Foverty and Women's power to shape the world is one key component to addressing Poverty in low Income Nations - The review below is a new book just being published by one of FWOP Board Members- Professor Isidor Wallimann who lives in Basel. Isidor has worked with friends in Basel to develop a strong Social Economy program in Basel. Recently they have joined forces with the Urban Agriculture Network in Basel to develop an interesting partnership. Stan
Globalization and Third World Women: Exploitation, Coping and Resistance
Globalization and Third World Women: Exploitation, Coping and Resistance, edited by Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, Isidor Wallimann . Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. 214pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780754674634.
1. Torry Dickinson
1. Kansas State University
1. dickins@ksu.edu
It would be hard to read this collection and not sit up, set aside our global assembly line clothes and corporate coffee, and begin taking responsibility for how the world is developing. Taken as a whole, this is a pounding collection of global South-focused articles that can engross researchers, activists, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
Focusing on women in the post-1970s period in the Third World, as seen within a global system, the collection contains five theoretical and contextual chapters on women’s resistance (Martha Gimenez) and six historically specific chapters about women’s struggles against the exploitation of labor, land, and resources in Southern Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ecuador, and the Philippines and South Asia. Methods include the analysis of secondary literature (Robert Dibie), archival research, newspapers, state records, UNIFEM reports (Christobel Asiedu), and field research.
Key frameworks draw on gender-extended definitions of neo-liberalism and globalization (Ligaya Lindio-McGovern and Isidor Wallimann) and a global analysis of corporate- and state-imposed mixtures of waged and non-waged work, with the emergence of commoners’ movements as alternatives (Leigh Brownhill and Terisa Turner). Bringing back the importance of globally situated, regional core-satellite relations (as formulated by Gunder Frank in the 1970s), many writers examine how sub-imperial orbits form an integral part of global extraction and exploitation. For example, profit-makers operate within regional orbits of power when they bond, send and receive women in the sex trafficking industry (Bandana Purkayastha and Shweta Majumdar). Resistance to imperialism, including through regional organizing against sub-imperialism, helps to explain why ideas of national liberation often shape women’s transnational organizing. This affects how U.S. women from various diasporas connect to Third World homelands (Shireen Ally, Robin Magalit Rodriguez, and Anne Lacsamana). Intra-labor’s global relations also have enabled women in cooperatives to envision and build commons by working with middle-income supporters and consumers who live in the region and in the global North (Ann Ferguson).
Women’s resistance to exploitation in the Third World addresses how neo-liberal accumulation rests on their backs. Globalization and development turn out to be the same side of the coin, and not different sides (p. 5); one side enriches the center’s corporations and the other impoverishes the South’s women and men, including through re-enclosures and state cutbacks.
The remainer is in the ASA Journal ...
© American Sociological Association 2010
