Globalising gender justice?

• Author: Stewart, Anne

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of the global market on gender relations. It argues that there is insufficient emphasis within contemporary feminist legal analyses on the inequalities associated with globalisation. While there has been major developments around the human rights of women at an international level, there has been much less focus on the economic aspects of the development of global trading. This paper considers the regulatory frameworks associated with three forms of trading chains: in vegetables and flowers, in care and in sex. It seeks to develop a framework through which to consider the ways in which different forms of legal interventions impact on gender relations. The aim is to open debate on the utility of feminist analytical 'tools' and action oriented strategies. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the extent to which feminist legal analysis provides a suitable framework for tackling global economic inequalities. It then sets out the contexts for each of the three trading chains, using the UK to concentrate on the relationships at the consumer end of the chain and African contexts for the various sites of production. Thereafter the paper explores the various ways in which the relationships between the consumer and producer sites are constructed legally. The paper concludes by exploring the ways in which a relational approach to gender justice, using the feminist concept of the ethic of care, can be developed in the context of a global economy.

Keywords:

Care, East and West Africa, Feminism, Gender, Globalisation, Labour Markets, Legality, Regulation, Trading Chains.

1. Legal Feminism and Global Justice

   Feminist discussions relating to law have developed their own internal dynamics in recent years as they have come of age. There is a rich literature stretching from detailed discussions of a particular doctrinal issue to gender critiques of international humanitarian law. There is also a substantial and varied body of analytical literature discussing the relationship between gender and law. Postmodernist insights into the construction of meaning have challenged the early, rather limited, understanding of legal rights and in the process, legal feminism has largely moved beyond dichotomous debates such as those relating to universalism and relativism. We now have a much greater understanding of the way in which legal discourses contribute to the construction of identities. There have been anxieties about the corollary to these developments: the first is the disjuncture between political action and the academy; the second is the neglect of issues of the distributional aspects of gender justice.

   The international women's rights movement best represents the first tension. The actions of activists in the last couple of decades have brought the issue of women's rights across the globe into the political spotlight. Much of this action has been institutionalised within the international human rights framework but activists continue to develop further their approaches in a wide range of contexts, from localised grassroots activism to regional and international networks. Organisations have entered into creative partnerships with state politicians to develop specific gender based documents such as the African Protocol on Women's Rights (1). The policy oriented approach of the rights movement often seems a long way from academic discussions not only in terms of the way in which issues are understood but also spatially. Much of the impetus for the rights movement is now located in the developing world, despite the continuing discourse on and distrust of the perceived western philosophical bias of prioritising individualised, political and civil rights over economic and social entitlement, while academic legal feminism is primarily (although of course not entirely) located within develop world institutions.

   Within development discourse, rights approaches have been used as an antidote to the imperatives of neo liberal economics, largely due to the influence of scholars such as Amartya Sen (1999) who argue that human development is the goal of economic activity rather than simply a possible side effect. Nussbaum (2002) has attempted to by pass many of the conceptual limitations of rights within this framework through the development of the capabilities approach to gender and development. While she makes the case for the capabilities approach using Aristotelian philosophy, the adoption of a rights approach to development by the broader policy community is less well grounded and focused (Cornwall and Nyamu 2005). One of the advantages of this type of approach is that the entitlements of individuals are recognised and inform policy development and there is often a focus on gender sensitive development. It offers an outcome oriented approach, the pursuit of gender justice. However this framework does not necessarily prioritise or even tackle distributional issues such as economic impoverishment or the specific effects of globalisation on gender relations. Substantiating economic and social rights may be part of the rhetoric of this approach to gender justice but implementation is less easy to achieve.

   Analytically feminism shares the unease of analyses which prioritise economic relations, focusing more on the need to understand the impact of a far wider range of factors on the construction of gendered identities although Fraser (2000) offers a way of rebalancing recognition and redistribution issues. Global north feminism's focus on what could be broadly defined civil and political issues rather than economic is mirrored in the global institutional context. This is not to deny the activities of some elements of the international women's movement, most notably those associated with labour rights, which have been struggling to gain recognition and interventions around these issues within institutional contexts such as the International Labour Organisation and others who have targeted the trade bodies. However they have faced formidable obstacles, particularly in the latter arenas. Yet, the economic impact of present forms of globalisation is having profound effects on gender relations which call for more analytical attention.

   Another strand of feminism, also associated with an ethical approach, which has been particularly influential within welfare debates but perhaps less so within wider legal discussions (but see Drakapoulou 2000) is the ethic of care. This concept, which has its origins in the work of Carol Gilligan (1982), arose out of the perceived differences in the way in which masculine and feminine moral reasoning developed. Tronto (1993) developed it in relation to political philosophy and Sevenhuijsen (1998) to European family and welfare policy (2). Care is contrasted with rights thinking in that it is based on relational and contextual rather than abstract individualised norms, of the type associated with 'private' family relations rather than 'public' life. The proposition is that the ethic of care has been lost in the development of the public realm, to the latter's detriment, and that the concept of interdependence and the values associated with care thinking (3) are necessary for a gender justice (and wider humane) society. To what extent can a rights discourse encompass aspects of a relational approach (4)?

2. The Relational Framework: Overview

   I will now set out the framework through which I will explore the three different chains. In each case the UK is the setting for one end of the chain. The demand for pre prepared vegetables and flowers, care and sexual services is located within this jurisdiction. Here, vegetables and flowers are bought in supermarkets by consumers many of whom engage in paid work; service workers provide care in a range of contexts including hospitals, nursing homes and private homes; and sex workers sell their services in bars, brothels, over the internet and on the streets. The paper sets out the background for the development of the demand for these services with a particular emphasis on the changes in the socio economic position of women in the labour market and within the family. It will consider the interactions between the market, the state and the family/community on gender relations in particular the ways in which the legal discourse on 'work/life' balance is constructed.

   The goods and services under discussion in this paper are 'produced' in different jurisdictions originally. The vegetables and flowers are grown in East Africa. Value is added through preparation and packaging which is undertaken primarily by women workers. The providers of the care services are generally women who migrate from West Africa to the UK. The sex workers are women who migrate (sometimes through coercion) from East and West Africa. In each jurisdiction there are interactions between the market, the state and the family/community which impact on gender relations. In each jurisdiction there are specific regulatory contexts (the 'vertical').

   Thereafter the aim is to explore the commodity, care and sex chains which link these women workers with women worker/consumers in the UK and secondly, to explore the regulatory contexts which structure these relationships. This involves a consideration of the ways in which the global market is regulated, the relationship between the respective states within wider international and regional contexts and an exploration of the ways in which family and community based networking operate. This, conceptually, is a 'horizontal' regulatory framework which impacts on the specific 'vertical' state specific frameworks in a variety of ways depending on location.

   The development of each context will be relatively schematic in this paper due to the necessary word limitations (5). The aim here is to set out the framework for analysis and to explore the implications for the development of feminist legal studies. I will argue that...