Feminist Perspectives on the Internationalization of the State

Feminist Perspectives on theInternationalization of The State

Birgit Sauer and Stefanie WohlDepartment of Political Science, University of Vienna, Neues Institutsgebaude,

Universitatsstraße 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria;[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract: The state is often described in transition: public spaces are rearranged by privatecompanies, national social welfare is being privatized to some extent, and supranationalinstitutions have more influence on national policies. “A view from the kitchen” (DianeElson) is helpful for understanding the changing dynamics of states and societies becausedifferent women are affected by these policies in different and often ambiguous ways: womenof the globalized South migrate to the North, creating global care chains, while women inWestern industrialized countries are confronted with changing welfare regimes, leaving mainlyhighly educated women to profit from this situation. This article contributes to feminist debateson economic globalization and state internationalization. Our feminist materialist perspectiveallows a critical view on dominance and power in “governance”. Thus, the article adds tofeminist debates on globalization from the perspective of state transformation and to debates ongovernance from the perspective of state transformation grounded in gendered social relations.

Keywords: gender, state transformation, feminist materialist state theory, global governancecritique, re-masculinization of politics

Asking Gender-Critical Questions: An IntroductionThe feminist literature of the last decade has usually been rather scepticalabout the consequences of globalization for women (see, among others,Klingebiel and Randeria 1998; Meyer and Prugl 1999; Sassen 1996,1998; Sauer 2001a). For example, structural adjustment measures putwomen in Africa in a precarious and exploitable position betweensubsistence and informal economy (Connelly 1996; Mulyampiti 2001).Additionally, in the Asian globalization crisis, women were especiallyaffected by unemployment (Elson 2002:29ff), and the reconstructionof welfare states in countries of the North, despite all the critique ofthe “patriarchal welfare state”, was seen as an unfriendly act towardswomen. Both as employees in these welfare systems and as thosereliant on social benefits in the form of childcare or financial support—women are negatively affected (see, among others, Jenson 1996;Sainsbury 1996; Wright 1997). Social reproduction is still politicallyignored as a crucial topic in processes of global restructuring; instead,Antipode Vol. 43 No. 1 2011 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 108–128doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00813.xC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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welfare-to-work programmes have been installed, not only in the UnitedStates (Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2003) but also in strong welfarestates such as Germany and Austria.

The globalization of politics and state transformation, on the otherhand, is perceived as being far more positive (see, among others,Holland-Cunz 2000; Meyer and Prugl 1999). In the last decade economicglobalization and political internationalization gave birth to new formsof political decision-making at international, national and local levels.In political science, these new forms are termed “governance” (Pierreand Peters 2000). Examples of such governance structures apply, onthe international terrain, to the political decision-making regimes ofthe European Union and the United Nations, and on the nationallevel, to the new negotiation networks in the local area, and to extra-parliamentary forms of cooperation on specific topics (for example,the German “Ethikrat”, or Ethics Council). The characteristic of thesediscussion fora and decision-making structures is that the (nation) state’sadministration is no longer the dominant actor; rather, social groups arealready integrated at an early stage in political processes. The state’sdefining and decision-making monopoly is thereby relativized so thatthe attempt to create non-hierarchical, cooperative and more specificallyheterarchical forms of politics is associated with governance structures.

Additionally, in feminist debates in the German-speaking context,governance—especially on an international level—is seen as anopportunity structure to overcome androcentric, racist and classistforms of world order that are based on (nation) statehood and as achance to establish more inclusive, more deliberative, more participatoryand more responsive forms of political decision-making (see, amongothers, Holland-Cunz 2000:26). Governance structures are hereconceived as a gain for women’s groups in the area of decision-makingand participation, because the nation state’s hierarchical structures(must) make room for new groups of actors and women whoobtain more possibilities of influencing the formulation of policies(Ruppert 2002:54). Ilse Lenz (2002:82) even considers a global “genderdemocracy” possible.

Governance is certainly an indication of the reworking of genderrelations in a globalized political space. However, besides the issueof representation, the contradictory social foundations for these newforms of statehood must also be viewed critically so as not to fallinto the trap of power-blind argumentation (Brush 2003; Wohl 2008).Moreover, the contradictions and the hegemonic process of inclusionof subaltern positions have to be recognized in order to avoid the riskof underestimating the state-centredness of new “governance” regimes.The new institutional power structures at the national and internationallevel as well as their neoliberal orientation, which has led to new formsof gendered exploitation of labour and new export-producing zonesC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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in countries of the periphery, lead to the further vulnerability of thepoorest (Wright 1997). The hegemonic “neoliberal frame” (Runyan1999) of these policies and processes, as well as the ambiguous andrepressive effects that thereby emerge can easily disappear from view(Ruf 2000:170; Young 2002). Even the political perspectives for womenthat governance—the new political field of action—does allow areoften falsely interpreted or simply overestimated (Brand et al 2001:8).Therefore, we would like to outline the gendered processes of thisinternational transformation of statehood.

