T his paper casts a gender perspective on globalization to illuminate the
contradictory effects on women workers and on women's activism. The scope of the paper is global The sources of data are UN publications, coun- try-based data and newsletters from women's organizations as well as the author's fieldwork. The paper begins by examining the various dimensions of globalization-economic, politicaL and cultural-with a focus on their contradictory social-gender effects. These include inequalities in the global economy and the continued hegemony of the core, the feminization of labor, the withering away of the developmentalist/welfarist state, the rise of iden- tity politics and other forms of particularism, the spread of concepts of human rights and women's rights, and the proliferation of women's orga- nizations and transnational feminist networks. I argue that, although glo- balization has had dire economic effects, the process has created a new constituency-working women and organizing women-who may herald a potent anti-systemic movement. World-systems theory, social movement theory, and development studies should take account of female labor and of oppositional transnational feminist networks.
DEFINING GLOBALIZATION
Globalization is a complex economic, political, culturaL and geographic
process in which the mobility of capital, organizations, ideas, discourses, and peoples has taken on an increasingly global or transnational form. Much has been written on the subject from various disciplinary perspectives. Eco- nomic globalization pertains to deeper integration and more rapid interac- tion of economies through production, trade, and financial transactions by banks and multinational corporations, with an increased role for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the more recent World Trade Organization. Although the capitalist system has always been
JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, VOL V, 2, SUMMER 1999, 367-388