Gender, Governance and Power: Finding the Global

at the Local Level

LAURA J. SHEPHERD

& LUCY FERGUSON

University of Birmingham, UK

University of Shefeld, UK
ABSTRACT One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of
globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The
articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative
contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal
since its inception. Further, this issue represents the rst issue of Globalizations that, in its
entirety, takes seriously the claim that gender matters to global politics and therefore to
globalisation. Ideas about gender are thoroughly bound up in the processes of integration,
fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration that characterise the sets of
practices and politics described by the short-hand of globalisation, and in various ways the
articles in this collection interrogate these practices to enrich our understanding of their
particular and more general effects.
Keywords: gender, global governance, feminist theory, globalization
Introduction
Feminist engagements with globalisation have a long and varied history, overlapping and inter-
twining with feminist analysis of development politics, political economy, and institutional
global politics. This substantial and inuential literature (summarised nicely in Peterson,
2010; see also Enloe, 2007) has facilitated a thorough-going critique of Unnuanced and bull-
dozer readings of globalisation [that] elide globalisation with trade liberalisation, modernis-
ation and Westernisation (Grifn, 2010, p. 221) and, further, drawn attention to the various
ways in which globalisation relies on particular congurations of gendered power. Drawing
Correspondence Addresses: Laura J. Shepherd, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University
of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. Email: l.j.shepherd@bham.ac.uk; Lucy Ferguson,
Department of Politics, University of Shefeld, Elmeld, Northumberland Road, Shefeld, S10 2TU, UK. Email:
l.j.ferguson@shefeld.ac.uk
ISSN 1474-7731 Print/ISSN 1474-774X Online/11/0201277 #2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2010.493011
Globalizations
April 2011, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 127133
on this literature, we suggest that there are four interrelated concepts that help to structure
globalisation, and all four are gendered in very specic ways.
The Global
Gender is represented in the global through the continual association of women with the private
sphere, as determined by an understanding of gender that maps the duality of men and women on
to the dichotomy of public and private. This is mirrored in the association of low/soft politics
(e.g. domestic matters, welfare, social security, and so on), even the description of which is gen-
dered, with femininity and the rendering of the international as a domain of high/hard politics
to which only masculine/ised subjects have access (i.e. only subjects that are masculine by birth
or behaviour or both).
The Economic
The economic realm is constructed as an abstract, apolitical, and even asocial domain in conven-
tional analysis (Wichterich, 2000, p. 30). However, on further investigation through gendered
lenses, men are the subjects of formal economic enterprise, adventurous, risk-taking, fast-
paced, globe-trotting young men (Marchand, 2000, p. 223) or their corollary, dignied and
mature corporate shareholders and executives (see Hooper, 2001). Either way, the notion of
the economic that informs processes of globalisation is gendered, and gendered masculine.
Moreover, assumptions about what constitutes the economic serve to perpetuate gendered
inequalities by obscuring the unpaid work of social reproductionpredominantly carried out
by womenon which the processes of production and consumption ultimately depend
(Elson, 2000; Hoskyns and Rai, 2007).
Mobility and Dynamism
In keeping with the public man/private woman assumption described above, there is a secondary
core assumption about the mobility of masculinity versus the xity of femininity that inuences
globalisation. This aspect of conceptual organisation draws heavily on gendered and sexualised
understandings of colonialism, imperialism and conquest, where the split between the developed
(colonial) and developing (colonised) world is constructed in gendered terms as conforming to
conventional binary opposition.
[P]ortraying the state as a feminized spinster/siren and the market as a masculinised roving bachelor
on the make . . . justies erosions in regulation of global capital and normalises a kind of love em
and leave em production, trade and nance that enriches only a few at the expense of far too many.
(Runyan, 2003, p. 139)
In order to carve out a space for agency in an era of globalisation, vast populations of women
have been forced into relocating to nd employment, for example, in the infamous export-
processing zones in Mexico and China (see Wright, 2006). However, just proving the ability
for mobility does not grant feminine subjects access to power, as the value accorded to the
employment they can nd is limited.
