Abstract
The scholarship on gender and globalization has contributed a far more complex picture of the impact of global processes as well as added a crucial gendered perspective on such processes. It has shown us how global processes may reinscribe, alter, and challenge sex/gender orders, which are not necessarily coherent or hegemonic. Yet, we think there is more that gender and globalization scholarship can do to enhance understandings of global processes. We argue that to do so, the literature needs to develop further by overcoming several limitations: (1) an understanding of gender that still tends to reflect the binary sex/gender arrangements common to Western societies, while failing to address the influence of colonial histories and postcolonial states (Roberts and Connell, Feminist Theory 17(2): 135–140, 2016; Sinha 2012); (2) a gender asymmetry, i.e., a disproportionate focus on women; (3) a narrow set of issues that come under its analytical lens; (4) a primary focus outside the US; and finally (5) a gender division of intellectual labor in which primarily feminists who identify as women study gender and globalization while those who identify as men, feminist or otherwise, tend to study a gender blind globalization. In this introduction, we examine the development of the gender and globalization literature, discuss how the articles in this special issue expand on it, and conclude with future directions for this burgeoning field.
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As the global economy took shape in the 1980s, scholar studying women and development began to notice the centrality of women in the Global South to this restructuring. Women were being incorporated into the global economy in new ways, as workers in factories manufacturing export products for expanding global markets and as migrants in search of work in wealthier countries. Since then, the study of gender and globalization has expanded dramatically. In many academic fields, the trajectory has shifted from feminizing the literature—bringing in women’s voices and experiences—to using gender as an analytical category to analyze institutions, structures, and processes, to a more intersectional analysis. The study of gender and globalization has, to a great extent, attempted to do all three from the beginning. Scholars have demonstrated the changing configuration of gendered processes in the neoliberal era; how these impact women differently depending on their location in the matrix of local power structures as well as geopolitical spaces; and that women are not only passive victims, but also actively engaged in the restructuring of these gendered processes. The literature has shifted from an initial focus on economic restructuring to cultural and political changes and to challenging local/global, North/South dichotomies and presenting a more multidirectional, transnational analysis.
For example, early studies ranged from macro analyses highlighting the feminization of global manufacturing, to empirical studies of the gendered global assembly line as well as global care work, to investigations of the transnationalization of service work via outsourcing; from explorations of why women were the desired workers in neoliberal globalization to micro analyses of how women in specific places were responding to the challenges of being in these workplaces and the new dynamics it generated in their families. By the 1990s, scholars began to address women’s collective agency and solidarities via transnational networks, as well as the cultural and political consequences of the new conjuncture between the gender global equality regime established via UN conferences and the inequalities generated by economic restructuring. In these studies, the global flow is no longer assumed to be unidirectional—from the West to the rest—but understood as moving in multiple directions, South-North, South-South, and North-North. Today, most studies aim to highlight how gender is constitutive of processes of globalization and how practices and norms of gender and sexuality in various places are impacted by and in turn shape global processes. Recent studies depict transnational linkages as dynamic and gendered, and examine how they produce intersections between local and global rather than dichotomies between them, a perspective that has important implications for the study of globalization (Choo 2016; Currier 2012; David 2015; Desai 2015; Hoang 2015; Moghadam 2013; Mojola 2014; Otis 2011; Parrenas 2011; Rinaldo 2013; Salzinger 2016; Thayer 2010).
