Reorienting Gender and Globalization: Introduction to the Special Issue

The scholarship on gender and globalization has contributed a far more complex picture of the impact of global processes as well as added a crucial gendered perspective on such processes. It has shown us how global processes may reinscribe, alter, and challenge sex/gender orders, which are not necessarily coherent or hegemonic. Yet, we think there is more that gender and globalization scholarship can do to enhance understandings of global processes. We argue that to do so, the literature needs to develop further by overcoming several limitations: (1) an understanding of gender that still tends to reflect the binary sex/gender arrangements common to Western societies, while failing to address the influence of colonial histories and postcolonial states (Roberts and Connell, Feminist Theory 17(2): 135–140, 2016; Sinha 2012); (2) a gender asymmetry, i.e., a disproportionate focus on women; (3) a narrow set of issues that come under its analytical lens; (4) a primary focus outside the US; and finally (5) a gender division of intellectual labor in which primarily feminists who identify as women study gender and globalization while those who identify as men, feminist or otherwise, tend to study a gender blind globalization. In this introduction, we examine the development of the gender and globalization literature, discuss how the articles in this special issue expand on it, and conclude with future directions for this burgeoning field.