ABSTRACT
In George Eliot’s day, the underlying assumption was that “young ladies” did not understand political economy because they did not have anything to do with it: the workings of an international capitalist political economy as codified and reified by classical political economists like Adam Smith were considered far removed from the experiential world and daily lives of young, middle class women in nineteenth-century Britain. They were supposedly too delicate and emotional to engage with or even discuss the harsh and rational world of political economy. Yet, as contemporary feminist scholars of, and commentators on international or global political economy (IPE or GPE) have increasingly revealed, the lives of nineteenth-century “young ladies” in colonizing countries and those of countless women across the colonized world were intricately and inextricably bound up in the creation of what was to become a global capitalist political economy. Now most often referred to as globalization, it has everything to do with the lives of women and men across the world in the twenty-first century. In the first edition of this collection, we made the case for the centrality of
gender, as a relation of inequality based on social constructions of masculinity and femininity, to the process of globalization that we preferred to call global restructuring to better capture the multi-dimensional, multi-speed, and disjuncted nature of this economic, political, social, and cultural phenomenon.2 We review some of these arguments in this second edition introduction because there is still resistance, particularly in conventional IPE literature but also in the popular imagination, to seeing this powerful relationship in all its complexity and acknowledging that globalization is not an overarching, unitary force majeure out of nowhere. Rather it is an open-ended, historically
produced, social and political construction with uneven and contradictory dimensions and effects that are subject to change. Beyond reviewing the substance of these arguments, however, we also bring
to bear more recent feminist scholarship on gender and globalization that further elucidates our understanding of varying intersectionalities of gender, race, nation, and sexual identities, ideologies, and practices produced through and productive of global restructuring. We argue that these offer richer “sightings” of the connections between gender, in all its complexities, and global restructuring. In addition; we follow through the direction taken in our first volume by complicating and expanding “sites” of global restructuring, taking them beyond geographical spaces to other analytic categories, such as sites of cultural, symbolic, and sexuality production and reproduction. Some of the latest scholarship on transnational feminism also raises new questions about and approaches to the issue of “resistances” to global restructuring through an intersectional gender lens.