Info-technology
The devaluation of womens labour has been enabled by the articulation of certain skills as
natural to women and therefore not to be rewarded. Women are hired to work on assembly
128 L.J. Shepherd & L. Ferguson
lines and in domestic services because of their famous dexterity, docility, patience,
attentiveness and cheapness (Elson and Pearson, 1998; Salzinger, 2003, cited in Wright,
2006, p. 25). These attributes are feminised, but also assumed to be found in women. They
are constructed as womens inherent characteristics, and as such are neither rare nor special,
thus the women themselves are rendered disposable, as any one woman could be replaced by
any other. In contrast, the rareed realm of info-technology is masculinised and therefore com-
fortable with and accepting of masculine/ised subjects, as info-technology is constructed as
high-risk, complex, detached, and rational in the extreme.
Where Does This Leave Us?
What are the implications of a set of beliefs about globalisation that implicitly or explicitly rely
on these gendered concepts? As Cynthia Enloe explains, globalisation
has a futuristic ring: traditional national boundaries will mean less as data and capital goods are
transferred electronically around the globe; teenagers in their Benetton sweaters will grow up
with a global consciousness. But to turn this vision into reality government ofcials are relying
on old-fashioned ideas about women. (2000, p. 174)
At every level, from individual employers of domestic help through small businesses to multi-
national corporations, hiring, ring, nancing, and restructuring are inseparable from gendered
imaginings of whose work is valued in which ways and under what circumstances (see also
Peterson and Runyan, 1999, pp. 130146). It is quite unlikely that deeply entrenched beliefs
about appropriate roles for men and women will change overnight. Thus, feminists who inter-
rogate globalisation seek not only to make explicit the implicit assumptions about gender that
inform neoliberal policies (in the hope that exposing the unstable and unsustainable foundations
of the ideas will expedite the erosion of those foundations) but also to explore ways in which
processes as they are can be made more equitable.
In sum, feminist engagements with globalisation have, in addition to their work on gendered
imaginings of integration, fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration, explored
the same three concerns that enliven non-feminist engagements with globalisation: space, insti-
tutions, and power. Literature on globalisation(s) is understandably curious about changing
spatial arrangements and the demarcation of space/territory. Whether or not we are moving
inexorably towards Kenichi Ohmaes borderless world (1999), scholars who have sought to
engage with debate about globalisation have drawn on insights about spatiality derived from
a range of sources, perhaps most notably human geography (see, for example, Peck and
Tickell, 2002, a seminal article on this subject; also Agnew and Corbridge, 1995).
Within this issue, feminist scholars also question cartographies and geographies of power, the
(re)congurations of which are central to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship
between globalisation and space than is permitted within the conceptualisation of globalisation
as an abstract liberal capitalist project devoid of political intent (Grifn, 2010, p. 221). In her
empirically rich account of the activities of Ethiopian women as they seek to translate inter-
national womens rights norms into national law (Burgess, this issue), Gemma Burgess theo-
rises connectivity and dissonance between the spatial domains that, while they are inevitably
arbitrarily dened and therefore problematic, order political action: the global, local, inter-
national and domestic.
Burgess argues that, in the particular case which she analyses, participation in formal political
activity is mediated by uneven and contested geographies of participation (this issue), a
Gender, Governance, and Power 129
conclusion broadly supported by Donatella Alessandrini and Irene Leon (this issue). Alessan-
drini and Leon suggest that these geographies have manifested, particularly in relation to
gender and sexual justice, in the marginalisation of non-White, non-Western feminist voices;
their conversation brings to the fore the complexity and variety of feminist voices seeking to
contribute to debate about global social justice and the ways in which space is hierarchically
organised and the manner in which it function (Alessandrini and Leon, this issue). These
authors bring their piece to a close with a quiet warning about the second central concern of glo-
balisation, arguing that the need to subvert power relations from multiple horizons [is] an issue
that makes even greater sense when the systems institutions . . . strengthen themselves and
establish solid mechanisms to ensure market control as an irreversible fact (this issue).
