The final decades of the twentieth century saw the acceleration of economic globalisation and the concomitant rise of new agents of justice. Corporations, bolstered and emboldened by the neoliberal politics that had nurtured them, were for the first time able to make claims on behalf of themselves, and injustices performed against their ‘personhood’, in the pursuit of their quintessential goals of increasing profit. Since these are invariably multinational corporations, this has reshaped the face of justice claims on a global scale. Economies and economic actors are the defining collectivities of the kyriarchal modern age; theirs overshadow and nullify other claims to justice. This sidelining of more morally intuitive claims to justice is not accidental, but is a prerequisite to the rise and rise of neoliberal capitalism.
Jaggar's edited volume raises a set of issues which are critical, at this historical moment, in remembering the deliberately forgotten women's collectivities whose legitimate and urgent claims to justice have not only been obfuscated by globalisation, but are specifically exacerbated and exploited by the commodification and privatisation it entails. The papers selected for this volume offer an overview of the ways in which globalisation negatively impacts women and produces burdens that are specifically shouldered by women of the Global South. The unjust distribution of benefits and burdens between genders and geographies sits at the heart of the book and provides its moral mandate.
Women have always been an integral economic resource within local and national economies. Traditionally, women's unpaid labour in the home permitted lower wages for men, since the reproduction of workers and their environments produces capital but has rarely been remunerated. Now, women continue to produce the world as a new proletariat of underpaid, precarious workers performing much of the world's essential labour, such as the production and processing of food and clothing, and the provision of carework. That women are now present in the global workforce is readily celebrated as a harbinger of an imminent gender equality, but this is patently false: not only is the work performed by women different from that of men, and differently remunerated, the gender distribution of unpaid carework has scarcely changed.
The articles in the anthology have been carefully selected to expose and detail some of the most urgent problems and interventions relating to global gender justice. There is no prevailing disciplinary bias to constrain the intellectual and practical reach of the issues, and the contributions seamlessly span philosophy, geography, economics, public policy, sociology, public health, and political theory in such a way that the pervasiveness of global gender injustice is made clear.
Jaggar's own contributions (the introduction and the first chapter) motivate those that follow. She begins by recommending three amendments to traditional theoretical conceptions of justice which promise to accommodate global gender justice. They are: that the domain of justice include households and families; that the subjects of justice be extended to gendered transnational collectivities; that the objects of justice include transnational organisation of caretaking responsibilities.
These demands are explicated by examining transnational gendered vulnerabilities in more detail. The most pertinent fact to note in grounding these vulnerabilities is the rise of a racialised, feminised, global proletariat. Social norms entrench the idea that women are associated with carework and the domestic sphere. This creates vulnerabilities because: (a) domestic work is onerous and unending, (b) domestic work is, for the most part, unpaid, which produces economic vulnerability, and (c) domestic work is performed in the private sphere, which renders it largely invisible to the public spaces in which policy is formed, meaning that workers' conditions cannot be monitored, nor can abuse be easily prevented. Jaggar proceeds to demonstrate that domestic work has acquired new vulnerabilities in a globalised world where it has been commodified such that poorer women sell their labour to wealthier households, producing new possibilities for exploitation. Another obvious gendered vulnerability is that produced by the social norm that female bodies are objectified and sexualised. This, too, has been exacerbated by globalisation, and the global sex industry has amplified the sexualisation of women's bodies and worked in a symbiotic dialectic with this norm. While gender inequality is undoubtedly ancient, the vulnerabilities produced by new global markets in carework and sex work have undoubtedly worsened the situation of the world's poorest women in the service of a fully integrated and unregulated global economy.
Hye-Ryoung Kang follows up this identification of two major strands of injustice with a suggestion as to how our understanding of justice should be reorganised in order to make legitimate subjects of justice claims more visible. She has in mind ‘transnational women's collectivities’. These consist of groups of women who are similarly situated with regard to their socio-economic status, even if their cultural and personal situations are diverse. This does not collapse into essentialism, nor does it make generalising claims about the broader experiental features of womanhood, but identifies the shared socio-economic locations that are controlled by global economic levers of injustice, and makes obvious the nature of the moral lacunae within those locations. Most importantly, seeing transnational women's collectivities – such as domestic workers, textiles workers, and sex workers – as subjects of justice allows for economic justice claims to be made across borders, which is not easily achieved using more mainstream cosmopolitan or nationalist theoretical models of justice.
Eve Feder Kittay takes the transnational women's collective of domestic workers as the focus of her identification of global gender injustice. She offers the volume's most striking explication of invisible justice claimants when she describes the world's ‘global heart transplant’ (the term originates in the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild) as carework is extracted from areas the Global South to wealthier nations in order to plug the care deficit left by increasing numbers of women joining the work force. The decision of migrant workers to take up carework abroad is consensual on a superficial reading, but occurs against the backdrop of significant international economic injustice. A direct and serious moral harm is visited upon migrant domestic workers, whose relationships with their own families and communities are adversely affected by the transplantation. Moreover, this harm is intrinsic to the work itself and the global hierarchies that make it possible and expedient, and cannot be dissolved even as working conditions (rightly) improve.