The scholarship on gender and globalization has contributed a far more complex picture of the impact of global processes as well as added a crucial gendered perspective on such processes. It has shown us how global processes may reinscribe, alter, and challenge sex/gender orders, which are not necessarily coherent or hegemonic. Yet, at a time when the world seems to be both dangerously fragmented along religious, national, and other lines—as well as increasingly integrated through economic transactions and social media—we think there is more that gender and globalization scholarship can do to enhance understandings of global processes. We argue that to do so, the literature needs to develop further by overcoming several limitations: (1) an understanding of gender that still tends to reflect the binary sex/gender arrangements common to Western societies, while failing to address the influence of colonial histories and postcolonial states (Roberts and Connell 2016; Sinha 2012); (2) a gender asymmetry, i.e., a disproportionate focus on women; (3) a narrow set of issues that come under its analytical lens; (4) a primary focus outside the US; and finally (5) a gender division of intellectual labor in which primarily feminists who identify as women study gender and globalization while those who identify as men, feminist or otherwise, tend to study a gender blind globalization.
Our understanding of gender and globalization is informed both by the contributions of the literature as well as these concerns and is reflected in this special issue of Qualitative Sociology. This special issue emerged out of a small symposium on gender and globalization organized by Rachel Rinaldo at the University of Virginia in Fall 2014, with speakers including Valentine Moghadam, Manisha Desai, Hae Yeon Choo, and Ashley Currier. The symposium brought together these gender and globalization scholars to assess the state of the subfield and its relationship to the broader discipline and to discuss new empirical and theoretical directions, with the hope of raising the profile of gender and globalization research in US sociology. The four articles we present in this special issue are based on exciting new research and speak to many of our concerns while also deepening “global and transnational”Footnote 1 sociology and taking the literature in promising new directions. Hae Yeon Choo examines migrant women workers, rights, and citizenship in South Korea. Chaitanya Lakkimsetti explores how transnational advocacy influences struggles by sexual minorities in India. Tara McKay and Nicole Angotti look at the production of antihomosexual discourses in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda and how these discourses are related to global social change and status hierarchies. Lori Leonard investigates how global oil production shapes masculinities in Chad. These articles question the transnationalization of sex and gender binaries, examine how genders and sexualities, including masculinities, are both constitutive of and constituted by contemporary processes of globalizations, and more generally, expand the purview of what it means to study gender and sexuality.
Social and political developments around the world, ranging from new forms of inequality in the Global North and the South, increasing movements of people across borders (fueling the refugee crisis in Europe, anti-immigrant rhetoric in the West, and citizenship struggles elsewhere), the spread of transnational terrorism and extremism, the widespread use of social media technologies across the globe, struggles over sexualities in new and unexpected places, environmental disasters and climate change, as well as the rising power of a variety of social and religious movements across regions call out for both sociological analysis and a lens that connects globalizing processes and gender. Research on gender and globalization is more often published in monographs and interdisciplinary journals rather than in flagship sociology journals. With this special issue of Qualitative Sociology, a journal that reaches across the discipline and outside it, we hope to bring some of the conversations, analyses, and theoretical contributions of the gender and globalization literature to wider attention.
In what follows, we examine the development of the gender and globalization literature, discuss how the articles in this special issue expand on it, and conclude with future directions for this burgeoning field.
Mapping the Terrain
As our discussion above indicates, the field of gender and globalization has become multi-faceted. Here we present a necessarily selective review in which we highlight three research areas that have been central to the field and to the articles in this special issue, namely work, collective agency and activism, and sexualities.Footnote 2
Changing Forms of Female Labor
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing to now, scholars began turning their attention to the new opportunities and challenges for women of globalizing working conditions; in particular, the shift of manufacturing from the US and Western Europe to the Global South and the expansion of factory employment for women in the latter (Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Freeman 2000; Lee 1998; Moghadam 1999; Ong 1987; Ngai 2005; Salzinger 2003; Wolf 1992). This focus on women workers has continued, for example, in Plankey-Videla (2012)) study of women workers and labor resistance in a Mexican garment factory.
