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Gender & Globalization

Gender, Globalization, and Location
A Seminar of the Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS)
Spring 2007

Associate Professor Carla Freeman, Anthropology & Women's Studies Departments Associate Professor Deepika Bahri, English Department and Asian Studies All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. --Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

One of the "god terms" of our times, "globalization" has become a central area of focus across the disciplines, generating a wide range of critical analyses and commentaries that attempt to describe and understand the increasing intensity of flows of capital, labor, commodities, and ideologies across national borders. This interdisciplinary seminar takes up globalization and the "time/space compression" (David Harvey's phrase) of the contemporary moment through works of literature, ethnography, and film. What have these global transformations of space and time meant for local identities (nationality, gender, class, race, sexuality) and enactments/meanings of culture? As such, we will analyze not only the manifestations and meanings of globalization (e.g. the intensifi-cation of flows of people, capital, goods, ideologies, etc.) "on the ground" in specific geographic locations, regions, and in people's everyday lives, but in particular through the lens of gender. In so doing, we will problematize the global/local; macro/ micro; theory/empiricism; masculine/feminine dualisms that continue to frame much ofglobalization scholarship.

While many disciplines have analyzed globalization at the macro level, this interdisciplinary seminar specifically aims to engage students in the study of globalization through the lens of "the local", through literature, film, and the medium of ethnography. There has been a gendered quality to these scales of analysis (macro/masculine; micro/feminine) that the seminar aims to disrupt. As such, the 'local' will be understood not simply as the ground on which globalization is played out, but itself integral to the shaping of systems of globalization. How does globalization manifest itself while the world is at work and at play, at home and abroad, in sickness and in health? In our quest for responses to these questions, we will study workers (white collar, pink collar, and blue collar), consumers, migrants and tourists, caregivers and net-users as actors on the global stage. We will explore wide-ranging cases, from West Africa, Mexico, Asia and the Caribbean to understand how local actors are affected by process of globalization, and even in small ways significantly shape its terms and contours. Through the survey of ethnographies, literature, and film from several world areas and various theoretical works we will explore the changing shape of local culture, and the gendered underpinnings of global processes.

The seminar will be organized around the following broad themes: