Desai, Manisha. Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization.

• Author: Quartaroli, Tina A.
• Position: Book review

Desai, Manisha. Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization. Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. 138 pages. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $22.95.

When I first started teaching about gender and globalization in the early 1990s, the literature painted a rather depressing picture of women in the developing world. The majority of feminist research on globalization focused largely on how women were negatively impacted by masculine-gendered processes of globalization such as ethnocentric development programs, multinational corporate spread, and rapid technological expansion. Most of the current literature in the field of gender and globalization remains tilted toward that perspective, and obviously the formal global economy continues to operate within the male-gendered traditions associated with the Western monetary model of the production of goods and services.

In Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization, Manisha Desai, director of women's studies and associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, paints an interesting, alternative picture, arguing that ordinary women are not just victims of globalization but that they are also agents of transformation, actively contributing to the evolving global landscape. Published as part of Rowman and Littlefield's Gender Lens series which seeks to elucidate the complexities inherent in gender studies while helping to foster action towards eliminating gender inequities, Gender and the Politics of Possibilities starts from the notion that because men and women participate in the global economy in different ways due to the same gendered processes that can produce negative effects on women's lives, women's participation tends to be overlooked but is no less vital to emerging economies and, as such, is equally vital to the global justice movement at large.

By looking more closely at women successfully negotiating within the informal economy as well as at how women have successfully adapted male-gendered strategies and technologies to both organize and mobilize, Desai does a great job of showing how many ordinary women are actually key actors in the processes of globalization around the world. She uses three fascinating case studies to support her central thesis: women cross-border traders in southern and western Africa, transnational feminist activists working at both formal and informal levels, and the Modemmujers social network program in...