A significant insight of this literature is the gendered pattern of production that emerged with the globalization of manufacturing, what some scholars have dubbed “the gendered global assembly line” (Bair 2010). Women have been sought after as workers in factories for a variety of reasons, including lower wage demands, stereotypes about feminine docility, and beliefs that light manufacturing is a more suitable job for women rather than men. Many scholars have also shown that such work has mixed consequences for women. While the wages and treatment are often exploitative, the opportunity to earn income and live independently from family has also been empowering for many young women, though they also tend to age out of such work. Yet as Bair observes, precisely why this gendered pattern persists even as production has shifted to poorer countries like Bangladesh, where women traditionally did not work outside the home, remains an open question. Some recent studies question the general feminization of global production in Latin America and South East Asia and show that it was always selective and related to the lack of upgrading of manufacturing. Salzinger (2004) has argued that some maquiladora shop floors, generally those that pay higher wages, are actually masculinized, though this is so taken for granted that it is rarely recognized. Indeed, Salzinger (2016) and Connell (2016b) have recently suggested far more attention needs to be paid to the role of masculinity in global economic processes. For Salzinger, masculinity is both an “unarticulated backdrop in the dispersal of transnational assembly” as well as a primary actor in the enactment of contemporary global finance (6). Meanwhile, the feminization of the global assembly line may be on the wane. Tejani and Milberg (2016)) argue that as educational parity is reached and manufacturing becomes more capital intensive women will lose their share of employment in factories in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Like the gendered global assembly line, there has also emerged a gendered global agri-food system (Joshi 2015). Here too it is women who are increasingly working in fields in the Global South and in the Global North who produce food for the Northern consumer, risking their health while working in environments with highly toxic herbicide and pesticides.
Along with feminization of global manufacturing there has been a feminization of migration (e.g., Beneria et al. 2012), primarily though not exclusively, from the Global South to the North to undertake child and elder care. This has resulted in what Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002) called the global care chain. This important concept refers to the need for care for the migrant women’s children in their home countries, which is often provided by paid or unpaid care givers, such as family members. Such care chains were first evident in the migration of women from the Global South to Europe, the Middle East, and the United States (e.g., Constable 1997; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Momsen 1999; Parrenas 2001; Sassen 2000; Silvey 2004; Zimmerman et al. 2006). As Herrera (2013) notes, a key insight of this conception is that even though paid care work at the top of the chain in general is undervalued, as one goes down the chain it gradually becomes unpaid. Critics, (e.g., Yeates 2005) argue that this has emphasized domestic childcare work at the expense of other forms of care, particularly elder and health care in domestic and institutional setting, provided by both migrant men and women. Kilkey (2010) discusses the exclusion of men from the global care chain literature and how it fails to take into account male domestic labor such as repair and gardening and how migrant men are implicated in the global redistribution of stereotypically female work of social reproduction. This has led scholars like Manalansan (2006) to argue that while the gender and globalization literature has feminized scholarship on globalization, it has been less successful at gendering it. Nonetheless, the literature has deepened our understanding of transnational families and the social and emotional costs of such labor. It has also expanded our understanding of citizenship and its geopolitics; who is afforded recognition, who is not, and its consequences; as well as the ways in which migrant women build communities (e.g., Constable 1997) and become political subjects.
Another strand of the literature on gender, globalization, and work has focused on emerging forms of service work, including sex work, domestic work, and surrogacy. As neoliberal globalization furthers commodification of various aspects of life and enables services across borders, countries like India are seeing a growth in commercial surrogacy. Recent studies on transnational surrogacy, where the transaction involves a purchaser from the Global North and birth mother from the Global South, show the often-exploitative nature of these relationships with their attendant paternalistic discourses (Pande 2010; Pande 2011; Rudrappa 2012; Rudrappa and Collins 2015). Clients in the Global North who hire women in the Global South see themselves as helping women to escape poverty and highlight their generosity, even though most turn to India primarily for the significantly lower costs (Pande 2011). Yet surrogates are often paid a very small percentage of what the clients pay the organizations and the money they receive does not actually improve their class status. Surrogate mothers are rarely provided adequate information about the medical procedures they undergo and the associated health risks, and the work is both heavily monitored and often separates them from their families. Despite this unequal exchange, as Rudrappa and Collins (2015) show, many surrogates greatly value their ability to assist other women with having children.
