Introduction
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racialized symbolism and metaphors that are deployed to construct and naturalize
dominant discourses of globalization. Such metaphors both propel its power and seeming
inevitability and obscure debate about the characterizations and effects of global capital
and alternative social, political, and economic arrangements. As Julie Graham and
Katherine Gibson have keenly observed, 1990s globalization narratives of both
neoliberals and neo-Marxists read like "rape scripts" which are based on the assumption
that men and women play out fixed gender roles of aggressors whose behavior cannot be
controlled and victims who are too weak to actually stop the violence. The constant
invocation of "capitalist penetration" into presumably weaker non-capitalist economic
systems, whether celebrated or bemoaned, evokes the standard rape scenario in which the
male rapist (read as global capital), whose body is "hard, full, and projectile," overwhelms
his female victim (read as workers, Third World countries, the poor, etc.), whose body is
"soft, empty, vulnerable, and open" (Gibson-Graham 1996:124). In the act of
globalization that is read like rape, resistance is futile; non-capitalist economic spaces are
constituted, like women in standard rape scripts, as
. . .inevitably and only ever sites of potential invasion/
envelopment/accumulation, sites that may be recalcitrant but are incapable of
retaliation, sites in which cooperation in the act of rape is called for and ultimately
obtained
(Gibson-Graham 1996:126).
Convention