This week I will examine “From Gender as Object to Gender as Verb: Rethinking how Global Restructuring Happens*” by Leslie Salzinger and “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” by Arjun Appadurai. Admittedly, “Disjuncture and Difference” was a bit difficult to understand at some points. However, I found that after having read “From Gender as Object to Gender as Verb,” I understood it a bit better and was able to make connections between the texts. The two reminded me of a text I read for ER&M 439: Fruits of Empire which is Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil by Andre Gunder Frank.
In Salzinger’s text, I found it particularly salient when they wrote, “However it is time to flip the question: to ask not how global processes affect ‘women,’ or even ‘men,’ but how gendered understandings, assumptions, and subjectivities structure global production itself. Thus, in the following pages, I will explore the consequences for global restructuring of its gendered form.” Salzinger posits that “global restructuring is a gendered process.” I have previously heard things such as, “labor is gendered,” and I generally understood what it meant, but this text helped clarify it for me by explaining that gendered understandings went into the “creation” (if there was ever really an emergence, as “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” by Frederic Jameson tells us, globalization has been around since the neolithic era trade routes) of globalization and global production.
In Capitalism and Underdevelopment, Andre Gunder Frank’s thesis is underdevelopment cannot and will not be solved or resolved by still capitalist development, and the peoples who inhabit these underdeveloped nations need to liberate themselves from capitalism completely in order to for the masses to have their needs met because capitalism only reproduces itself regionally and locally. That is the insidious part about the global capitalist system: You cannot develop an underdeveloped nation, region, locality, enterprise, etc. If you attempt to, the underdevelopment just expands and deepens. As the peripheries (or satellites), nations in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia get their resources expropriated from them and they get appropriated by the “developed” capitalist nations and within those nations, the elites. This is why, in my opinion, Gunder Frank’s most salient point has to be, “For the generation of structural underdevelopment, more important still than the drain of economic surplus from the satellite after its incorporation as such into the world capitalist system, is the impregnation of the satellite’s domestic economy with the same capitalist structure and its fundamental contradictions” (10). This leads me to consider the ways perpetual underdevelopment that only deepens with attempts to develop is gendered. I wonder how “gendered understandings, assumptions and subjectivities” structured development and underdevelopment and incorporated what Gunder Frank argues in the world order, allowing this world to function as/within a global capitalist system. I know that in Salzinger’s piece, they argue that “within transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms of tropes of gendered personhood, and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its impact on gendered selves per se” (44). I reckon, then, gender and race, or perhaps the marginalization and subordination of the Third World identity, worked to structure the aspect of global production that renders the Global South “underdeveloped.”
Furthermore, I was really compelled by Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “the new global economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries)” (296). This point is especially striking to me because most of what I learned in Fruits of Empire revolves around the center-periphery model and does draw from neo-Marxist theories of development, which Appadurai says can no longer explain our new global cultural economy. Honestly, I have so many questions about this I don’t know where to begin. However, I am really interested in the notion that “at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way” (295). This notion adds to, and disrupts, what I know and have learned about development, global capitalism, and metropole-periphery relationships, all of which are explained in Capitalism and Underdevelopment.
Overall, I am interested in how gendered notions, subjectivities, and perspectives went into the structuring of disorganized capitalism, which brings all three of these texts together. I want to further explore how the gendering of “the relationship between the five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes” and its implications for empire and the study of empire (296). I believe these readings are useful and can lend themselves to the study of Fruits of Empire.
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