As these examples show, the literature on globalized work, migration, and gender has been crucial for underlining the complex ways in which global economic processes are gendered, while also delineating how women partake in them and are affected by them. In the process, it has broken out of conventional dichotomies such as victim-agent, modern-traditional, and local-global. In this special issue, Choo takes this literature in a new direction by showing how the conditions of migrant women’s work in South Korea intersect differently with national advocacy struggles and have consequences for their ability to obtain rights. Meanwhile, Leonard furthers the study of how globalized work shapes gender practices with her insightful exploration of emerging masculinities among workers and other men in Chad’s oil producing region.
Collective Agency and Activism
Yet there is much more to the gender dynamics of globalization than economic production. Influenced by feminist literatures, scholars have been doing empirical and theoretical work since the early 1990s to demonstrate how women’s movements in different parts of the world respond to these influences and forge transnational connections across borders. Scholars have also discussed the pitfalls and opportunities of the transnational context as well as issues such as democratization and how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed feminist organizing (Alvarez 2000; Bernal and Inderpal 2014; Charrad 2010; Desai 2008, 2007; Ferree and Tripp 2006; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Jafar 2007; Moghadam 2005, 2013; Mohanty 1988, 2003, Naples and Desai 2002; Puri 1999; Ray and Korteweg 1999; Richards 2005, 2013 and Rinaldo 2013; Zakia 2012; Thayer 2010; Viterna 2013; Walsh 2012).
This scholarship has contributed to much greater understanding of women’s agency and activism at transnational, national, and local scales. But it has also resulted in problematizing the very terms global and transnational. In the US academy, global has often meant elsewhere, i.e., the Third World, not the US, and yet it has also been reified as an overarching location in opposition to the local. More recently, sociologists have tended to use “global” as a frame for understanding international institutions and actors such as the IMF, WTO, United Nations, and so on, that exist above, between, and across nation states. Although we think it is crucial to understand the operations at this level of the political and economic system—and it might serve as a useful descriptive term for issues or institutions that encompass much of the world—we think these understandings of global leave much out. For us, the global does not exist as such. All places are local, albeit with differential power, even as they are involved in non-local or translocal processes and social relations. Transnational, as an analytic, rather than a descriptive term, (e.g., Conway 2013; Desai 2013; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kim-Puri 2005; Patil 2013) captures this as it frames uneven relations across borders shaped by histories of colonialism, modernization, and postcolonialism. We consider this to be a useful concept and several of the articles in this issue use transnational in this analytical construction.
Theoretically speaking, the literature on globalization and women’s movements has been especially influenced by postcolonial critiques of feminism such as Mohanty (1988, 2003), and Grewal and Kaplan (1994), which argue for a more intersectional approach and an interrogation of the power dynamics between global/imperial powers and women in the Global South. More recently, H.J. Kim-Puri (2005) calls for a transnational feminist sociology that bridges the discursive and material realms, highlights the importance of social structures and the state in shaping transnational relationships, examines various forms of linkages across cultures and societies, and stresses empirical research. Illustrating such an approach, Desai (2008), theorizes the different ways women both participate in and help to create globalizations. Eisenstein (2009) critiques the ways feminism has come to serve the interests of the global capitalist elite, while Moghadam (2013) develops a comparison of transnational movements. Scholars continue to critique global women’s rights discourses as well as newer LBGT rights discourses (e.g., Abu-Lughod 2013; Puar 2007; Spivak 2005;) for the way they are often implicated in imperialist projects. In this special issue, Choo adds significant nuance to studies of women’s rights efforts by showing how different types of advocacy for women migrants contribute to different kinds of collective agency and rights. Lakkimsetti broadens the women’s movements literature with her examination of how transnational advocacy efforts for LGBT people and sex workers both influence and are used by these very actors in struggles for rights in India. Both articles draw our attention to non-traditional movements that center around issues of gender and sexuality, and their differential impacts on subordinated groups.
