Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

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SESSION II
GLOBALIZATION, GENDER AND SEXUALITY: MALAYSIAN AND
PHILIPPINE ARTICULATIONS
Elizabeth Uy Eviota
INTRODUCTION
Global capitalist expansion may be its major impetus
but globalization is much more than the workings of
capitalism on a world level. It also means expansion,
though not necessarily unproblematic, of associated
technological developments and an interweaving of a
political, material, and ideological culture. Globalization
is to be understood in relation to an economic, political
and social context and conceptualized as a relationship
between the global and the local. (Kinnvall and Jonsson,
2002) As such, social arrangements become relativized
with positive preferences for Western and capitalist
possibilities.
The political economy of globalization involves structures,
institutions and processes which work through human
beings who have their own personal and social historical
contexts. Thus, social structures, institutions and processes,
have both an objective logic and a subjective embodiment.
(Giddens, 1991) An understanding of this logic as it
intersects with the agency of human subjects is central
to any analysis of connections between globalization
and changes in sexual and reproductive behavior.
Sex is an expression of a person’s sexuality, that
malleable feature of the self, a prime connecting point
between body, self -identity, and societal norms. (Giddens,
1992) Sexuality encompasses both the material and
ideological, from the physical capacity for sexual arousal
and pleasure to the personal and shared social meanings
attached to sexual behavior and the formation of identities.
It is articulated in sexual behavior - what people
do sexually with others or with themselves, how they
present themselves sexually, how they talk and act. Its
connection to the social renders sexuality not a thing
in itself, a category detached from the social matrix.
Rather, sexuality is embedded in a network of social
relations; it affects and is affected by social, political,
economic and religious factors.
One of these social relations is gender. Gender is the
structure of social relations between culturally defined
males and females and together with sexuality have
emerged as primary modes of self-consciousness in our
contemporary period; they are today’s reflexive projects,
the prisms of changing local contexts. (Giddens, 1992)
Gender and sexuality, as social relations, are never static
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
or unchanging; rather they are flexible, unstable features
of society. Gender and sexuality intersect with societal
processes and as societies change, existing forms of
relationships between and among women and men,
absorb, transform and mediate the forces of emergent
social, economic and political change and are as well
informed by these forces. In these relationships, women
and men engage in human praxis, as agents with needs
and intentions, actively maintaining, negotiating or
resisting, collectively or individually, institutional and
cultural forces that bear on their everyday lives. Because
sexual behavior is a social relation it both mirrors and
is lived through the salient power divisions in society
through gender as well as through nation, class, race,
and ethnicity. Its infusion with power renders sexuality
a matter of rights, both as a right to sexual expression
and as a right to be protected against unwanted sex.
INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION
AND SEXUALITY
Sexuality and what is sexual is implicated in a range of
societal institutions and cultural processes and events -
marriage, procreation, prostitution, reproductive health,
infectious diseases, parenting, gender roles, violence,
definitions of masculinity and femininity, and paid
work. The effects of globalization on the sexual are
varied and complex, indirect and direct, and are often
contradictory—have both negative and positive
features. Globalization has meant the pursuit of economic
growth largely through deregulation of markets and
prices, liberalization of trade, and reduction in the
economic role of the state resulting in a progressive erosion
of political and cultural borders and intensification of
interconnectedness mediated by communications and
information technologies. These events have precipitated
such phenomena as the expansion of education, the
migration of large numbers of women, the absorption
of specific groups of women and simultaneous
expulsion of men by the economy, revisions in state
policies, and shifts in media images and discourses of
social institutions and social movements. These associated
phenomena have, in turn, affected gender relations and
sexual practice.
In Malaysia and the Philippines the global expansion