Control + 1 – Block Headings

Links – Economy/Development
Analysing only economic stability ignores disparities for women

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 78.

Feminists are investigating the reasons for this invisibility that exists not only at the level of policy discourse but also in the field of IPE. However, making women visible within the statist frameworks of neorealism and neoliberalism does not lend itself (for reasons given below) to investigating hierarchical global economic structures detrimental to women; adding women to the liberal literature on economic globalization is equally problematic because it continues to hide the gendered power structures that feminists believe are the cause of women's disadvantaged position. Silence about gender occurs because it is invisible in the concepts used for analysis, the questions that are asked, and the preference for the state level of analysis typical of conventional IPE."' Certainly the questions asked by both neorealists and neoliberals about the reasons for state conflict and cooperation are quite different from those of feminists. Rather than trying to understand the con- ditions necessary for stability in the international system, feminists are seeking to understand the causes of women's various economic insecurities and investigating the conditions under which they might be alleviated. While neorealists and neoliberals both claim that states are furthering their own interests in the global economy, they have been less concerned with how these rewards are distributed internally. Rather than taking the state as given, feminists seek to understand how state policies and structures, in their interactions with the global economy, have differential effects on individuals; making visible gendered power relationships can help us to understand how women and men may be rewarded differentially as the state pursues gains from the global economy.
Links – Economy/Development
Economic “progress” is often regressive for women

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 79-80.

While IPE feminists have been centrally engaged with the debate about the pros and cons of economic globalization, most of them have been quite critical of the assumptions and prescriptions of liberalism. Feminist scholars more generally tend to be skeptical of celebrations of beginnings and endings and historical turning points: they find evidence to suggest that times of "progress" are often regressive for women. For example, the "triumph" of capitalism in the former Eastern bloc was accompanied by a sharp decline in both the economic status of women and their level of political participation. Skeptical of claims about a "new world order," feminist perspectives on economic globalization are unanimous in pointing to continuities in various forms of patriarchy that have had detrimental effects on women's economic security throughout much of history. Given the increase in global inequality, the feminization of poverty, and the discriminations that women often face when they participate in the global market, some feminist scholarship is questioning the triumphalist story of a borderless world that is being told by supporters of economic globalization. It is today's global financiers and corporate executives, those whom Cox has defined as the transnational managerial class - most of whom are men -who seem most comfortably to fit definitions of global citizenship. Most feminists also reject theoretical projects that offer universal, essentialist, or reductionist explanations of multifaceted and complex social relations." Many claim that liberalism's metanarratives about the triumph of rationality and the end of history have not moved us beyond ideology; rather, they are a disguise for a form of knowledge that tells only a partial story-a story that often does not include the experiences of many women (and marginalized people more generally) whose identification with a marketized version of global citizenship is minimal. Certain feminists also claim that values espoused by liberalism of privilege-such as individual freedom, the importance of property rights, and universalism-emphasize values associated with a Western form of hegemonic masculinity. These values are then reproduced in economic models that tend to conflate this masculine viewpoint with a general "human" standpoint, thereby confining the feminine to the structural position of "other"; such thinking renders the masculine as norm and the feminine as difference.51 For example, when proponents of economic globalization speak of economic actors and global citizens, they are using terms that come out of a historical tradition of Western political and economic thought and practice based on experiences more typical of men than women. Denied the right to vote, in all societies, until the twentieth century. Women are still seeking full citizenship in many parts of the world. Terms such as these focus our attention on the public world of the market and the state, historically inhabited by men, while rendering the private world of women virtually invisible. Fukuyama's prediction of a "common marketization" of international relations based on economic calculation comes out of this worldview that portrays individuals solely as economic actors and hides the complex social relations, including class and gender relations, within which individuals' lives are embedded. The market model, favored by liberals, is based on the instrumentally rational behavior of economic actors whose self-interested behavior in the marketplace leads to an aggregate increase in wealth. Households and women's labor more generally remain invisible in economic analyses that privilege productive labor over reproductive labor" This representation of "homo economicus" is detached from the behavior of real people in the material world; it is gendered masculine because it extrapolates from roles and behaviors historically associated with Western (elite) men. However, it has been used by liberal economists to represent the behavior of humanity as a whole. It also tends to mask power relationships that structure differential rewards to different individuals, based on class and race as well as gender.
Links – Economy/Development
The assumption that market integration improves quality of life is empirically false and furthers the economic insecurity of women

