ABSTRACT
During the preparations for the Beijing conference, serious attempts were made by the Vatican and conservative forces to undermine feminism by staging an apparently trivial sideshow—namely, an attack on the use of the word "gender". The demand for global citizenship confronts feminists, once again, with the difficult problem of whether they can really represent the underclass. Although global in scope, feminism is necessarily shaped by national and regional cultures, politics, and economics. Perhaps rather than describing feminism simply as a movement with a set of objectives, one should describe it as a position that destabilizes both fundamentalism and the new oppressive structures that are emerging with late capitalism. As a secular nonessentialist and counterhegemonic movement, it must confront other global institutions, not only the Vatican but also the World Bank, a confrontation that involves more urgently than ever the struggle for interpretive power.