Our article seeks to contribute to these feminist debates on economicglobalization and state internationalization with a feminist materialistapproach towards state and state transformation (the second and thirdsections). This approach allows a critical view on dominance and powerin the political field of action described as “global governance” (fourthsection). Thus, we would like to add to feminist debates on globalizationthe perspective of state transformation and to debates on governancethe perspective of state transformation grounded in gendered socialrelations.

In the process of the restructuring of the (nation) state, one thingis certain so far: gender regimes that are fenced in by the nationstate are breaking up and new gender identities are being interpellatedas a foundation for political action. The dynamic of globalizationcan admittedly lead in the direction of further hetero-normative re-gendering—especially along the lines of class and ethnicity in thecase of migrant women as care workers in Western countries. Buteconomic globalization can also lead in the direction of de-genderingof social institutions such as the family and to greater gender equality,as for instance in the dual (adult) breadwinner model. Thus Westernindustrialized countries can no longer organize their gender regimesbased on the model of the Keynesian welfare state; rather, these regimesmust be readjusted. As a result, well-educated women in the North aredefinitely counted as being among the winners as a result of globalizationand, in the course of global capital restructuring, traditional genderregimes in the countries of the South are also rearranged (Mulyampiti2001). However, the social and political transition we currently findourselves in has the gendered structure of modernity. There is muchindication that globalization, as Janine Brodie (1994:8) writes, resultsin a “phallocentric restructuring”. New gender identities are developedfrom processes of simultaneous persistence and dissolution as well asfrom the non-concurrence of different social and political spaces, andindividuals are required to assume these new identities.

The reconfiguration of state and politics in the guise of “governance”at various local, national, and supranational levels has the organizationof gender-specific, ethnic and classist structures of inequality at itsfoundation. It is therefore not a democratic form of political action andC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


decision-making, but instead has only narrow scope with regard togender equality or fairness. The deregulation of political fields of actionas conceived by the nation state, in the context of the internationalizationof state and the development of forms of “governance”, does not asyet suggest gender-democratic structures. Rather, “governance” is thepolitical form of regulation of still unequal “ethnicised binary genderidentities” (Gutierrez Rodriguez 1999). It restructures the hierarchictopography of gender relations in the political field of action.

To explore these considerations, we firstly clarify our feministmaterialist concept of state and present a feminist reading ofcontemporary globalization processes, which reveals the genderambivalences in the processes of state restructuring at various levels.Secondly, we outline the current social shifts in the process ofeconomic globalization. These social changes are the material basisof current political state transformations. Thirdly, we argue that thesechanges show that the internationalization of state in the new forms of“governance” rests on unequal gender relations, and therefore insteadof democratically increasing women’s political agency it tends to makepolitics less accessible to women.

Global Restructuring of State as a Hegemonic Project:an Analysis from a Feminist Materialist PerspectiveTo grasp the gendered dimension of state transformations in the era ofglobalization we first need a feminist materialist concept of the state. Inthis perspective, the state is not only conceptualized as a bureaucraticapparatus and a liberal-democratic framework of institutions, but—according to Nicos Poulantzas—as a field of social relations and power,where social forces fight over meaning, representation and interests(Poulantzas 1973). This is the “material basis” of states. To explainstate transformation it is therefore important to analyse this materialbasis of the state—that is, the transformation of social relations andsocial forces. The state is, further, the institutionalization of a discursivefield of social and political identities as well as social practices (Pringleand Watson 1992). State institutions and norms originate from socialdiscourse about the organization of social relations. The state is a terrainupon which structures of inequality are built, where they consolidate, andwhere hegemonic forms of perception are developed (Sauer 2001; Wohl2007). Additionally, each nation state—its specific gender and ethnicregime—which Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez (1999:252) describesas “gendered ethnicity”—originates from this state-driven discourse.Typical of the patriarchal state relations of Western industrializedsocieties were, for instance, gender-discriminatory welfare state regimesas well as the male bias of state institutions.C© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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These ethnicized gender regimes are made secure by hegemoniccompromises. Common norms, systems of belief and conviction aboutgender, ethnicity and class make up the hegemonic foundation of anystate (Stienstra 1999:265). The divisions of social spheres into publicand private, or state, market and household economies, are essentialtechniques in these hegemonic state compromises. Furthermore, themodern state is also based on the existence of borders between nationstates. All these structured differences, which are coupled with theborder regimes, have always been and are still the modes of constructingsocial inequality: state borders and citizenship construct inequalityqua ethnicity or nationality; power over resources for production, andthe division of manual and mental labour, produce class inequality;and the granting of access to gainful employment or assignmentto reproductive labour creates gender inequality. However, in thediscourses and practices of the state, social positions and politicalidentities are not simply prescribed compulsorily; rather, they mustbe actively appropriated or “contrived”. In this sense, the state is notonly a repressive monolithic apparatus, but also an arena where subjectsactively develop their identities and interests, and in which they couldalso potentially initiate change. Gender identities and gender regimesare also objects of social discourse and change.