J. Ann Tickner, Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, ’92, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 75-6

If capital is being rewarded disproportionately to labor in the world economy, then men are being rewarded disproportionately to women. A 1981 report to the U.N. Committee on the Status of Women avers that while women represent half the global population and one-third of the paid labor force and are responsible for two-thirds of all working hours, they receive only one-tenth of world income and own less that 1 percent of world property. 10 While much of women's work is performed outside the formal economy, these data suggest that women are not being rewarded to the same extent as men even when they enter the market economy. Although no systematic data on men's and women's incomes on a worldwide scale exists, an International Labor Office study of manufacturing industries in twenty countries, conducted in the mid-1980s, showed that women's wages were less than men's in each case. 11 Earning lower wages and owning an insignificant proportion of the world's capital puts women at an enormous disadvantage in terms of power and wealth and thus contributes to their economic insecurity. While feminist economists are just beginning to explore the differential effects of the operation of the market economy on men and women, one area where these effects have been examined in some detail is in studies of Third World women and development. 12 Liberal modernization theory, a body of literature that grew out of assumptions that free markets and private investment could best promote economic growth in the Third World, saw women's relative "backwardness" as the irrational persistence of traditional attitudes. For example, the United Nations' Decade for the Advancement of Women (1975-85) assumed that women's problems in the Third World were related to insufficient participation in the process of modernization and development. In 1970, however, Esther Boserup, the first of many women scholars to challenge this assumption, claimed that in many parts of the colonial and postcolonial world, the position of rural women actually declined when they became assimilated into the global market economy. 13 Women's marginalization was exacerbated by the spread of Western capitalism and culture. In the preindependence period, Western colonizers rarely had any sympathy for the methods women used to cultivate crops; assuming that men would be more efficient as agricultural producers, they attempted to replace women's cultivation practices with those of men.
Free trade may be good in some cases, but it is terrible for women

J. Ann Tickner, Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, ’92, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 78

Liberals, believing in the benefits of free trade, have generally supported export-led strategies of development. But since states that have opted for export-led strategies have often experienced increased inequalities in income, and since women are disproportionately clustered at the bottom of the economic scale, such strategies may have a particularly negative effect on women. The harsh effects of structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund on Third World debtor nations fall disproportionately on women as providers of basic needs, as social welfare programs in areas of health, nutrition, and housing are cut. When government subsidies or funds are no longer available, women in their role as unpaid homemakers and care providers must often take over the provision of these basic welfare needs. 19 Harsh economic conditions in the 1980s saw an increased number of Third World women going overseas as domestic servants and remitting their earnings to families they left behind. These feminist studies of Third World development and its effects on women are suggesting that liberal strategies to promote economic growth and improve world welfare that rely on market forces and free trade may have a differential impact on men and women. Since women's work often takes place outside the market economy, a model based on instrumentally rational market behavior does not capture all the economic activities of women. Therefore we cannot assume that the prescriptions generated by such a model will be as beneficial to women's economic security as they are to men's.
Links – Economy/Development
Focus on competitiveness ignores the domestic economic hardships women face

J. Ann Tickner, Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, ’92, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 83-4

