ABSTRACT
Global restructuring and the processes of globalization which effect it are disrupting traditional conceptualizations of political and economic space (Harvey 1989; Bird et al. 1993; Agnew and Corbridge 1995; Featherstone et al. 1995). In broad terms, globalization can be understood as “the emergence and spread of a supraterritorial dimension of social relations” (Scholte 1996: 46). Restructuring concerns among other things “the mobility of capital vs. the fixedness of the state as a territorial unit” (Runyan 1996: 238; see also the Introduction to this volume). Analysts are being pressed towards increasingly integrated understandings of the old state/market configuration in order not only to map the changing patterns of transnational production and consumption but to explore the political economic dynamics characteristic of them. Female labor is central to restructuring as a major feature of the cheaper resources of the South (compared to the North) sought out by transnational corporations, and as mobile labor to service various forms of economic transition in home and host states. Hence the recent growth of global flows of domestic workers, the subject of this chapter (see also Pettman 1998).
