Article Title
Document Type
Symposium
Publication Date
Fall 1996
Publication Citation
4 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 7 (1996)
Abstract
Economic globalization has reconfigured fundamental properties of the
nation-state, notably territoriality and sovereignty. There is an incipient
unbundling of the exclusive territoriality we have lcing associated with the
nation-state. The most strategic instantiation of this unbundling is probably
the global city, which operates as a partly denationalized plaform for global
capital. Sovereignty is being unbundled by these economic and other noneconomic
practices and new legal regimes. At the limit this means that the
State is no longer the only site for sovereignty and the normativity that comes
with it, and further, that the State is no longer the exclusive subject for
international law. Other actors, from NGOs and minority populations to
supranational organizations are increasingly emerging as subjects of
international law and actors in international relations.
Developing a feminist analytics of the global economy today will require
us to factor in these transformations if we are to go beyond a mere updating
ofthe economic conditions of women and men in different countries. Much of
the feminist scholarship on women and the economy and women and the law
has taken the nation-state as a given or as the context within which to examine
the issues at hand. And this is a major and necessary contribution. But now,
in view of the distinct impacts that globalization is having on the systemic
propertieso f the State--i.e., exclusive territorialitya nd sovereignty--it becomes
important to subject these to critical examination.
The purpose here is to contribute to a feminist analytics that allows us to
re-read and reconceptualize major features of today's global economy in a
manner that captures strategic instantiations of gendering, and formal and
operational openings that make women visible and can lead to greater
presence in representation and participation. My effort, then, is to expand the
analytic terrain within which we need to understand the global economy, to
render visible what is now evicted from the account.
Here I specify two strategic research sites for an examination of the
organizing dynamics of globalization and begin examining how gendering
operates in order to develop a feminist reading. These two sites are derived
from two major properties of the modern State, exclusive territoriality and
sovereignty, and their unbundling under the impact of globalization. In the
first section I discuss what I see as the strategic instantiations of gendering in
the global economy. In the second and third sections, I focus on the
unbundling of State territoriality through one very specific strategic research
site, the global city, and try to lay out the implications for empirical and
theoretical work on the question of women in the global economy. In the
fourth section, I examine the unbundling of sovereignty in an age of
globalization to understand the implications for the emergence of other actors
in international relations and subjects of international law. While in many
ways each of these represent distinct research and theorization efforts encased
in very separate bodies of scholarship, both focus on crucial aspects of the
broader process of globalization and its impact on the organization of the
economy and of political power which we need to factor into a feminist
analytics of the global economy.
Recommended Citation
Sassen, Saskia
(1996)
"Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy,"
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies: Vol. 4:
Iss.
1, Article 2.
Available at:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ijgls/vol4/iss1/2