8. Implement progressive immigration reform to: provide domestic workers with full immigration status on arrival; abolish the ‘head tax’ on all immigrants; include persecution on the basis of gender and sexual orientation as grounds for claiming refugee status.

9. Contribute to the elimination of poverty around the world by: supporting the cancellation of the debts of the 53 poorest countries; increasing Canada’s international development aid to 0.7% of the Gross National Product.

10. Adopt national standards which guarantee the right to welfare for everyone in need and ban workfare.

11. Recognize the ongoing exclusion of women with disabilities from economic, political and social life and take the essential step of ensuring and funding full access for women with disabilities to all consultations on issues of relevance to women.

12. Establish a national system of grants based on need, not merit, to enable access to post-secondary education and reduce student debt.

13. Adopt proactive pay equity legislation.

There are at least three striking things about these demands. The first is their close relationship to the femocratic administration project. Funding of women’s groups to increase participation in the policy process, increasing funding to social programs, including childcare, to reduce the burden of unpaid labour, and reforms to Employment Insurance, immigration policy and pay equity to improve women’s paid employment situation are all good starts.

The second notable feature is the extent to which these demands correspond to Canada’s particular social formation. Major cleavages in the Canadian women’s movement based on nation (aboriginal peoples and Quebec), race, sexuality and ability are addressed in these demands. If there is any doubt about the persistent importance of national concerns, one need only look at the disclaimer that appears in the text of “The Feminist Dozen.” It says the following:

When you see an asterisk (*) beside a demand, it indicates that the Canadian Women’s March demand is made to the Federal Government of Canada with the understanding that Québec has the right to determine its own standards, programs and policies in this area.

This caveat makes it clear that in Canada, a ‘national’ women’s movement is actually multinational in character. Recognition of Quebec was even structured into the March itself. The March involved three separate ‘wings,’ which eventually merged into one. When the ‘Quebec wing’ merged with the other two just before reaching Parliament Hill, it was a powerful statement of the complications and contradictions of feminist solidarity in Canada.

The final point of interest is the way in which these largely national concerns are interwoven with international expressions of solidarity, with attention to immigration issues, developing country debt, and foreign aid. This again shows how a national strategy may be supplemented with an international one.

The Fall 2000 edition of Canadian Woman Studies is dedicated to the World March. In the introductory essay, Angela Miles, at first glance, appears to belong to the ‘global feminist’ school. She says:

All over the world women are engaged in feminist environmental, economic, health, shelter, food security, social-justice, human rights, peace, anti-debt, anti-globalization, pro-democracy, anti-violence, and anti-fundamentalist struggles of major proportions (6).

Despite references to “feminist internationalism” and “sisterhood feminism” (6, 9), though, she quickly makes clear that the World March is an example of a nationally-based strategy. She dubs the activities around the World March “feminist local globalism,” to describe a feminism that begins at the local level, but is linked globally (7). Miles is careful to note that...

Farmers, fishers, peasants, workers, young people, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples, as well as feminists, all over the world are working in their own contexts to end cutbacks, privatization, environ- mental destruction, corruption, dictatorship, militarism, and violence (9; emphasis mine).

This Feminist Local Globalism Links National Struggles to International Ones

Making links of various kinds is essential, especially in advancing our understanding of the relationship between gender, globalization, and the state.

I thus began this article by reviewing some literature which theorizes globalization as beyond the state, and which is thus strategically oriented towards the development of global civil society. In response, I drew attention to those who insist that “bringing the state back in” is crucial to both explaining and countering globalization, which is, in fact, a project of nation-states. I then turned to one of the only, albeit unfortunate, points where feminist and non-feminist work on globalization seems to overlap: calls for transnational/global feminism. I showed that these calls—in much of the feminist literature, as well as in two cases of women’s organizing (Beijing + 5 in 2000, and the AWID Forum in 2002)—are based on a faulty conception of globalization, in which it is portrayed as inevitable and irreversible. In addition, transnational/global feminists tend to universalize women’s experiences, and to exaggerate the extent and power of global feminism. I argued that the state continues to be a fundamental political site for feminist movements in their struggles to resist and reverse neoliberalism and globalization, and that efforts at transforming the state through democratic administration are a good start. However, greater consideration must be given to the ways in which democratization, like globalization, is gendered. Finally, I described various feminist projects of democratization, or ‘femocratic administration,’ and the ways in which they can be linked to the international level. A more holistic approach to gender, globalization and the state is possible, so it’s time to get our act together.