The material basis of the androcentric state and its politicalinstitutions are consequently configured by these social power relationsand hegemonic constellations. Liberal democracy, the politicalrepresentational form of the bourgeois-masculinist state, is not only aninstitutional setting of participation, of majority rule and of the selectionof political elites, but rather a social relationship. Democratization thenmeans inversely the transformation of state in a more comprehensivesense, as outlined above.

The catch-all term “globalization” in mainstream literature (see, forexample, Beisheim and Geworg 1997) encompasses social, political,cultural as well as economic transformation dynamics. Globalizationis characterized by the dissolution of boundaries between nation statesthrough media-communicative networking and migratory movements,the internationalization of political decision-making bodies, and thereduction of distance in space and time through rapid media interaction.Most of these concepts of economic globalization assume the declineand erosion of the nation state due to international regime-buildingor due to the power of international companies. Critical accounts ofeconomic globalization and political internationalization point to the factthat “globalization” first of all refers to the almost worldwide expansionof capitalist modes of production. Critical economists and state theoristsdefine globalization as the “unleashing” of capitalism after the declineof real socialism and the “disembedding” of capital and financial flowsfrom national contexts. These processes do not erode nation states butC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


create a new material basis for statehood in nation states, once thepolitical “bed” of capitalism (Altvater and Mahnkopf 1996:107). Thesedynamics also create new forms of political democratic representation,labelled governance, at the national and international level.

The change in economic and political post-war relations is notinherently necessary for capitalism. The globalization of capitalism,like its “nationalization” after the Second World War, is politicallyproduced and intended (Bergeron 2001:996). Globalization is also nota linear, but a multidimensional process which is temporally, spatiallyand socially unequal. Globalization should hence be conceptualizedas a set of contingent political, economic and cultural transformationdiscourses and practices (see also Marchand 1996:597). The hegemonicglobalization discourses and practices are one and the same: theyreconfigure economic, social, political and symbolic spaces at local,national and international levels and frame them in a competitive andefficiency-related context. Globalization is hence more appropriatelycharacterized as a “global neoliberal restructuring” (Marchand andRunyan 2000:3; emphasis added).

Globalization also encompasses specific thought patterns, rooted inthe minds and bodies of people, which explain the world and at the sametime prefigure political solutions. In the current globalization practices,people (re)produce identities and interests and develop new normsand institutions (Brodie 1994:52). In other words, globalization as a“structural context” (Jessop 1998:280) must be appropriated by citizens:“Women and men . . . are struggling to make sense of the conditionsof economic restructuring and to find better ways of living under theconditions of globalisation” (Jenson 1996:10). These new “technologiesof the self” are based on neoliberal knowledge about effectivity andaccomplishment, employability and forms of depreciation and exclusionassociated with neoliberalism (Foucault 2000).

The dynamic of global restructuring is now propelled by the processesof the drawing-up and dissolution of boundaries. Not only do new borderregimes between nation states emerge, not only is the “domestic-foreignfrontier” shifted (Rosenau 1997), but new limitations and boundariesalso come into being within nation states between the spheres of market,state and everyday life or family economy. The market, under the magicword “deregulation”, is enlarged in comparison to the state sphere,social state regulation of work and everyday life is minimized, andfinally, the ratio of employment and reproductive labour is reformatted.Globalization therefore fundamentally changes social relations—labour,reproduction, international and gender-specific division of labour, socialparadigms and hegemonic compromises are restructured. The politicsof neoliberal restructuring can also be characterized as a “politicalrevolution” (Brodie 1994:55) because the spheres of the political arerearticulated and the boundaries of the political are likewise newlyC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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defined. The transformations of border regimes require new stateprojects as well as new forms of political regulation and democraticrepresentation, as expressed in the political paradigm of “governance”.

Governance is thereby the political regulation of neoliberal socialrelations. Governance is a description of statehood in the context of itsglobalization and internationalization, of a new technique of governingand controlling. Governance consequently does not describe the “other”of state organization and dominance, it is hence not a “counter model”to the eroding nation state, it is rather its “successive form” (Brandet al 2001:9). In other words, governance is a—primarily discursive—project of the revision of dominant statehood as defined by neoliberalismand only understandable in the context of globalization of politics andeconomy (for more detail, see Wohl 2008:64ff).

Global restructuring is therefore not a transformation beyond thelogic of gender that then (only) affects gender relations; rather, it isan intrinsically gendered process, which on the one hand is basedon specific gender arrangements, and on the other hand reproducesand thereby also modifies these arrangements (Marchand 1996:602),because the gender-specific and ethnicized grammar of currenttransformations is also based on a shifting of boundaries, as outlinedabove (Eisenstein 1997:142f). Neoliberal discourses and practicesenable new gender identities and new gender relations to developbecause they imply—like all hegemonic discourses—a reshuffling ineveryday life and a new way of regulating the conditions of socialexperience. Such a conceptualization focuses on how institutionalpractices reproduce gender relations in the global restructuring process,but also on how gender identities, the configuration of femininities andmasculinities, “communicate” the global transformation process.

