"Difference" and Transnational Feminist Networks

Published a decade after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks, by Valentine Moghadam, provides a detailed examination of the emergence of transnational feminist networks, the neoliberal globalizing processes that have given rise to them, and the policy agendas that these networks have pursued. Locating herself firmly within the tradition of feminist international political economy, Moghadam seeks to demonstrate that transnational feminist networks are the organizational expression of both the transnational women's movement and the ideals of global feminism. A former staff member of the United Nations and a consultant to international organizations, Moghadam guides the reader through the complex, acronym-filled worlds of six policy-oriented transnational feminist networks, and the other movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with which they are affiliated. Her goal is to demonstrate how these organizations have contributed to the construction of a more equitable global civil society. Globalizing Women is divided into eight chapters that address the gendered effects of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the emergence of transnational feminist networks during the 1980s, the organizational characteristics of these networks, and the challenges they pose to the gendered injustices of global neoliberalism. The second chapter of the book contains one of the best reviews of feminist scholarship on globalization available. Focusing largely on the effects of global economic processes, Moghadam demonstrates how the increasing liberalization and deregulation of markets and the increased activity of multinational corporations have created increased inequalities among nations as well as among groups differentiated by gender and class. She argues that, by putting gender at the center of their analysis, feminist approaches to globalization and feminist scholars highlight how central the maintenance and exploitation of gender inequalities is to the global spread of neoliberal ideologies. From the increasing demand for workers to be flexible to the actual trafficking of women themselves, Moghadam shows that the maintenance of gender inequalities, even when invisible, is critical to the implementation of neoliberal policies by individual nation-states and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. While Moghadam acknowledges that some positive outcomes for women have emerged from the economic and political policies underlying neoliberal capitalism, her argument focuses largely on their negative impacts and the forms of resistance that they have generated. She views the gendered injustices of contemporary capitalism not only as the product of the neoliberal economic practices of states and international organizations, but also as the outcome of the patriarchal fundamentalist principles embraced by religious groups opposed to the cultural and commercial imperialism of neoliberalism itself.