Sexualities/Embodiment
While women and gender have been the key focus of work and transnational activism, another area of scholarship that has grown over the past decade is on sexualities in a global context. The literature on sexualities initially focused on transnational gay movements and, to some extent, the ways in which LGBTQ discourses and practices were circulating globally (e.g., Manalansan 2002). Following that, more critical scholarship showed how these transnational flows were limited to primarily urban, educated middle classes in the Global South and often resulted in marginalizing local practices around same sex sexuality (e.g., Khanna 2005; Wieringa et al. 2007). An important and much debated consideration is also the way discourses of LGBT rights have sometimes been entangled with Western power and neoliberalism (Duggan 2002; Puar 2007). This literature has led to a diversification of concepts related to sexual practices and identities and the uneven ways in which sexual minorities see themselves as part of the global queer community, as highlighted by Blackwood (2010) for tomboys and their girlfriends in Indonesia. They simultaneously see themselves as belonging to the global queer community and yet different from the range of identities promoted by it. The emphasis more recently is on the diversity of local queer identities and practices, both historical and contemporary. For example, in India, the use of the older terms hijra, kothi, jogappa, arvani have joined the LGBTQIA identities, though the latter are more frequently used by the media and have been useful in making rights based claims (e.g., Dave 2012; Puri 2008). In Indonesia, gay Muslim lives exist as “habitation of incommensurability” where they see their gayness as a sin and marry heterosexually to make amends, or see it as divine or God given and a challenge that they have to live with (Boellstorff 2005). Additionally, there is also a challenge to gender categories as mutually exclusive, the way they are often understood. For example, Blackwood (2010) shows how tomboys in Indonesia perform femininity at home and masculinity in public places to maintain their queer identity along with their familial ties. Lakkimsetti contributes to this important scholarship with her insightful exploration of how LGBT activists in India have been able to make strategic use of transnational advocacy around HIV/AIDS and human rights, yet remain legally marginalized within their nation state.
Another line of scholarship, exemplified by one of the articles in the special issue, is the ways in which local political and religious actors define homosexuality as a Western import and use homophobia to quell political opposition as Currier (2012) found in the case of Namibia. But Currier (2012) also showed how, through regional alliances, LGBT and feminist activists in Namibia prevented organizations from the Global North from determining their sexual diversity activism. McKay and Angotti make a significant and astute contribution to the study of political homophobia by tracing the evolution of anti-homosexual discourses in sub-Saharan Africa and showing how they are linked to both transnational issues and national actors.
Together, these studies on globalization and sexualities demonstrate the mutually dynamic relationship between global and local discourses on sexuality, challenge the hegemony of western conceptions of sexuality, and problematize the ubiquitous use of western categories in studies of sexualities.
Advancing the Study of Gender and Globalization
Despite the rich body of knowledge that has emerged over the last several decades, we think the field would be enriched by greater consideration of several issues. Despite critiques by Grewal and Kaplan (2001), Blackwood and Wieringa (2007), and others, the hegemonic definition of sex and gender as binaries is left intact in most analyses (we do not except our own work from this criticism). Millan (2016) demonstrates the real life pitfalls of such an approach in the context of Eastern Europe, where western categories of both gender and feminism have travelled since transition to democracy without critical input from “local” feminists. While there are global flows of gender and feminism from above and below, she argues, most local dialogues happen in English using terms developed in the West.