In the following, we seek to outline the material basis of the newform of statehood from a gender perspective. This new state form andstructure originate in new gender relations, which develop out of majorsocial shifts in the context of global neoliberal restructuring—the shiftbetween markets and the household economy and between capitalistproduction in the North and the South.

The Materiality of the Neoliberal State: New GenderRelations or an Androcentric Gender Compromise?The new ways of regulating gender relations, in the countries of theNorth as well as in the South, focus on the reorganization of marketand state, of gainful employment, as well as on the reshaping ofthe reproduction of population. In the context of globalization, thedecline of labour is often spoken of in Western industrial countries.This thesis needs to be reformulated: society has not run out of labour;rather, traditional forms of gainful employment and the associatedC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


binary division of society—men as employees and women asreproductive workers—are tailored anew. The protected segment oflifelong—masculine—fulltime employment also “loses its boundaries”or is dissolved, as are the firmly established family and reproductivelabour relations. More and more men are falling out of the formalizedlabour force and are unprotected, exposed to the capitalist conditionsof valorization—a reality that previously primarily affected women,or women reproductive workers. Even when the correlations betweenglobalization and the transformation of working conditions are toocomplex to trace back to a distinct causal relationship (Leitner andOstner 2000:40) they still allow for an explanation of the simultaneoustrends of economic flexibilization and the “dissolution of theboundaries” of labour.

With the orientation of national production and reproduction towardsinternational competition and international markets, traditional forms ofgender-specific division of labour as well as traditional gender identitiesbegin to weaken. Femininity can no longer be identified merely as theresponsibility for reproduction, and hegemonic masculinity is beingdefined less and less by lifelong employment, and increasingly bya specific kind of performance-related and efficient employment. Inparticular, work in the management of the world market is masculinizedand coded with being white. Wendy Larner calls these groups of well-educated manager elites, who are primarily employed in finance andhigher service sectors in international corporations, the “new boys”(a group to which, no doubt, a few “girls” also belong) (Larner1996:33f). These new forms of gendering of employment are connectedto ethnicity and locality. A good education will still have to be boughtin global centres like the USA. This, of course, requires opportunitiesand resources for temporary or permanent mobility.

On the other hand one can currently speak of a “feminization” oflabour in three ways (Bakker 2002:18f): firstly, feminization signifies theincreasing number of employed women in the so-called “First World”,as well as in the “Third World”. Capitalization means, for instance,that many women in southern Africa have the chance to engage in—although more precarious—self-employment (Mulyampiti 2001). Theemancipation of women through employment and self-employment,with the concept of “entrepreneurship” for instance, strives towards thegoal that women will be able to fulfil their tasks in the family (that is,reproduction) more and better than before (as argued in a paper fromUNCTAD, cited in Runyan 1999:214). In Western states, educationalpolicy since the 1970s has created conditions for women’s employmentand made employment a self-evident element of feminine everyday life.A group of well-educated women is increasingly able to find entry intothe established world market, into highly paid jobs, even when theirprogress is slowed down by the existence of a glass ceiling. However,C© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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the simple financial necessity for (married) women to be employed ison the rise, since the man’s and thereby, family’s income is decreasing.In the class of the “working poor”, a McJob no longer suffices to supporta family.

Secondly, feminization means a casualization and informalizationof labour conditions: namely, the increase in intermittent employment,unprotected employment, temporary contracts, new self-employmentand part-time employment that does not secure or provide a livelihood(Jenson 1996:6). Production in the so-called “First World”, but also inthe “Third World”, develops a demand for flexible working conditionswhich accommodate the demands of global capital: for example, part-time work is a way for companies to reduce costs (salaries, insurance,entitlement to pension). This new segment of unprotected work is asegment of women’s labour, and the demand for a feminine labourforce—or more accurately, the demand for what is construed as a“feminine” labour force—is increasing. Expressed euphemistically, thedemand for feminine workers fits with the necessity—primarily ofmothers with small children—to combine work and family. Thirdly,feminization of employment means a decrease in the wage levelto that of women’s labour—to that of “additional labour”—as wellas a differentiation in women’s salaries. The politics of “structuraladjustment”, for example, initiates a feminization of poverty in theSouth. In industrial countries women and migrants who are not welleducated are ghettoized in a segment of miserably paid and casualizedemployment.

The feminization of employment is an aspect of the contradictoryredefinition of the circumstances of productive and reproductive labour.The dissolution of the boundaries of employment is accompanied inWestern welfare states by a reprivatization of former state-organizedsections of care-giving labour as well as other services and benefitsformerly provided by the welfare state. The increasing integrationof women into the labour market in the countries of the Northoccurred simultaneously with the withdrawal of the welfare state fromspecific areas. For example, all OECD countries decreased expenditureson family allowances and reprivatized the costs of childcare between1965 and 1990—parallel to the increasing integration of womeninto the labour market (Mitchell and Garrett 1996). Furthermore,welfare state measures that enabled a minimum of social redistribution,further education opportunities for women and more “fair-to-women”participation in labour, fall victim to the state project of the“Schumpeterian workfare state” (Jessop 1994) and its strategies ofreprivatization. This “limitation” of the welfare state pushes womenback to the private realm and restricts women’s agency and self-determination. Diane Sainsbury (1996) concludes that women in allwelfare regimes are clearly disadvantaged by this process ofC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


restructuring, because it limits the fields of action and decision-making.Vulnerable social groups, like single parents, are especially anddrastically affected by the restructuring of the welfare state.

