ABSTRACT
As globalism reorders gender, patriarchy is redefined, and with it, women’s movements and feminism. But what kinds of feminist forces are brought into play, and how do these develop? Feminisms are embedded in the particular gender order, a product of interactions between circumstance and consciousness, as well as between experience and action. Feminism, as a social movement, involves the construction of a collective social actor with a shared awareness and a particular set of practices geared to pursuing common aspirations. The aspirations, practices, consciousness, awareness – indeed the very categories to be constructed and mobilized – reflect the ways in which patriarchal antagonisms are played out. In other words feminisms are situated in experience and in the specificity of patriarchy. Against the universalizing disembodied logic of globalism, feminist praxis asserts the embodied experience of gender orders in a dialectical relationship with globalism. This chapter seeks to enter into this dialectic, exploring the dynamics of feminism under globalism from the vantage-point of the global semi-periphery.
