Introduction
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gender has figured prominently in the imperial designs and actions of the neo-
conservative US administration. Gender identities and relations as well as gendered
symbols, institutions, and practices associated with the multilateralist, economic-centric
globalization of the 1990s have undergone some swift changes in the post-9/11 climate of
unilateralist, military-centric globalization. Old-style Anglo-American hegemonic
masculinities that privilege brawn over brain and are based on extreme homophobia are
on the ascendance, as are the re-imposition of “traditional” gender roles for women
through relentless attacks on reproductive rights, social welfare programs, and livable
wages within the US and in relation to its actions overseas. As many feminist
commentators on post-9/11 have observed, women and so-called “women’s issues” have
virtually disappeared on the public stage amidst the manly world of the “war on
terrorism” under which any assault on human rights is justified. Thus, while women (with
the exception of token neo-conservative shills) and especially feminist voices are largely
absented from political space, gender is still hard at work in post-9/11 globalization.
Despite the veritable silencing of feminist perspectives on the public airwaves and
in public policy in especially the neo-conservative regime of the US, the sheer nakedness
of the gendered, racialized, classist, nationalist, and homophobic discourses and practices
deployed to justify the will to empire (currently couched in the language of the will to
democracy) and all undertaken to achieve it should make it difficult these days to
analytically marginalize these ideologies and relations of inequality in any treatment of
post-9/11 globalization. However, it is also this climate that can contribute to a continued
Convention