These strategies of reprivatization now assume that an unlimitedsupply of unpaid women’s labour exists, which the politicaltransformations of the welfare state can absorb. Yet these strategiesare based on a construction of family that has not existed for a longtime: the nuclear family is neither a dominant form of life, nor does theidea of a single family income depict reality. Women are no longer athome in front of the stove, and the global transformations in employmentcontribute considerably to the fact that they also no longer return to thestove. Through the withdrawal of state and the mobilization of familialback-up systems, the private sphere is expanded and enlarged—andwomen are overburdened (Larner 1996:46). Because the labour of care-giving remains a form of badly paid work, these politics produce newgender relations in the private sphere: the social responsibility for thereproduction of future as well as current generations is (once again) morefirmly bound to the feminine gender. A gender-specific redistribution ofproductive and reproductive labour is not in sight and is also politicallynot intended.

In the course of the re-privatization of care-giving labour, householdswith top earners gain a new “employer function”. The integration ofwomen into top positions in Western industrial societies ensues on thebasis of a broadening of informal feminine working conditions in thehome economy. The feminine members of the “global club” must andcan buy a woman reproductive worker—usually from the South or fromEastern Europe (Rommelspacher 1999:245). Reproductive labour is alsonot only feminized, but also ethnicized. This has, in recent years, givenrise to flexible and de-normalized “care-giving markets”. De-normalizedmeans that the people employed in the home economy are usuallyoperating in completely unprotected working conditions. Strategies ofdifferentiation therefore cause the economic, ethnic and class differencesbetween women in Western metropolizes to become even greater.

Through the neoliberal dissolution of boundaries, the forms ofinternational gender-specific division of labour are reconfigured. Inthe era of national capitalism, the international division of labourwas a division of labour between zones of production and marketsof nation states. International gender-specific division of labour wasbased on a duplication of the structures of inequality in the countriesof the periphery, namely on an export of gender-unequal forms oflabour and the “housewifization”1 of employment in the countries ofthe South as additional labour in the masculinized so-called “centres”.The international unequal division of labour has been de-territorializedover the past decades through the relocation of production and throughmigration streams; it is no longer tied to the locality “on-site”. Rather,C© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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the international assembly line returns to the metropolises. These shiftsof boundaries as well as the processes of dissolving or recreatingboundaries allow ethnicized gender regimes, gender practices andgender identities to develop, especially in the industrial countries, suchas in eastern Europe.

Today’s border regimes construe, using citizenship, belonging toa community or the exclusion from it. Border regimes are thereforealso means of regulating productive and reproductive labour, formaland informal or illegal labour. Neoliberal practices of dissolvingboundaries imply first and foremost the easier crossing of boundaries forcommodities and services, but these practices also imply a limitation,in terms of the exclusion of people. The new border regimes are usuallygender selective and racist, because they construct subjects that are“useful” and “useable” in the local or national labour market andsubjects that are “of no value” to the national economy. Women from theSouth primarily make up the new (sexualized) service class of the North(Gather, Geissler and Rerrich 2002). Neoliberal economic restructuringis hence not only a process of a new kind of gendering, but it is also oneof “racification” (Larner 1996:40f).

The changes in the relations between productive and reproductivelabour result in an intensified intertwining of formal and informal labourmarkets in the countries of the South as well as in the countries ofthe North. The formal economy (of industrial countries) increasinglyneeds the informal, semi-public economy (of the South). The newneoliberal labour conditions thus produce new gender-coded positionsof employment all over the world: the more formal the employmentis, the more likely it is that it remains a white man’s reservation; themore informal it is, the greater the probability that it is the work of anon-white reproductive labourer.

Marianne Marchand (1996:586) hence identifies two simultaneousand interwoven global gender-specific restructuring processes: a“masculinist” process of a highly technologized world of global financeand production, and a “feminized” globalization process of the inferioreconomy of sexualized and ethnicized services with intimate activitiesin the home or private sphere. The feminized globalization is the“privatised other” of the masculinized processes.

Statehood is without a doubt undergoing changes specific to genderand ethnic identities, because of the relocation of production facilities,the conquest of global markets, and migration in a globalized world:ethnicization as a form of state discourse becomes more visible, moremanifest as well as, and even in connection with, gender discourse.The “dissolution of boundaries” and condensation of space and timein the context of globalization is also a process of the intensificationof gendering and ethnicizing of the worldwide production of “centres”and “peripheries” and the structures of inequality they are bound to.C© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


The production of “one’s own” and of “foreign” becomes a hegemonicform of the nation state’s discourse in the process of neoliberalrestructuring.

