Session 157: Gender, Globalization, and Social Change: Local Implications in South and Southeast Asia

Organizer and Chair: B. Lynne Milgram, Ontario College of Art and Design

Discussant: Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh

Keywords: gender, globalization, development, social change, South Asia, Southeast Asia.

Women’s places in their communities are often circumscribed within traditionally vulnerable or generally subordinate and narrowly defined positions with limited access to social, economic or political authority. The reality of many women’s lives in rural and urban Asian communities, however, may be otherwise. As researchers have argued, women are active agents negotiating their roles and empowering themselves in society through channels that extend beyond the local. The avenues they choose are often counter to conventional wisdom and thus challenge not only traditional definitions, but the very structures of their societies. Even women’s apparent participation in disadvantageous systems can have multiple meanings, and what might appear on the surface as conformity can be something quite different.

Macro theorists of globalization offer powerful models of circuits of movement and change in this age of late capitalism, but offer little specificity about how these are configured on the ground and to what ends. As research has demonstrated, women dissolve conventional dichotomies such as household and market or local and global to fashion new opportunities across multiple social and economic spheres. To this end, the panel papers analyze how women operationalize the global trade in secondhand clothing (Philippines), the effects of new artisanal technology (Sri Lanka), microfinance development initiatives (Nepal and Vietnam), and global discourses to contest domestic violence (Vietnam). In so doing, these case studies provide a critical perspective on women’s agency, as small-scale actors, to determine the very fabric of globalization and negotiate their positions within ongoing local to global interchanges.

Negotiating Global Commodities, Gender, and Class: Women and the Used Clothing Trade in the Philippines

B. Lynne Milgram, Ontario College of Art and Design

Worldwide exports of secondhand clothing from North America and Europe to "developing" regions have expanded rapidly since the 1980s. Some research has argued that this transnational trade in used clothing is a continuance of the West’s exploitation of the "rest"’ Indeed, used garments or ukay-ukay (to dig) are now widely available throughout the Philippines. This paper argues, however, that Philippine entrepreneurs, and women in particular, have used the influx of the West’s secondhand clothing to operationalize new opportunities in work and dress practice. Women’s agency to refashion such commodity flows thus disputes the thesis that women’s informal economic sector work is marginalized with expanding global capital.

Instead, women use this trade to operate at the edge of multiple spheres that cross household and market, rural and urban, formal and informal and local to global activities. Their work in secondhand clothing—a specific transnational commodity—indexes an international order with which traders and consumers engage as they set prices and marketing practice and choose garments based on local cultural preferences and hierarchies of these goods. In so doing, they domesticate the logic of the market and the meaning of this globally traded commodity to recognizably local signs of status and value at the same time that they transform them. Fashioning new spaces of agency and resistance, I argue that Philippine women engaged in the secondhand clothing trade reconfigure this specific commodity and consolidate their identity and class positions despite the ever-present potential of these positions to shift.

Gender, Class, and the Mechanization of Pottery Production in Sri Lanka

Deborah Winslow, University of New Hampshire

For over 30 years I have observed the successful expansion of pottery production in a rural community in central Sri Lanka. The potters have increased production and sales of traditional pots sufficiently to more than compensate for their declining land base and the high inflation that followed Sri Lanka’s post-1977 economic liberalization. Furthermore, until the 1990s, pottery making remained a household-based industry, with egalitarian access to raw materials, tools, work space, and marketing. Their household economy appeared to be resilient, a safe space in which potter men and women worked together to exploit unexpected opportunities in a rapidly globalizing macroeconomy.

However, in the mid-1990s, some households began mechanizing production. By 2003, half of the village’s 150 households had purchased expensive pottery presses; some also had invested in clay mixing machines. In this paper, I use 2003 and 2004 field data to analyze the effects of mechanization on social relations within and between households. Has growing economic differentiation between households spilled over into other contexts? As pottery making has become increasingly capital intensive, have potter women retained their earlier equal footing with men? Or, has the ideology that gives men control of capital meant that, like the community as a whole, women have had to relinquish equality for greater economic security? This paper explores how even new technologies developed within a community (rather than introduced from without) redefine the ways in which class and gender are enacted and experienced.

Wife Battering in Globalized Terrain: Vietnam, Gender Violence, and Cultural Change

Lynn M. Kwiatkowski, Colorado State University

Since the mid-1980s, women in Vietnam have been grappling with wife battering on a number of different levels including personal, familial, community, national, and international. Vietnamese women have been contesting wife battering despite their position of diminished power relative to Vietnamese men and the state. The means by which women have asserted their agency in the face of this violence have been changing over time, from personal management of battering to formal protests of the violence through state agencies. These changes are often influenced by the emergence of internationally informed local cultural ideologies and economic and political structures, and by the global circulation of discourses and practices addressing violence against women. Vietnamese women have joined the international arena, drawing upon international development and non-governmental organization paradigms, and upon international scholarship and networking practices to generate new responses to wife battering in Vietnam.

This paper analyzes how women’s attempts to contest wife battering in Vietnam have been constrained, for example, by kinship relationships or state programs designed to assist battered women. It also assesses how women have been trying to overcome impediments they have faced by creatively constructing new means of contesting wife battering through women’s actions in international networks and through the movement of women and discourses in the global landscape. I address the significance of assessing how women’s agency is articulated through the global movement of ideas, people, and institutions when seeking to understand local processes of violence and gender in most cultural arenas today.

Microfinance as Social Capital? Comparative Perspectives from Nepal and Vietnam

Katharine N. Rankin, University of Toronto

This paper considers how the globalization of neoliberal economic thought manifests in market-led approaches to development. It takes one instance of this phenomenon—microfinance—and considers the specifically gendered nature of its role in promoting market-led development. Microfinance is a popular development approach that has been replicated throughout "developing" countries. Its most significant innovation has been the recognition that markets can be promoted and finance capital dispersed "at the grassroots," when social capital—groups of borrowers who monitor one another’s financial activity—substitutes for physical collateral. It is argued that this innovation offers a second developmental benefit: the empowerment of women. When women get access to credit, the argument goes, they gain opportunities to earn income and change the gendered relations of power within households. Yet the very proposition of social collateral as a device for deepening credit markets, also relies on the participation of women in rather instrumental ways; after all, women are more readily disciplined to wear uniforms, chant slogans and follow other heavily regulated practices of microfinance programs.

The paper examines the implementation of the microfinance model in two different national contexts—Nepal and Vietnam. The comparative approach is undertaken to emphasize how development models cannot merely be replicated, as is often claimed, but, as an instance of globalization, must always articulate with national regulatory frameworks and local cultures of value. Particular focus will be placed on examining the claims of women’s empowerment against the instrumental use of women as agents of market deepening.