Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization, and: Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (review)

Readable, engaging, and informative, Manisha Desai's Gender and the Politics of Possibilities sparkles with new insights. Unlike many scholars, she does not just focus on the different processes of globalization. Instead of constructing women's agency as reaction to patriarchy, her framework of inquiry is based on how women create agency as action. Linking the micro to the macro to the global, she emphasizes how gendered social actors themselves constitute globalization and how they create possibilities of global justice. Her work is field-based and, therefore, accessible to undergraduates. I have already used chapters for my undergraduate course "Sociology of Globalization." Desai provides empirical evidence in three case studies: cross-border traders in Africa; transnational feminists who work simultaneously at the United Nations, at the grass roots level, and at the World Social Forum (WSF); and modemmujers—Mexican women who bring information technology to rural women in Latin America.

The African case study is particularly appealing; not enough research has been carried out about African feminists in gender studies. Shadows of a stereotype prevail: masses of women oppressed by structural adjustment that they are unable to rise above. Desai's well-researched chapter shatters such assumptions. In contrast to Leslie Sklair ([1990]2002), who views cross-border global trade as carried out by transnational corporations (TNCs), Desai focuses on women who comprise 20-30 percent of all cross-border traders; unlike male corporate CEOs, these traders are invisible. African women, particularly in the west and southwest, have always been traders. Facilitated by colonialism, this process is now reshaped by globalization. As women cross-border traders develop their social economies, creating kin and nonkin relationships across borders, they also express their globalized collective identities.

Desai adds much to critical globalization studies, which is defined by William I. Robinson (2005) as a field that contests mainstream globalization studies and links theory to practice. She investigates how men and women are actually catalysts of globalization. In so doing, she creates a new nexus of critical globalization studies and social justice movements. Desai argues that there are different globalizations: economic, political, and cultural processes that, although interlinked, are not the same.

Her analysis of globalization scholars as first and second wave is illuminating. If first-wave scholars emphasized the paradox of increasing deterritorialization and growing interconnectedness, second-wave scholars stressed the importance of the complexities of time and space in the geographies of globalization. To these themes, Desai adds a much-needed framework of inquiry: namely, the ways in which ordinary men and women create globalization in their everyday lives. In so doing, she challenges the conventional perspective that globalization emanates from the West to the rest of the world in a unilinear direction.

Her chapter "Modemmujers and the New Cultures of Globalization" is exciting. Defining culture as the creation of meaning that sustains life, she links culture to globalization in a tangible way. Highlighting the distinction between common or the ability to create common discourses based on common cultural values and same or uniform discourses that do not encourage diverse viewpoints, she introduces the subject of "ethical cosmopolitanism." In contrast to a life of privilege that distinguishes the consumer-of-the-world perspective, those who share the values of ethical cosmopolitanism make life an art. She argues that people who are rooted in their communities can also be cosmopolitan in their values, as they utilize an ethical axis to belong to real, virtual, and imagined communities.

Unlike much of the writing on globalization, Desai courageously provides definitions. After a reference to global civil society or globalization from below, she defines transnational activism as a political philosophy of political activism that goes beyond state geographies in terms of issues, actors, strategies, and perspectives...