Neoliberal discourses and practices are furthermore masculinistbecause they do not in principle eliminate the sedimented genderasymmetry; rather, they restore it—in its individual components. Theeconomic and political restructuring process takes gender inequalityinto consideration as a resource to legitimize the new functionaldivisions and boundaries (Wohl 2007). Gender relations thereforeremain power relations. The following section closes with a gender-critical acknowledgement of the political regulations of these globalsocial changes. The section looks critically at global governance as anew form of statehood based on unequal gender relations.

Global Governance: Women’s Political Perspectives on theInternationalized StateDenationalization and internationalization, and the fact that democracyin nation states is challenging boundaries, therefore allowing for newpolitical spaces and needing to find new forms of institutionalization,definitely offer appealing feminist perspectives. Since the nation stateas the container for democracy never was very favourable to women, itseems from a feminist point of view that in this shift there are aspects thatare open and formable: even conceptualizations of a “cosmopolitization”or “post-national” democracy (see, among others, Held 1995:108ff)partially overlap with feminist ideas of democracy.

Of course, the state and its forms of representation do not “erode”;rather, the state apparatus executes “a change of form in the architecture”(Altvater and Mahnkopf 1996:116). The “end of the (nation) state” ishence more accurately identified as the “adjustment” of states to the neweconomic doctrine: nation states primarily produce optimal conditionsof valorization for local capital, or the capital it wants to attract, so as toallow it to be a high-performance player in the context of internationalcompetition (Hirsch 1995:103). This reorganization of nation statescreates new political institutions and forms of representation at thenational as well as the international level. These new institutionsare there to “effectively” accompany, moderate and legitimatize theglobalization of capital. The new forms of political representationand decision-making at the national as well as the international levelmust thereby be seen within the context of economic and socialtransformations. In the following we briefly discuss these new forms ofpolitical representation in a gendered perspective, having in mind thatthe project of state transformation is contested, that the internationalizedstate is an arena of struggles between different social forces, and onein which new identities and anti-hegemonic strategies are created.C© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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Hence, the project of restructuring hegemonic masculinities througheconomic globalization and political internationalization has not yetbeen finalized, but is a contradictory and ambiguous process.

On the national level, an informalization of politics can be identifiedin the substructures of negotiation rounds and in networks in the extra-parliamentary area. State institutions are now only facilitators; theyare no longer the only, or even the privileged, actors in politics. Eventhe importance of political parties in decision-making processes isdecreasing. In these networks, the social actors as well as the socialmovements are no doubt partially integrated. However, these formsclearly have problematic effects: Vivien Schmidt (1995:85) speaksof “asymmetries” of state power, because through the process ofinformalization, primarily the power of the executive is strengthenedcompared with that of the legislature. In the “negotiating state”,democratically legitimate institutions lose their monopoly on politicalproblem definition, agenda-setting and problem-solving strategies tocorporatist networks, strong social groups such as industry, the churches,the media and academia. This process of “de-parliamentarization” alsobecomes obvious with the invention and appointment of new brain trusts,for example the “Ethikrat” (Ethics Council) in Germany which workson issues such as genetic bio-banks.

These processes of “privatizing” politics result in gender-politicalambivalences: the national negotiation regimes entail de-democratization and remasculinization because they weaken anyorgans of representation and negotiation, like parliament, where womenhave fought to gain a quota of access. The decision-making in systemsof negotiation also usually excludes the public. Privatization thenmeans that politics tend to remain withdrawn from an examiningpublic. This removal of the public results in decisions being madeby old boy networks, because in these negotiation networks men arealmost exclusively the actors in important positions. Usually linked tosuch forms of arcanization of politics is its homogenization—and agender homogenization as well. The more intensive form of informalinterweaving of lobbies, bureaucracy and private actors tends toincrease the influence of men, making successful interventions forwomen and equality difficult.

With the nation state’s loss of the primacy of regulation to capital andlabour, nation states increasingly cede authority to supranational bodieslike the EU or the IMF. Internationalization and denationalization ofpolitics mean that political and social interactions are expanded beyondthe nation state’s boundaries and political decisions are negotiatedin international “regimes” or “governance” rounds. Compared withinternational relations in the years of the Cold War and to the RealistTheory of international relations, “global governance” appears to be arevolutionary paradigm shift, since it seems to indicate a shift away fromC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


the ideas of military security to a model of conflict resolution throughcooperation (Ruppert 2000:51ff).

Politics beyond the nation state, in international networks ofcooperation between women of the South and of the North, has in factopened up new feminist fields of action in the last decade. The history ofwomen’s NGOs at the UN conferences can in this regard be consideredsuccess stories: in this way the descriptive and therefore quantitativerepresentation (Pitkin 1967) of women in international bodies like theWorld Bank and the UN has noticeably increased (D’Amico 1999), andin the context of UN conferences, women’s groups or women’s NGOshave grown to become important global actors. The fields of actionand decision-making in international negotiation regimes could alsobe considerably expanded to include women politicians and women’sNGOs. Women’s movements became one of the central building blocksof “global governance”; in fact the international women’s movementcan even be considered a co-initiator of “global governance” structures(Ruppert 2002:61).

