Abstract
This chapter provides a view of how economies in the Asia-Pacific are gendered by pursuing three questions. First, What macrotrends can we identify as effects of neoliberal globalization policies? Second and more specifically, How are these trends reconstituting identities, ideologies, and practices associated with socially necessary labor, informalization, migration, and financial flows in the Asia-Pacific? And third, What are the gendered and economic implications of these developments?
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Notes
V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual Economies (London: Routledge, 2003). See for argumentation, empirical evidence, and citations supporting the claims made throughout this chapter.
Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Cambridge: Polity, 2002);
Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner, Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004);
V. Spike Peterson, “How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy,” New Political Economy 10, no. 4 (2005): 499–521;
Georgina Waylen, “You Still Don’t Understand: Why Troubled Engagements Continue Between Feminists and (Critical) IPE,” Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 145–64.
Setting aside the contentious issue of distinguishing among these approaches, I focus instead on what is common to them and which differentiates them ‘definitively’ from positivist/empiricist and ‘rationalist’ commitments that dominate in economics and IR. In brief, positivist dichotomies differentiate concepts both oppositionally (as mutually exclusive and essentialized—that is, prediscursive, presocial—categories) and hierarchically (privileging the first term over the second); they fuel knowledge claims that are problematically reductionist, ahistorical, and noncritical. ‘Posties’ reject this binary logic and its corollary view of language as a neutral tool or medium in which symbols/signs simply refer to ‘objective’ phenomena. Rather, they view language, knowledge, and power as mutually constituting such that objective and subjective are necessarily inextricable. Similarly, they argue that the meaning of all words, ‘things’ and subjectivities is produced through/by discursive practices that are embedded in relations of power; that language produces power by constituting the codes of meaning that govern how we think, communicate, and generate knowledge claims-indeed, how we understand ‘reality’ and act ‘accordingly’ Operations of power are not extricable from the power coded into our meaning systems; therefore, the latter are not coincidental to but constitute power manifested ‘materially’ Moreover, positivist binaries are inherently masculinist insofar as the privileged terms in foundational dichotomies—reason, mind, objectivity, culture—are associated with valorized masculinity and the devalued terms—affect, body, subjectivity, nature—with denigrated femininity. Also see Drucilla K. Barker, “Beyond women and economics: rereading ‘women’s work,’” Signs 30, no. 4 (2005): 2189–209;
J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996);
Gillian J. Hewitson, Feminist Economics: Interrogating the Masculinity of Rational Economic Man (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1999);
Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper, ed, Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003);
Marieke De Goede, “Beyond Economism in International Political Economy,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 79–97;
Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner, liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004);
V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual Economies. London: Routledge, 2003;
V. Spike Peterson, “How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy.” New Political Economy 10, no. 4 (2005): 499–521;
V. Spike Peterson, “Getting Real: The Necessity of Poststructuralism in Global Political Economy,” in International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics, ed. Marieke de Goede (London: Palgrave, 2006), 119–38;
Georgina Waylen, “You still don’t understand: Why troubled engagements continue between feminists and (critical) IPE,” Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 145–64.
On diversity, identities/subjectivities, and intersections of structural hierarchies see, for example, Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99;
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003);
Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, ed., Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 2003).
United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2002 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Robert H. Wade, “Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality?” World Development 32, no. 4 (2004): 567–89.
As Stivens aptly observes, “there are many ‘Asias’ and as many modernities” (10). She also notes the particular location of Australian scholarship on Asia: “it is of the West and yet on its margins, reading across varying positions from within an Asian-Pacific context, while being located within a national project” (23). Maila Stivens, “Theorizing Gender, Power and Modernity in Affluent Asia,” in Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, ed. Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens (London: Routledge, 1998), 1–34.
Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 191.
Insofar as SAPs reduce public spending, they have the following gendered effects: women are disproportionately affected because they are more likely to depend on secure government jobs and on public resources in support of reproductive labor, and women are expected to fill the gap of reduced welfare, in spite of fewer available resources and more demands on their time. The poor are also disproportionately affected by reduced public spending because they have the fewest (private) resources, and hence are most in need of public services and the support they provide. Because poverty is marked by race and gender, the effects of privatization— especially of cutbacks in public welfare—evidence systematic patterns that fuel the reproduction of intersecting structural hierarchies (Peterson, A Critical Rewriting, 73). On SAPs see also Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, ed., Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
Rai, Gender and the Political Economy; Lourdes Benería, Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Arlie R. Hochschild, “Love and Gold,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie R. Hochschild (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 19.