Along the same theme, Rachel Silvey's contribution asks what moral geographies migrant workers can invoke in order to pursue justice claims. Since borders permit the movement of migrant workers in the interest only of capital accumulation, wealthier nations are able to benefit from the labour of migrant workers while ‘offshoring’ the costs of supporting and reproducing those workers. This is yet another way in which the poorer communities are cornered into facilitating the runaway development of wealthier nations. Silvey finishes with the insight that the macroscopic and microscopic scales of gender justice are intimately linked. Global gender justice requires domestic gender justice; while there is inequality in carework, there will be global gender inequalities. This theme underwrites the volume as a whole.
The second half of the book breaks with the first half's theme of migrant workers and carework and tackles some further specific aspects of global gender justice.
Abigail Gosselin considers the ways in which socio-economic and epistemic injustice conspire to produce poor mental health outcomes for women across the world, with women of the Global South being particularly badly affected. Her aim is to show that there is good reason to correlate gender with particular forms of mental disorder. Gosselin's first case study explores the socioeconomic determinants of postpartum depression, starting from the empirical observation that poor women in a globalised world are at greater risk of suffering in this way. Women's disproportionate responsibility for carework, coupled with the way in which economic restructuring is catalysing privatisation of the public services which facilitate carework, are implicated in the correlation between poverty and postpartum depression. Further, globalisation drives the migration of labour away from rural communities, resulting in the increased isolation of women as primary carers as their support networks dwindle. Gosselin's second case study examines the way in which a specific form of epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, is implicated in the rise of eating disorders. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a group is deprived, due to structural oppression, of the resources required to interpret that oppression and diagnose its effects. Disordered eating is often a way of expressing other forms of suffering for which a person does not have the communicative resources. Globalisation contributes to disordered eating in women through the sexualisation and commodification of female bodies through the global pornography industry, the globalisation of oppressive and unrealistic beauty norms, piloted by corporations in the pursuit of profit, and poor or non-existent therapeutic representations of disordered eating.
Linda Martín Alcoff aims to trouble the way in which the terms ‘consent’, ‘victim’, and ‘honour’ denote across different locations in the context of sexual violence. She describes the way in which these concepts must be complicated by different cultural and transnational contexts in order to provide the flexible narrative space required for women across the world to develop their own liberatory resources. This involves recognising the reactionary origins of these concepts as well as their diverse cultural origins and meanings, and ensuring that women are able to operationalise them in ways that befit their particular experiences.
Gillian Brock brings her economic and policy background to bear on some of the issues discussed in the volume, adding a pragmatic ballast to the pages. She asks a straightforward yet crucial question: how is global gender justice to be funded? It is becoming increasingly inarguable that the world's tax burden has been shifted not only from corporations to individual workers, but from men to women. There is an obvious link between women's wellbeing (as primary caregivers) and the availability of public services. Since general taxation funds public services, national and international tax policy correlates closely with the situation of women. In many of the world's poorest countries, there are large informal sectors of impoverished workers, such that taxation is not an obviously useful way of benefitting local women. Rather, Brock suggests that the most progressive way of generating income to redistribute to poor women would be a Tobin tax on the movement of money across currencies, coupled with more convincing measures for managing tax evasion. She concludes that tax justice is essential to working towards a gender-just global future.
Scott Wisor's feminist assessment of the ‘resource curse’ rounds off the anthology. The resource curse centres on the idea that an abundance of natural resources in any given state tends to correlate with civil conflict, authoritarianism, and squandered opportunities for growth. In addition to this, and less often reported, is the gendered injustice in the benefits and burdens of the international resource trade. In particular, authoritarianism and conflict tend to reduce the provision or availability of public services, reducing the quality of life of women as primary caregivers. In theory and policy, there is an increasing willingness to characterise resource trade as a form of theft, since state citizens (rather than corporations and rich landowners) are legitimate resource owners, yet none of the analyses in the literature describe women as resource owners. Wisor recommends that capital generated from the resource trade be redistributed in the form of cash transfers to women, while trade sanctions be imposed on states according to women's rights violations, as an incentive for encouraging greater gender justice.
This book would be a rich starting point for a graduate course on gender and globalisation, or an academic reading group on that topic. It provides a helpful overview of many of the major issues in the field, but keeps its cross-hair on domestic work as the linchpin in the movement towards a meaningful global gender justice. Readers will note the absence of work on production lines, peremptory coverage of sex work and trafficking, only a side note on conflict, and no mention of resistance and labour organisation between women in the Global South as a way of demonstrating possible futures. Still, the topic is hopelessly large, and Jaggar's approach to it is brave: she has chosen hard-hitting pieces that paint in bold colours the major strands of global gender injustice and name the culprits without the need for endless obfuscating and particularising that plagues much of the literature in women's studies and often renders the subject inert. Here, global gender injustice is represented to scale, and it is ugly and morally straightforward. Jaggar's edited volume does a commendable job of leaving the reader feeling informed, enraged, and eager to read more.
