The gendered time politics of globalization: of shadowlands and elusive justice
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70 the gendered time politics
Barbara Adam
abstract This paper seeks to bring a time perspective to the discourses of globalization and development. It first connects prominent recent gender-neutral discourses of globalization with highly gendered analyses of development, bringing together institutional–structural analyses with contextual and experiential data. It places alongside each other ‘First World’ perspectives and analyses of the changing conditions of people in the ‘developing’ world who are at the receiving end of globalized markets, and the international politics of aid. To date, neither of these fields of expertise has made explicit the underpinning time politics of globalization. Naturalized as status quo and global norm these temporal relations form the deep structure of globalization and its neo-colonialist agenda. The paper uses feminist epistemology to explicate the taken-for-granted time politics of globalization and time-based ontology to render visible the gender politics of globalization. The combined conceptual force makes connections where few exist at present, maps complex processes and traces naturalized relations. It offers not a new or better theory of... but an approach to globalization that makes transparent hitherto opaque relations of power and it identifies openings for change, resistance and alternative political practice.
keywords globalization; gender; time politics and time creation; commodification; control and colonization
feminist review 70 2002 c 2002 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/02 $15 www.feminist-review.com (3–29)
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introduction Globalization is a predominantly male discourse. Whether the emphasis is on economic and political processes,1 social relations,2 the role of technology3 or environmental impacts,4 gender is rarely the focus of attention. Yet, it is clear that globalization impacts differently on men and women as workers, consumers, service providers, re/producers and loan/aid recipients. Viewing globalization almost exclusively through a male lens creates blind spots in the analysis and ‘shadowlands’ of practice in which women dwell and toil in unequal numbers. Only in the field of work and global labour markets has the gender blindness in the globalization literature been largely transcended. In this research the feminist focus has been extended from national to international and global labour markets.5 Moreover, in the field of work time-blindness has been extensively reduced.6 Given that the task for my contribution to this Special Issue is to theorise the connection between globalization, time, and gender, the challenge is not to summarise this existing work but rather to use the triple focus for gaining new insights and a novel perspective on established ways of seeing. In this paper I therefore want to bring together three discourses that thus far have developed along parallel lines and have pursued their respective research agendas with little reference to each other.7 Towards this end I first establish a connection between ‘Globalization’ and ‘Develo
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