Transnational Solidarity: Women’s Agency, Structural Adjustment, and Globalization

IN THIS CHAPTER I EXAMINE HOW GLOBAL CAPITAL, STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROgrams and international institutions such as the United Nations have shaped women’s agency around the world. In particular, I focus on two important features of women’s agency in the global era. First, just as global capital is fluid and exists simultaneously in multiple spaces, resulting in “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994), so is women’s agency evident in multiple spaces from the local grassroots movements and community-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to national and transnational feminist networks. Second, women from around the world have been forging transnational feminist solidarities via networks, regional meetings, and world conferences. At these sites, the flow of ideas and activism is no longer unidirectional, from the North to the South, but multidirectional. The ideas and activism are dispersed into varied local sites where they are picked up and refashioned as they resonate in contextualized ways.