art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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Tatjana ĐURIĆ KUZMANOVIĆ
Globalization: Feminist Economic Perspective
Eighties saw radical changes in women’s lives worldwide, whether in terms of their
inclusion into or exclusion from global economy. The issue of the impact of globalisation on
women implies perceiving the most direct relationships between gender and globalisation.
An analytic gender model is supposed to ensure avoiding all pitfalls noted in the debates
on globalisation, and reproducing the existent dichotomies and stereotypes.
Gender analysis, as an integral part of analytic approach to globalisation, contributes
to its better comprehension as a multidimensional process. Namely, conventional
interpretations of globalisations are too narrow, “economical”, focusing primarily on
changes occurring on the market and state levels, and their mutual relationships. In other
words, little attention is paid to the global and local reconstruction of social, cultural, racial
ethnic, gender, national and family identities, roles and relations. The first stage of gender
analysis, therefore, is the re-conceptualisation of global space from gender perspective. It
further generates the re-conceptualisation of national space, state, economy, household
and civil society.
Such articulation of the global restructuring process will demonstrate old and new
forms of including or excluding partners from the globalisation process and the features
of the existing inequalities. Finally, such analysis will show what response and which
forms of resistance current globalisation brings about. Such response includes various
activities and strategies of women’s groups, peace movements, green movements,
which sometimes acquire a dimension of exclusive, and even forceful resistance to
globalisation. Such violent response is the most frequently articulated through ethnic
conflicts, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Gender analysis should also provide
a feminist perspective in considering such resistance to globalisation (Marchand H.
Marianne and Runzan Sisson Anne, 2001).
Having disregarded the less significant debate on whether globalisation actually exists
or not, the fist question related to globalisation concerns its meaning and its linearity as a
process. Modernisation oriented theoreticians see globalisation mostly a continued global
homogenisation after the Western model (Fukuyama, Naisbitt, Kothari). Other authors,
however, describe globalisation more as a globalised production of diversity (Appadurai,
1996). Whether globalisation will be regarded as homogenisation or heterogenisation
largely depends on the perspective used in the course of the analysis.
Many analyses, including those used in development studies, are characterised by a
macroeconomic perspective that regards globalisation as a complex, but unidimensional
process. The unidimensionality of this process is largely determined by neo-liberal logic
based on the modernisation thought pattern, even if theoreticians who go beyond neoliberal
logic seldom abandon the idea of globalisation as a linear process. This means that
globalisation is placed in a global context, but this context is not problematised. Thus, one
does not ask the question of from whose perspective it is a global process, and for whom it
is. The theoretic perspective of gender and development is mostly reactive when analysing
macro-political and economic issues (Peason, Ruth and Jackson, Cecile, 1998).