In an important essay about how the politics of gender within non-Western locations do not necessarily lend themselves to being read through the lens of binary arrangements of masculinity and femininity, Sinha (2012) challenges us to not merely export the gender binary to other parts of the world but to rethink the category itself based on different locations:
[I]t is … precisely in the nonexotic ordinary character of the daily practices of gender, the “range of subject positions taken up by women and men in everyday life,” that the implications of this scholarship are potentially so devastating to a unitary (and modern European) understanding of gender as part of a sex-gender schema. (Sinha 2012, 359-60)
Manalansan (2006) and Roberts and Connell (2016) similarly argue against assuming a stable gender order and universalizing notions of gender scripts, and for a more relational analysis, recognizing that sexes and genders are usually constructed in relation to others. Although their articles are not primarily oriented toward challenging sex and gender binaries, the articles by Lakkimsetti and McKay and Angotti push the literature forward by illuminating the effects of global discourses and actors who present sex, gender, and sexual orientation as binaries.
As evident in the selective literature review above, most of the scholarship on gender and globalization still primarily focuses on women, even as there is increasing work on masculinities. However, Connell’s (1987) work on hegemonic masculinity and the debates over this concept (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) have influenced recent studies of how global processes are influencing masculinities in Cote d’Ivoire (Matlon 2016); Mexico (Carrillo 2002; Gutmann 2006; Salzinger 2004); Nigeria (Smith 2014); South Africa (Decoteau 2013; Morrell 2001); Vietnam (Hoang 2014); and Uganda (Wyrod 2016). In this special issue, Leonard’s article on multiple masculinities along the oil pipeline in Chad is a fascinating contribution to this literature. Particularly significant is the way she is able to relate masculine identities to the globalized conditions of work (and non-work) as well as local men’s ties with expatriate workers.
We also argue that the gender and globalization literature would benefit from further expanding the range of topics and issues that it addresses. For example, while religion and secularism are rapidly growing (or perhaps returning) as subjects of interest to “global and transnational” sociology, this literature tends to be fairly separate from the literature on religion and gender (Avishai et al. 2015), despite a wave of interest in the intersections of religion, gender, and the global in disciplines such as anthropology and religious studies. And despite early feminist claims that all issues are gender issues, issues of climate change, sustainability, food sovereignty, disasters, refugee flows, terrorism, rise of populism, and water rights are not well represented in the study of gender and globalization in the US academy though they are being addressed by women activists within and outside the US. In this special issue, McKay and Angotti’s article on homophobic discourses in Africa is an important step in broadening the gender and globalization lens.
Similar tensions are also evident in how sociologists think about globalization as a study of societies beyond the US. Although as scholars who primarily do research in the Global South, we are pleased to see such a large body of work based on research outside the US, we are also concerned that this subfield is reproducing First World / Third World dichotomies from early feminist scholarship and contributing to a situation in which gender and sexuality in the US are rarely interrogated in terms of transnational/global processes unless they have to do with issues such as migration or trafficking. Indeed, in sociology more generally we still see a tendency to view societies as bounded by nation states rather than produced in relation with other societies across borders; within this framework, research from outside the US is considered to be “area studies” and often has to be strongly justified in terms of its general theoretical or transnational relevance, but this is rarely the case for research done within the US. Thus, while there are many scholars studying gender outside the US with a transnational lens, there seems to be an artificial separation between such work and the mainstream sociology of gender. It is really only on the margins of sociology of gender, such as in studies of migrant families and gender relations, (Dreby 2010; Menjivar 2002; Purkayastha 2005), that we see consideration of the transnational. We propose that US sociology, and especially the study of gender, would be greatly enriched by engaging more with the valuable insights and concepts that have emerged from the study of gender and globalization as well as more macro feminist theorizations of globalization (Bose 2015; Moghadam 1999; Sassen 2000).
While transnational perspectives have emerged that provincialize the US and include it in studies of globalization, for the most part gender and globalization continues to be seen as studying gender relations outside the US. Thus, a kind of parochialism persists in US sociology in regards to the place of the US within globalization studies. Such parochialism may also be related to the more general skepticism of sociology toward what has traditionally been considered “area studies.” Indeed, too often there is a disconnect between sociological studies that examine global networks or linkages (such as international trade or climate pacts) and those that focus on a particular country or region. The articles for this special issue demonstrate the analytical richness gained by combining an examination of the transnational dimension with a thick understanding of local and national contexts.