In their articles, Sophie Harman, Suzanne Bergeron, and Penny Grifn all engage, in very
different ways, the institutions of global governance that are produced by and productive of a
commitment to neoliberal globalisation: market liberalism, the primacy of foreign direct invest-
ment (FDI), the outward-orientation of economies and the contraction of the state and its
machinery (Grifn, 2010, p. 220). Literature on globalisation has been concerned with the insti-
tutional apparatus that has underpinned, or at least facilitated, the shifts in spatial/political
arrangements discussed above for the last two decades (see, for example, Diehl, 2005; Wilkinson
and Hughes, 2002). Feminist interrogations of the ways in which international institutions (and
other political actors) negotiate the politics of the global include but are in no way limited to
studies of gender mainstreaming and the gendered effects of institutional policy across the
globe (for a useful overview, see True, 2010). Suzanne Bergeron (this issue) builds on this foun-
dation as she offers a nuanced critique of the assumptions about reproductive labour built in to
the policies of development institutions. Bergeron concludes that households are changing in
developing economies in the context of neoliberalism, such that fewer correspond to the sup-
posed norm of nuclear, heterosexual coupledom (this issue) and yet it is this norm that continues
to inform development policy.
Similarly, both Grifn and Harman (this issue) question the governance of HIV/AIDS by
international institutions, in a special section on this theme. From different theoretical positions,
using different methodological techniques, both Harman and Grifn warn of the grievous impli-
cations of limited and exclusionary ideas about gender, sexuality, parenting, and family that
order institutional responses to HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Harman conducted eld inter-
views with national and local government ofcials, representatives of various United Nations
organisations as well as in-country and headquarters ofcials of the World Bank as part of a
wider research project. In the article she offers here, her detailed analysis interweaves a critique
of the received wisdom about political representation and participation with an exploration of the
ramications of the dual feminisation of HIV/AIDS. Harman argues that it is both the type of
inclusion and the emphasis on inclusion alone that makes the feminisation of HIV/AIDS par-
ticularly problematic (this issue).
Grifn extends this insight through her sophisticated critique of World Bank governance of
HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, proposing that
Bank discourse . . . predicates and reproduces a picture of African sexualities as inherently proble-
matic, instituting policy interventions that echo the pernicious efforts of European colonisers to clas-
sify, medicate and regulate sexual practice as part of a broader system of social control. (Grifn, this
issue)
This is an original and persuasive engagement with policy-making at the intersection of global
and local spaces, exactly the kind of policy-making that interests scholars of globalisation, not
130 L.J. Shepherd & L. Ferguson
least because the credibility of the World Banks post-structural adjustment mandate of
poverty alleviation hinges on reversing the massive damage that HIV/AIDS inicts on key
economic growth and developmental indicators (Grifn, this issue).
Grifns article comments on not only the institutionstheir politics and processesthat
have a negative impact on the management of a variety of human ills, but also the intricate
and diffuse networks of power that (re)produce those ills and, ultimately, the very human sub-
jects of which the policies purport to speak. In this way, Grifn also contributes to the third and
nal sector of debates around globalisation that we wish to highlight here: contemporary
explorations of power using the analytical tool of governmentality (see, for example, de
Goede, 2006; Larner and Walters, 2004). Derived predominantly from the work of Michel Fou-
cault (see, in particular, Foucault, 2007), the concept of governmentality articulates (joins
together) governmentthe conduct of conduct, a more or less calculated and rational set
of ways of shaping conduct through a multiplicity of authorities and agencies in and outside
of the state and at a variety of spatial levels. (Watts cited in Foster, this issue, emphasis
added)with mentality, which is understood as mindset or capacity and which further centra-
lises the constitution of the supposedly agential human subject. The emphasis added to the pre-
vious quotation demonstrates how and why those interested in globalisation have engaged
fruitfully with governmentality, exploring the authorities and agencies involved in multiple
processes of globalisation at a variety of spatial levels, as mentioned above.