Richard Friman and Peter Andreas, ed., The Illicit Global Economy and State Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);
R. T. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underground Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002);
Peter Andreas, “Illicit International Political Economy: The Clandestine Side of Globalization,” Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 3 (2004): 631–52.
Brigette Young, “Globalization and Gender: A European Perspective,” in Gender, Globalization, & Democratization, ed. Rita Mae Kelly, et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 39.
Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo, and Shirlena Huang, “Introduction,” in Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo, and Shirlena Huang (London: Routledge, 2002).
Nicola Piper, “Gendering the Politics of Migration,” International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (2006): 143.
Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt, “Women in International Migration,” in A Commitment to the World’s Women, ed. Noleen Heyzer (New York: UNIFEM, 1995), 61.
Lindio-McGovern observes that the bulk of Philippine export labor is domestic workers. Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, “Alienation and Labor Export in the Context of Globalization: Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Taiwan and Hong Kong” Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 2 (2004): 217; she also discusses how domestic workers resist the forms of alienation that they experience. On women’s agency and activism in the Asia-Pacific, see Yeoh, Teo, and Huang, “Introduction,” in Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific; on domestic workers in the context of modernizing projects,
see Christine B. Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity” Project (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); on gendering “Asia and the West,”
see L. H. M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave, 2002).
Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London: Zed Books, 2000), 2.
See, for example, Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia (London: Zed Books, 1990);
Pettman, Worlding Women; Jan Jindy Pettman, “Body Politics: International Sex Tourism,” Third World Quarterly 18, no.1 (1997): 93–108;
Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, ed., Global Sex Workers (New York: Routledge, 1998);
Lin Lean Lim, ed., The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1998); Hanochi, “Japan and the Global Sex Industry”; Kinhide Mushakoji, “Engendering the Japanese ‘Double Standard’ Patriarchal Democracy,” in Gender, Globalization, & Democratization;
Navarro Alys Willman, “Making it at the Margins: The Criminalization of Nicaraguan Women’s Labor under Structural Reform,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, 2 (2006): 243–66. Although important, I do not here address the complex, gendered dynamics of homosexual activities, child prostitution, female tourists seeking sex, or militarization.
Mary E. Hawkesworth, Globalization and Feminist Activism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 2.
Richard Brown and John Connell, “Occupation-Specific Analysis of Migration and Remittance Behaviour: Pacific Island Nurses in Australia and New Zealand,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47, no. 1 (2006): 135–50.
Linda H. Aiken, et al., “Trends in International Nurse Migration,” Health Affairs 23, no. 3 (2004): 69–77; “Nurses,” Guardian, May 18, 2005.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “The International Division of Reproductive Labor: Paid Domestic Work and Globalization,” in Critical Globalization Studies, ed. Richard P. Appelbaum and William I. Robinson (New York: Routledge, 2005), 239. She describes the three-tier transfer of care among women: “class-privileged women pass down the care of their families to migrant domestic workers as migrant domestic workers simultaneously pass down the care of their own families—most of whom are left behind in the country of origin—to their relatives or sometimes to even poorer women whom they hire as their own domestic workers’ (238).
Debates regarding how to theorize, define, measure, and evaluate informalization are addressed in Peterson, A Critical Rewriting. The underground economy has been estimated to be $9 trillion, “Black Hole,” The Economist (August 28, 1999): 59; the value of ‘housework’ to be $10 to $15 trillion, Mary Ann Tetreault and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Global Politics as if People Mattered (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005): 25.
World Bank, Global Economic Prospects: Economic Implications of Remittances and Migration (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006), xiii.
Samuel M. Maimbo, et al., ed., Migrant Labour Remittances in South Asia (Directions in Development, 2005).
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© 2009 Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo
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Peterson, V.S. (2009). Gendered Economies in the Asia-Pacific. In: D’Costa, B., Lee-Koo, K. (eds) Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617742_3
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