Additionally, the substantial representation of women2 was alsoachieved more widely in the last decade: in international regulationregimes, women’s groups were successful in gendering the politicalagenda (Meyer and Prugl 1999:5). Because of these engagements, itwas possible to establish the political field of “international women’spolitics” (Ruppert 2002:60) and make gender an important internationalissue. Feminist experts were able to increase the knowledge aboutgender in important international institutions like the UN and theWorld Bank, sensitizing these organizations to the questions of genderand the gender-sensitive “framing” of their political issues. Theinternational women’s movement, for example, gave determiningimpetus to including women’s rights (including reproductive rights,protection from violence against women, and the recognition of rape asa war crime) on the human rights agenda (Klingebiel 2000:162; Meyerand Prugl 1999:3, 7). Similar successes can also be noted at the EUlevel. The European Commission, which can likewise be identified as a“governance” structure, is considered the initiator of European women’snetworks (Abels 2001). The European Commission, in cooperationwith the European Court of Justice, adopted quite women-friendlypolicies and was able to implement them in unwilling nation states likeGermany. Without doubt, new “governance” forms were also fought forby international movements and NGOs, and by women’s movements.They are the results of negotiation processes between different elementsof civil society, including economic actors, and the nation state’sadministrative structures at national and international levels. “Globalgovernance” is the political regulation of social relations in the processof global neoliberal restructuring, the political form of “economicregime-building” (Runyan 1999:211). This state-theoretical andC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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dominance-critical view sheds a more differentiated light on theprocess and structures of “global governance”. Against this backgroundwe would like to outline some of the problematic consequencesof “governance” that affect the democratic configuration of genderrelations.

As we have shown, “governance” is a deeply gendered process. Theredefinition of political space is coupled with a remasculinization of thepublic and institutions, as well as a narrowing of the room for manoeuvrefor women’s politics. Additionally, supranational institutions werehistorically developed by excluding women; they are inscribed witha masculinist bias. The apparatuses of international statehood are veryobviously “manned”. In powerful institutions like the World Bank, theIMF, the European Central Bank or the WTO, women are significantlyunderrepresented (Lenz 2002:84ff). Beyond that, women are not onlymarginalized in the largest organizations of global governance, but evenin NGOs (Lenz 2002:79). Symbolic as well as nominalist masculinismhas not been abolished on these levels. In these new political forms,women are perhaps more visibly integrated; yet the gender-specific andethnicized invocations associated therewith are integrated into a settingthat is not free of power and dominance, which reconfigures the powerrelations of gender, ethnicity and class: being white, being a man andbelonging to the new class of the “hyperbourgeoisie” (Duclos 1998),acting worldwide, are rearticulated in the process of the transformationof the international gender-specific division of labour and have becomethe social foundations of power in the “new” neoliberal state. The“anarchy” of single states’ manhoods are replaced by new powerfulnetworks of “world manhood”. The global economy and internationalpolitics create new heroes of manhood, new masculine conqueror types(Kreisky 2001:85ff): it is no longer the “warriors” and military heroeswho conquer the world, although even these are also becoming moredominant; global virility obtains in the stockbroker, in the “manager-manhood of transnational corporations” (Connell 1998:102) or in themondial “spin doctor” a refined nuance—and is thereby also potentiallyaccessible to women. The hegemonic manhood of neoliberalism isalso defined by the “pattern of calculated egocentrism” of the stockmarket and by the “compliance and dominance of bureaucracy” (Connell1998:101).

Uta Ruppert (1998:96ff) therefore arrives at the sobering conclusionthat traditionally strong international organizations are not questioned intheir dominant positions by women’s NGOs, but that these organizationsare in fact more interested in a political supplement of women’sorganizations. This hegemonic inclusion of women’s movements fosterstheir image and even strengthens their power, since subaltern positionscan be “silenced” through integration. They are marginalized in thepolitical process and are dominated by commercial organizations. TheC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


women’s movements of the North as well as of the South lack theresources—finances, professional and symbolic capital—to be ableto participate as powerful players in the international “governance”structures (Ruppert 2000:60). Despite the growth of internationalorganizations’ magnitudes and breadths, the international women’smovement can only expect a few improvements when it comes to theirinvolvement or the implementation of their demands.

The informal institutions of a “post-national network democracy”are just as impermeable to gender-specific themes as the nationalinstitutions, because the channels of influence are additionally installed“underground”: they seal themselves up against new, unknown womenactors more successfully than the formalized structures do, becausethey are not transparent and are hidden from public (Sauer 2001b).The generation of international regulation patterns is by no meansconnected to the questioning of the reified pattern of manhood. On thecontrary, even the supranational state operates traditionally masculinepractices.

