ABSTRACT
Feminist scholars working in the development field have long questioned the meaning and making of gender in shaping restructuring processes, international governmental institutions, nation-states, and household and community relations. Gender and Development (GAD) scholarship extended earlier discussions by positing gender as socially constructed and as embedded in development and globalization discourse (Jaquette and Staudt 2006). Feminist ethnographers have shown how notions of gender themselves are produced through global restructuring. For example, in Genders in Production (2003), sociologist Leslie Salzinger demonstrates how women’s gender identities are produced on the maquila factory floor. As the majority female labor force is trained and disciplined as maquila workers, managers, and factory owners are creating, rather than merely reproducing (as assumed in positivist political economic frameworks), a certain set of roles and expectations that the workers are obliged to follow in order to keep their jobs. That is, new gendered subjectivities are produced through transnational production (Salzinger 2003), itself a product of the so-called neoliberal model of global development and governance. This type of research has been key in pointing out the complex and often contradictory relationships between the production of gendered subjectivities, capitalism, and globalization.1
