Introduction
Page 3
bear more recent feminist scholarship on gender and globalization that further elucidates
our understanding of varying interstructurings of gender, race, nation, and sexual
identities, ideologies, and practices produced through and productive of global
restructuring. These offer richer “sightings” of the relationship between gender (and
related power relations) and global restructuring, while also complicating and expanding
“sites” of global restructuring, taking them beyond geographical spaces to other analytic
categories, such as sites of cultural, symbolic, and sexuality production. Some of the
latest scholarship on transnational feminism also raises new questions about and
approaches to the issue of “resistances” to global restructuring through a gender lens.
What has particularly animated more recent feminist explorations of gender and
globalization is the ushering in of the post-September 11, 2001 world, which has tied
globalization in sharp relief to a tidal wave of re-militarization, with globalization and
militarism constituting what feminist political theorist Rosalind Petchesky (2002) calls
the fraternal “twin towers” of empire. Beyond the implications of the re-rise of
militarism for facile globalization theorizing that predicted the end of history in the form
of ideological struggles, nation-state conflicts, and wars, the contemporary twinning of
globalization and militarization for empire presents new challenges for feminist analyses
of gender and globalization.
Whether post-9/11 militaristic empire building is seen as a part of globalization or
as a separate process that nevertheless assists it and whether empire is seen as the next or
culminating phase of globalization (competing arguments we will examine below),
Convention