One reason lies in the fact that the neoliberal framing of “globalgovernance” creates and privileges the economic hegemony ofinternational organizations like the World Bank and the WTO (Cox1996) and “market-friendly NGOs” (Runyan 1999:212). Even feministorganizations run the risk of mutating into a “trade-related feminism”(Shiva 1995:37, cited in Runyan 1999:218)—perhaps because that isthe only way they can successfully put gender issues on the politicalagenda. Furthermore, the danger exists that global women experts willbe absorbed by the process of neoliberal hegemony and their anti-hegemonic potential will get lost. Gayatri Spivak criticizes, for example,the “feminist apparatchiks who identify conference organising withactivism” (Spivak 1996:4, cited in Runyan 1999:212). Additionally,Christa Wichterich identifies a group of “jet-set female lobbyists”(Wichterich 1998:236, cited in Klingebiel 2000), who lack referenceto women’s movements.

Women are substantially underrepresented in “global governance”structures; their interests are dismissed and are only selectivelyperceived. Gender was indeed made a central category of internationalpolitics, and women from the so-called “Third World” were recognizedfor their importance to economic growth and to population politics,in short to development. But gender equality is developing much moreinto a resource for economic growth in the countries of the periphery (asstated in the World Bank Report 2001, ch II, cited in Ruppert 2002:56;Klingebiel 2000:164) rather than being the foundation for emancipationand empowerment. In this sense, empowerment programmes (such asreproductive rights and women’s health) are economically framed andreinterpreted, and women are assessed on the basis of their value togrowth and economic development.C© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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This precarious “discovery” of gender places women primarily inrelation to men and to the so-called “First World” (keyword: population“explosion”). Feminine empowerment is reduced to economic successand economic efficiency, and women’s freedom is sacrificed tocommercial “freedom” (Runyan 1999:218; Wohl 2008:69). Anne SissonRunyan therefore fears that “governance” perceives and construeswomen in a way “that can undermine feminism” (Runyan 1999:210).Women are functionalized as symbols—as per Gayatri Spivak’s verdictat the Beijing Conference: “[T]he financialization of the globe must berepresented as the North embracing the South. Women are being usedfor the representation of this unity” (Spivak 1996:2, cited in Runyan1999:210). Thus, the global South is constructed by the feminizeddiscourse of the North, instead of “governance” advancing genderequality.

ConclusionsIn this article we have shown that “global governance” is not a gender-democratic alternative to masculinist forms of decision-making at thenational level. Global governance in our feminist materialist perspectiveis a new form of statehood, originating in the (global) change of socialrelations in the context of neoliberal restructuring. While the formsof global governance at first glance promise a transformation of thestate apparatus towards more participation and inclusion of women’smovement actors in decision-making, a second look at social powerrelations reveals that global governance is the restructuring of patriarchalstatehood in the process of globalization and thus a political formwhich neoliberal restructuring requires in advancing the global projectof capitalist transformation.

The advancement of masculinist hegemony of the international state isstill an incomplete project in which women’s movements can interveneand which they can change. Many aspects of this neoliberal project areof course already in place, yet the deregulation of national patriarchalfields of action also allows chances for anti-hegemonic political action.For feminists, the chance that remains is the paradoxical interventionof anti-state politics with state actors at national and internationallevels—and thereby also the engagement in “governance” structures.State- and dominance-critical reflections must certainly remain partof such an emancipatory project if it does not want to be defeatedin the struggle against economic and masculinist hegemony. At thesame time, feminist politics should not overlook that it is itself apart of the neoliberal discourse to negate and disarticulate existingpolitical—specifically women’s political—conditions, resistances andoppositions. Now, as before, the everyday life of women is the sourceof discrepancy and contradictions. Women’s movements in the globalC© 2010 The AuthorsAntipode C© 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.


South could sing a loud song about this (Bergeron 2001:1000f).Feminist perspectives can reveal these contradictions of women’severyday practices, show the gaps and broken pieces that neoliberalrestructuring leaves behind, politicize and change them. These “politicsfrom the kitchen” (Elson 2002) are still a way to more democracy—and to politicizing contradictions in the male hegemonic project ofglobalization.

However, the latter requires more feminist theoretical work on thetransformation of statehood to fill remaining gaps (Rai and Waylen2008). The focus on state theory in our article has been on a materialistconception of the state, relying on a neo-marxist debate in the German-speaking countries. Another strand of feminist state theory, whichfocuses on “subjectivation“ and knowledge/power complexes (Wohl2008), might be useful to explain not only the politics of identity but alsothe politics of intersectionality and the interplay of women’s movementsand states in a globalizing context (Sauer 2008).

Endnotes1 This expression refers to the degradation of waged labour into unpaid or worse-paidand precarious work, such as housework (Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and von Werlhof1988).2 Action taken “for” women within an institution or within a policy process is what isto be understood by this term (Pitkin 1967).

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Feminist Perspectives on the Internationalization of the State

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