Notes

1. Burbach and Robinson are also optimistic about the “revolutionary possibilities” of information technology (12).

2. For an elaboration of this point see also Vogel, 1996.

3. Or, as Cohen and McBride put it: “Globalization represents a uniform system of thought and practice, based on a ‘consensus’ originating in Washington, that all nations and all people within nations throughout the world should root their decisions and actions in one type of economic system” (1).

4. See Grinspun & Kreklewich, 1994.

5. There is a considerable dose of naïveté involved in some of these prescriptions though. Kerr, for example believes that “[w]hen women confront and recognize their differences, it will be possible for them to inform and lobby policy makers to regulate the negative impacts of restructuring policies in ways that benefit women” (245). This liberal feminist presumption that simply educating the government will bring about change is belied by the failure of reasoned argument about the effects of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) on women to dissuade the neoliberal Mulroney government in Canada.

6. Hoskyns identifies the convoluted institutions of the EU as a barrier to women’s ability to lobby and coordinate efforts though. She also notes that while attempts to develop a “gender framework” have been difficult, recognition of race, ethnicity and class has been even slower (80, 82).

7. Jenson, nonetheless, tends to focus mainly on the new opportunities for citizenship provided by globalization.

8. As seen earlier, many have challenged the idea that states are losing power. The view that NGOs and international law are beyond nation-states is also questionable, when the former rely heavily on state support and funding, and the latter requires states to sign on to human rights treaties, and to enforce them. This point will be elaborated later on. In addition, the belief, presumably, is that the UN is more progressive than nation-states around gender equality. This is an assumption with little substance. But beyond that, it is unrealistic in assessing the effectiveness of the UN, and fails to acknowldge its origins (and continuing use) as a tool of US imperialism.

9. This approach is largely the product of what Panitch calls an “outside-in” orientation to describe Coxian and other, World-Systems-style approaches (1994: 71).

10. It must be mentioned that the level of American feminist paternalism, and widespread ignorance of women’s experiences outside of the U.S. demonstrated at this conference, also raises questions about the viability of global feminism. This was evident in the interactions between the American and Japanese participants generally, and then in specific instances throughout the conference. In one workshop, where Diane Elson was presenting the 2000 UNIFEM Report, she was expressing the difficulty she faced in finding statistics that demonstrate the reality of inequalities between women. Brigette Young suggested that the rise in foreign domestic workers in Europe might be such a measure. At this point, a well-known American feminist, and one of the conference organizers, nonchalantly commented that the use of immigrant women as nannies is “nothing new” and had been common for years. Young politely explained that this may very well be true, and even accepted in the U.S., but that it has only been recently, with the dismantling of the welfare state, that this is occurring in Europe. It did not occur to many that the American experience was not universal and/or desirable.

11. The journal Gender and Development, in an issue called “Women Reinventing Globalisation,” also featured articles based on AWID forum papers, but with a more balanced range of perspectives.

12. Although ‘development’ was never really defined.

13. Joanna Kerr, the Executive Director of AWID, makes this point herself in Gender and Development. See Kerr & Sweetman, 7.

14. Gabriel & Macdonald (1994) adopt the term ‘feminist internationality’ from Vasuki Nesiah instead of ‘global sisterhood,’ because they believe it combines transnational alliances with the acknowledgement of differences. In the end though, it is not clear that the two are substantively different.

15. To speak of the First Nations as a single nation is problematic, however, because it obscures the diversity of aboriginal nations in Canada.

16. For an elaboration, see Tammy Findlay 2003.

17. I have argued that Canada is multinational. I still refer to a ‘national’ state, however, because the current configuration of Canadian federalism requires that various nations continue to pursue their struggles through the federal government.

18. See, for example, Van Kirk 1991; Fox 1991.

19. Craig Scott (1999) provides a good outline of the Concluding Observations from CESCR and CCPR. There is not space here to discuss the merits of using these instruments as a strategy. Any consideration of their potential to advance an agenda of global feminism, though, must keep in mind that the U.S. has not even signed onto CEDAW or CRC.