of the majority of the world population, the nature of women’s waged and unwaged work, the conditions of labor within the global economy, the scope of democratic practices within neoliberalism, and gendered power relations within families, communities, nations, global institutions and transnational arenas. Given the importance of such questions for policy-makers and policy analysts, why is this knowledge so routinely erased from mainstream globalization discourses? (275-6)