Finally, as this overview also demonstrates, even as sociological scholarship has become inclusive of men and masculinities and sexualities, at least in North America, it continues to be primarily sociologists who identify as women who write about gender and globalization (recent exceptions being David 2015; Epstein and Carrillo 2014; and Wyrod 2016). Such a gendered division of intellectual labor reflects the tensions within sociology and most social sciences and humanities disciplines emerging from what Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne once called “the missing feminist revolution in Sociology” (Stacey and Thorne 1985). While gender analysis has become prominent in the discipline of sociology, as well as inclusive of men and transgendered people, and is moving from a gender binary to a more gender fluid and queer understanding of the category itself, the subfield of gender continues to be dominated by women sociologists.
This diverse literature on gender and globalization has contributed a great deal to social science. It has generated significant and ongoing debates about gender and agency, especially with respect to transnational economic and cultural forces; the extent to which the globalization of production is shaping new forms of gender inequality and providing new opportunities for women’s mobilization; as well as challenging discussions about human rights, feminism, and LGBT movements and their impact in postcolonial settings. Many recent studies have also employed innovative methodologies, such as multi-sited ethnographies and participatory action research, as well as drawing connections and links to transnational power structures. The articles we have selected for this special issue expand on many of these themes, but also suggest fruitful new directions.
Moving Forward with New Research
The articles in this special issue are representative of the broadening of the literature from a focus on globalization’s economic effects on women to a wider emphasis on how transnational processes are implicated in various kinds of struggles related to gender. Indeed, these articles are each in their own way expanding the purview of studies of gender and globalization.
The articles in this special issue highlight new directions in the field of gender and globalization within sociology. We see three clear trends in these articles, as well as in the broader pool of submissions. First, they emphasize transnational linkages, depicting globalization as a dynamic process, and aim to understand how transnational as well as national or local forces shape how categories are constructed and how they operate. These authors depict national and global processes in ways that don’t render them dichotomous but instead emphasize intersections between them. Second, work, agency, and collective action continue to be major themes, but we see a new and important emphasis on the transnational circulation of masculinities and sexualities as well as relational gender analysis. Several of these articles shed light on how globalization processes are both challenging and reinforcing norms, attitudes, and behaviors relating to men and masculinities as well as sexualities. This is a notable shift in the field which has primarily focused on women and where discussions on sexuality tended to focus largely on heterosexuality, sexual violence, and women’s sex work. Third, we think the large number of submissions to this special issue shows that sociologists, including those in the US, are interested in these issues, and are increasingly doing research in many different world regions. In fact, we were thrilled to receive many excellent submissions based on research in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the latter a region that we consider to be severely neglected in US sociology. Thus, it is unusual and exciting to be able to present as a special issue of a major North American sociology journal two articles based on research in Asia and two articles based on research in Africa.
We see all of these as vital developments—defying the conventional image of globalization as a one-way North-South or West-East process, emphasizing the intersections of the local and transnational, challenging the restriction of gender to women, furthering a social constructionist understanding of sexuality, and more generally, broadening the purview of what it means to study both gender and transnational processes.
The Article Lineup
Hae Yeon Choo’s article builds on the literature showing that global migration for work is a deeply gendered phenomenon—she delineates the tensions around citizenship and the impacts on different kinds of transnational migrants in South Korea, and she also demonstrates the consequences of different kinds of advocacy for women migrants. Importantly, while a great deal of migration literature focuses on the US and Western Europe, Choo shows us how gendered migration flows are producing significant struggles in Asian contexts and new forms of citizenship are potentially negotiated in these processes. Choo’s case shows how globalization is increasingly regionalized, with flows not simply from the Global South to the Global North, or even from West to East, but from poorer to wealthier countries within Asia.