In keeping with the other contributions to this issue, Emma Foster explores her chosen analyti-
cal vehicle, namely global environmental governmentality, as if gender matters. Just as feminist
interventions in debates about space and spatiality have drawn attention to the ways in which
hierarchical geographies and cartographies of power are always already gendered, feminist
engagements with the institutional apparatus of globalisation recognises not only that legitimacy
and authority to act at the local/national/international/level is gendered, but also that insti-
tutions are staffed by gendered bodies and their imaginings are replete with gendered ideas
and ideals that delimit the boundaries of appropriate behaviour, whether consciously or not.
Similarly, feminist work on governmentalityin this collection, Grifn, Foster, and the
article by Tine Davids, Francien van Driel, and Anouka van Eerdewijkcentralises gender,
seeks to connect questions of rule, politics and administration to the realm of bodies, lives,
selves and persons (Davids et al., this issue). Given that the social recognition of bodies
relies in large part on the social ordering function performed by gender, we would venture to
suggest that proceeding to interrogate governmentality without centralising gender risks over-
looking important aspects of how we understand what it means to be human in late modernity.
Foster concludes, in keeping with Grifns analysis, that popular ctions determining how
individuals should relate with regard to their sexuality . . . demonstrate oppressive, exclusionary
and constrictive constructions of gender and intimacy (this issue). Meanwhile, Davids et al.
(this issue) apply a multidimensional analytical methodology to the study of gender and gov-
ernmentality, using the story of Malick, a 20-year-old Muslim boy living in Dakar, the capital of
Senegal . . . to deconstruct sexualised masculinity and discourses on HIV/AIDS to illuminate the
complexity of moral agency (this issue). Approaching strategies of governance and techniques
of governmentality enhance our understanding of the multiple processes that constitute globa-
lisation; undertaking these analytical ventures with a feminist curiosity (Enloe, 2004) about the
concept, nature and practice of gender (Zalewski, 1995, p. 341) enriches our understanding even
further, as this curiosity questions the ways in which gender is made meaningful in social/pol-
itical interactions and the practicesor performancesthrough which gender congures bound-
aries of subjectivity.
Gender, Governance, and Power 131
Where Do We Go from Here?
The year 2010 was a busy one for feminist scholars, especially those interested in globalisation
and global governance. The Beijing +15 conference at the United Nations in New York in
March 2010 carried out a global review of gender policy across a range of governance insti-
tutions. The conference reviewed the key commitments made by UN member states a decade
and a half earlier, when the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action were signed. In Septem-
ber 2010, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, of which gender issues are a
fundamental component (see Goal 3, which commits governments to promote gender equality
and empower women), was reviewed by a High Level UN meeting. October saw a global pro-
gramme of events interrogating the successes and shortcomings of UN Security Council Resol-
ution 1325, 10 years after its unanimous adoption by the Security Council. These important
junctures in global policy and processes of globalisation offered multiple opportunities for
researchers, activists, and practitioners to come together to create new denitions, policy
objectives, and political strategies. As such, the debates, theoretical innovations, and empirical
research presented here form part of a broader commitment to transforming global governance.
Taking into account the ever-changing global land/-scapes identied by Appadurai (1990,
pp. 67) and changes in both feminist analysis and gender policy, the articles in this special
issue locate a range of global debates in a variety of local contexts. Cartographically, these articles
tell stories of feminist works and lived experiences from sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the
nexus between the global local in womens movements in Ethiopia and on HIV/AIDS govern-
ance in Senegal. Geographically, Alessandrini and Leon present a challenge to top-down analyses
of globalisation by engaging specically with voices from Latin America, bringing to the fore-
ground feminisms from the global South. This collection also includes articles that engage
with sustainable development, the politics of World Bank policy, and the complexity of social
reproductive labour. These articles not only engage with and enhance existing feminist literature
on these subjects, but also challenge some of the limitations and a priori assumptions of non-fem-
inist works. As discussed above, the articles in this collection engage with many of the same
issues that enliven contemporary scholarship on globalisation and in Globalizationsspace,
institutions, and governmentalitywhile treating gender as a noun, a verb, and a logic that is
both produced by and productive of the ways in which we understand and perform global
politics (Shepherd, 2010, p. 5). This collection therefore goes far beyond adding women to
globalisation (or gender to Globalizations) and represents a testament to the feminist scholars
who have insisted, from the beginning, on nding the global at the local level.
