WSTA03H3 Chapter 4: Transnational Feminism.docx
14 Apr 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Transnational Feminism
•Exploitation of women workers in the global economy
•Lack of education for girls
•Inadequate maternal and child health care
•Sexual exploitation
•Patriarchal family structures and cultural practises harmful to women and girls
•Researches the gender effects of globalization and the international political
economy.
•Theorises the relationship between first-world and third-world feminism and
between traditional gendered societies and modernity.
•Supplies the socialist feminist analysis of gender, class, racial, and ethnic
inequality to the third world, the global south, postcolonial and nonindustrial
societies and developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
•Theses countries are linked to countries with developed industrial and post-
industrial economies through globalization.
•Men and women circulate and migrate for different (gendered) works- men for
agriculture and women for domestic and care work.
•Women and girls are often trafficked into sex work.
•Jobs are outsourced to areas of cheap labour and inexpensive products produced
in the global south are sold in Western chain stores and malls.
Gender Inequality in the Global Economy
•Uses theories of underdevelopment and development to analyze the position of
women in the global economy, with particular emphasis on newly industrializing
countries.
•The global economy links wealthy countries whose economies focus on service,
information, and finances with manufacturing sites and the sources of raw
materials in poorer countries.
•Mena and women workers all over the world supply the labour for the
commodities that end up in the stores we go to on a daily basis; consumers want
inexpensive electronics and clothing therefore this demand has major impacts on
the workers in poorer areas.
•Women workers tend to be paid less than men workers throughout the world,
whatever the wage scale is because they are supposedly only supporting
themselves.
•Another important part to the global economy is the flow of immigrant labor from
poor countries to wealthy countries. The jobs they do are low paid ‘dirty work”
but they par more than work at home so those who cannot get documents to work
legally, risk injury and death to get smuggled into wealthy countries.
•There is a thriving sex traffic, which entices young women with the false promise
of jobs but sends them into brothels.
•Another form of exploitation is surrogacy- poor women having babies for rich
westerners.