Evident in the articles by Chaitanya Lakkimsetti and Tara McKay and Nicole Angotti is the increasingly global spread of binary notions of gender/sexuality, even as such binaries are also being challenged. The authors reveal the ways in which discourses and practices around sexualities circulate globally and nationally, and are linked to struggles over sex workers and LGBTQ rights in India as well as homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa. While there is an established body of literature on LGBTQ movements and identities in globalizing contexts, these articles branch out in new directions by showing how actors in very different parts of the world engage with binary understandings of gender and sexuality as well as how transnational advocacy can both shape and help to challenge such binaries. We are excited that this special issue can thus contribute to a growing literature on globalization and sexualities.
We are also very pleased to be able to present work that examines men and masculinities and the ways in which global processes are challenging and reinforcing norms of masculinity. This is evident in Leonard’s article on Chad, which shows how the global oil industry is generating new ways of being masculine as well as interesting new tensions around masculinities. Leonard’s article also shows how masculine identities are constructed in relation to other men and to women, demonstrating the strength of relational gender analysis.
While masculinity is of increasing interest to sociology, most sociological literature focuses on masculinity in the US. Leonard’s article adds to a growing literature on how global processes are implicated in shifting masculinities, in this case in Africa.
Methodologically, the articles by Choo, Lakkimsetti, and Leonard are all based on substantial ethnographic fieldwork, while McKay and Angotti analyze an original dataset of articles from local news media. We are pleased to be able to present articles based on such rich and ambitious research.
Conclusions
The scholarship on gender and globalization and the articles in this special issue highlight both the gendered patterning of transnational forces and relations as well as the way gender and sexuality are shifting and evolving in different parts of the world. As Connell (2016a) observes, today gender orders are in flux everywhere and operate at multiple levels with contradictory impact for men and women. We hope that more scholars of all genders will use a gendered lens to understand processes of globalizations, even as that lens itself is being reimagined. Feminist scholars (Scott 1999) have long argued that examining gender/sexuality is not simply about investigating the meanings of masculinity and femininity but a broader examination of how ideas about sex and sexual differences are used to create and justify relations of power. We encourage US scholars to engage more with the transnational, and as Connell (2016) argues for masculinities, we need to decolonize the scholarship on gender and globalizations in light of the histories of colonization, decolonization, postcolonial development, and neoliberal globalization.
There is also an urgent need to understand how contemporary global issues such as environmental change, natural and human-made disasters, racism and xenophobia, emerging forms of work and the “sharing economy,” digitalization and social media, religion and the secular, terrorism and transnational violence, and displacement are gendered. We also encourage gender scholars to consider the gendered aspects of ongoing challenges to conventional Western European visions of modernity, evident in the appeal of right wing and religious extremist movements, as well as indigenous and global justice movements (e.g., Conway 2013; Escobar 2008; Santos 2007). The purview of what constitutes issues of gender and globalization includes all of these issues and many more. While we are inspired by forty years of feminist scholarship, we hope that forty years hence the gendered lens on globalizations will be vastly expanded.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Rae Blumberg, Hae Yeon Choo, Ashley Currier, and Valentine Moghadam for their participation in the symposium that inspired this special issue. This introduction has also benefited greatly from comments and suggestions from Christine Bose, Janet Conway, Myra Marx Ferree, and Afshan Jafar as well as two anonymous members of the Qualitative Sociology editorial board. Koyel Khan provided valuable help with the preparation of this introduction. We especially want to thank David Smilde for his support and advice and Rebecca Hanson for her extensive assistance with this special issue. Finally, thanks also to all those who reviewed manuscripts and to Leslie Salzinger for writing the Afterword.
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Desai, M., Rinaldo, R. Reorienting Gender and Globalization: Introduction to the Special Issue. Qual Sociol 39, 337–351 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-016-9340-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-016-9340-9