Women's Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival(1)

Abstract

... households and whole communities are increasingly dependant on women fir their survival. [G]overnments too are dependent on their earnings as well as enterprises where profit making exists at the margins of the `licit' economy. The last decade has seen a growing presence of women in a variety of cross-border circuits that have become a source for livelihood, profit-making and the accrual of foreign currency. These circuits are enormously diverse but share one feature: they are profit- or revenue-making circuits developed on the backs of the truly disadvantaged. They include the illegal trafficking in people for the sex industry and for various types of formal and informal labor markets. They also include cross-border migrations, both documented and not, which have provided an important source of convertible currency for governments in home countries. The formation and strengthening of these circuits is largely a consequence of broader structural conditions. Among the key actors emerging in these particular circuits are the women themselves in search of work, but also, and increasingly so, illegal traffickers and contractors as well as the governments of home countries. I conceptualize these circuits as counter-geographies of globalization. They overlap with some of the major dynamics that compose globalization: the formation of global markets, the intensification of transnational and trans-local networks and the development of communication technologies, which easily escape conventional surveillance practices. The strengthening and, in some cases, formation of new global circuits is made possible by the existence of a global economic system and the associated development of various institutional supports for cross-border money flows and markets.(2) These counter-geographies are dynamic; to some extent they are part of the shadow economy, but they also use some of the institutional infrastructure of the formal economy.(3) This article maps some of the key features of these counter-geographies, particularly those involving foreign-born women. I focus on the possibility of systemic links between the growth of these alternative circuits for survival, profit-making and hard-currency earnings, on the one hand, and major conditions in countries that are associated with economic globalization, on the other. Among these conditions are growth in unemployment, the closing of a large number of typically small and medium-sized enterprises oriented to national rather than export markets, and high, and often increasing government debt. While these economies are frequently grouped under the label developing, they are in some cases struggling, stagnant, even shrinking. In the interests of brevity, I will use the term developing as shorthand for all these situations. MAPPING A NEW CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE The various global circuits that incorporate growing numbers of women have strengthened at the same time as economic globalization has had a significant impact on economies. They have had to implement new policies and accommodate new conditions associated with globalization: Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), opening their economies to foreign firms, the elimination of multiple state subsidies, and, it seems almost inevitably, financial crises and the accompanying programs of the IMF. It is now clear that in most of the countries involved, these conditions have created enormous costs for certain sectors of the economy and population and have not fundamentally reduced government debt. Among these costs are the growth in unemployment, the closure of many firms in often traditional sectors oriented to the local or national market, the promotion of export-oriented cash crops which have increasingly replaced survival agriculture and food production for local or national markets and, finally, the heavy, ongoing burden of government debt in most of these economies. …