EXPLORING THE PERSISTENCE OF GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF GLOBAL JUSTICE

Let’s begin with a guessing game. The titles of the two keynote lectures for the 2014 PEWS conference were as follows: “Feminism as Counter Hegemonic” and “The Dilemmas of Alter-Movements.” Can you guess the gender and theoretical/ political orientation of each speaker? If you guessed that the former was by a female, feminist scholar and the latter by a male, “leftist” scholar you would be correct. Both feminism and alter-movements are accorded the same status yet they are segregated and gendered. This gendered division of political labor, both academic and activist, along with its spatial separation, is what I have called the gendered geography of struggles (Desai 2016). In this chapter I argue that global justice movements or alter-movements, as exemplified by the World Social Forum (WSF), also demonstrate such a gendered geography, and I explore the reasons for the persistence of such a gendered geography four decades after the emergence of contemporary feminism. I suggest that this gendering of global justice results from: (1) the inability of radical politics to meaningfully address the two key debates identified by Wallerstein (2014) in his keynote address. Namely, who is the historical actor of social transformation - social movements or nationalist movements? - and whether a verticalist organization - in which multiple groups subordinate their oppressions under one dominant historical actor - or a horizontalist one - in which all oppressions are treated as equal and addressed at the same time - is a better strategy for social change. (2) Given this history of radical politics, feminists and women’s movements have also primarily focused on women even when they adopt an intersectional approach and hence contributed to this division. (3) Finally, contemporary neoliberal globalization has co-opted many demands of social movements through the NGOization of politics. This has meant that funding is provided for specific social groups and projects, which also contributes to this gender division of political labor.