References
Agnew, J. & Corbridge, S. (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy (London:
Routledge).
Appadurai, A. (1990) Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Public Culture, 2(2), pp. 124.
De Goede, M. (ed.) (2006) International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
Diehl, P. F. (ed.) (2005) The Politics of Global Governance: International Organisations in an Interdependent World, 3rd
edn (London: Lynne Rienner).
Elson, D. (2000) Gender at the Macroeconomic Level, in J. Cook, J. Roberts & G. Waylen (eds) Towards a Gendered
Political Economy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press), pp. 7797.
Elson, D. & Pearson, R. (1998) The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory production, in
N. Visvathan, L. Duggan, L. Nisonoff and N. Wiegersma (eds) The Women, Gender and Development Reader
(London: Zed Books).
132 L.J. Shepherd & L. Ferguson
Enloe, C. (2000) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd edn (London and
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Enloe, C. (2004) The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (London and Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press).
Enloe, C. (2007) Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Plymouth and Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littleeld).
Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19771978, ed. M. Senellart,
trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
Grifn, P. (2010) Development institutions and neoliberal globalisation, in L. J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global
Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge), pp. 218233.
Hooper, C. (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics (Chichester and New York,
NY: Columbia University Press).
Hoskyns, C. & Rai, S. (2007) Recasting the global economy: counting womens unpaid work, New Political Economy,
12(3), pp. 297317.
Larner, W. & Walters, W. (eds) (2006) Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge).
Marchand, M. (2000) Gendered representations of the global: reading/writing globalization, in R. Stubbs & G. Underhill
(eds) Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 218227.
Ohmae, K. (1999) The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, revised edn (New York, NY:
HarperCollins).
Peck, J. & Tickell, A. (2002) Neoliberalizing space, Antipode, 34(3), pp. 380404.
Peterson, V. S. (2010) International/global political economy, in L. J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics:
A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge), pp. 204217.
Peterson, V. S. & Runyan, A. S. (1999) Global Gender Issues, 2nd edn (Oxford and Boulder, CO: Westview Press).
Runyan, A. S. (2003) The place of women in trading places: gendered global/regional regimes and inter-nationalized
feminist resistance, in E. Kofman & G. Youngs (eds) Globalization: Theory and Practice, 2nd edn (London:
Continuum), pp. 139156.
Shepherd, L. J. (2010) Sex or gender? Bodies in world politics and why gender matters, in L. J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender
Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge), pp. 316.
True, J. (2010) Mainstreaming gender in international institutions, in L. J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global
Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge), pp. 189203.
Wichterich, C. (2000) The Globalized Woman (London: Zed).
Wilkinson, R. & Hughes, S. (eds) (2002) Global Governance: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge).
Wright, M. W. (2006) Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (London: Routledge).
Zalewski, M. (1995) Well, what is the feminist perspective on Bosnia? International Affairs, 71(2), pp. 339356.
Laura J. Shepherd is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Birmingham, UK.
She currently works at the intersection of gendered global politics, critical approaches to security
and International Relations theory. Laura is the editor of Gender Matters in Global Politics: A
Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010) and the author of
Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice (London: Zed, 2008), as well as many
scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, including International Studies Quarterly,
Review of International Studies, and Journal of Gender Studies.
Lucy Ferguson is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Shef-
eld. Her research addresses the gender dimensions of tourism as a development strategy in
global political economy. She has published a number of articles on this theme: on the
implementation of gender in World Bank tourism projects, published in International Feminist
Journal of Politics; and on the impact of tourism development on relations of social reproduc-
tion, published in Review of International Political Economy. Lucy has also published her
research in a range of non-academic outlets in order to engage with a broad range of actors.
She is based in Madrid and works with a number of different NGOs and international institutions
around the themes of gender equality, international development and tourism.
Gender, Governance, and Power 133
Copyright of Globalizations is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users
may print, download, or email articles for individual use.