Using game theoretic models to explain states' behavior in the international system, economic nationalists, like the neorealists discussed in chapter 2, often portray states as unitary actors; concentrating at the interstate level, economic nationalists do not generally focus their attention on the internal distribution of gains. But if, as I have argued, women have been peripheral to the institutions of state power and are less economically rewarded than men, the validity of the unitary actor assumption must be examined from the perspective of gender. We must question whether women are gaining equally to men from economic nationalist prescriptions to pursue wealth and power. In all states, women tend to be clustered at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale; in the United States in the 1980s, 78 percent of all people living in poverty were women or children under eighteen. 29 In the United States, certain feminists have noted a trend toward what they term the increasing feminization of poverty: in the 1970s and 1980s, families maintained by women alone increased from 36 percent to 51.5 percent of all poor families. 30 In societies where military spending is high, women are often the first to feel the effects of economic hardship when social welfare programs are sacrificed for military priorities. As I have mentioned before, for economic nationalists the military-industrial complex is an important part of the domestic economy entitled to special protection. For poor women, however, the trade-off between military and economic spending can pose a security threat as real as external military threats. I have shown that the economic nationalist explanation of states' behavior in the international system, which focuses on instrumental rationality, is biased toward a masculine representation. Moreover, the evolution of the modern state system and the capitalist world economy changed traditional gender roles in ways that were not always beneficial to women. Contemporary economic nationalist prescriptions for maximizing wealth and power can have a particularly negative impact on women since women are often situated at the edge of the market or the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.

Links – Nation Building
The notion of state or nation building contributes to the silencing of stories of women – their interests are redefined for them to serve power and national identity

Bina D’Costa, PhD, Australian National University, Australia, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Otago, John Vincent fellow in the Department of International relations at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, taught in the Department of Women’s Studies and International Relations at ANU, 2006 [“Feminist Methodologies for International Relations” edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auskland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pg. 146-7 EmiW]

Using the responses and the archival research as a basis, I analyzed the state-nation-gender nexus and suggested that the control of women is fundamental to the construction of the nation's identity.28 This control is closely linked to the processes of state-building, and therefore state- building has fundamentally contributed to the silence/silencing of stories of women and other marginalized groups. In Bangladesh, women's interests are reconstructed to serve nationalist ideology and power. By “reconstruction” I mean that government policies treated all women as similarly willing or docile enough to go through abortions or adoptions of their babies. From the government record we know no stories of resistance or reluctance. However, dispersed stories indicate an under­lying violence. One such narration is of a woman whom we know as Tara, who spoke with Nilima Ibrahim, one of the most prominent social workers of that time. Tara's words are reported in Ibrahim's book Ami Birangona Bolchi. While discussing her experience after she was rescued from the rape camp, Tara recounts:

A few months later I ended up in the Dhanmondi Rehabilitation Centre . . . after that I started avoiding people ... In the meantime I had abortion. You have seen how many women did not agree to have abortion. They wanted to keep the babies… but where will I go with this baby? Do you remember Marjina? That 15-year-old girl who did not want her son to go overseas? She used to scream when she saw you, fearing that you might steal her child. (Ibrahim 1998: 17-18)

Nation building enforces the male dominant role

Shirin M. Rai, professor in the department of politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, 2008 [The Gender Politics of Development: essays in hope and despair Chapter 1, page 10 Strong]

Development” has historically been a nationalist project. The edifice of eighteenth-century anti-colonial nationalism, which was a gendered ideology of resistance as well as power, included ‘development’ as progress and civilization sustained by religion, culture and tradition, as well as by science and technology, capital and markets. The creation of the nation-state, of ‘its world of meanings’ - in other words, nation building has been the starting point of what has been called the developmental state. In this chapter I examine how nationalism and nationalist struggles have framed discourses and strategies of development. I argue that nationalism circumscribed development priorities in post-colonial con-texts, gave them a hierarchy - of gender, class and ethnicity, among others- created some new spaces and closed off others. Ideology, religion and imaging of the nation-state played a crucial part in setting the development agendas in post-colonial nations! In the process of nation building, just as the 'economic man’ was the critical player in the development discourse, so the ‘political man’ was the citizen. ‘The citizen’s’ interests were articulated in a universalist language that allowed only certain issues of economic development to be addressed Both women and ‘subaltern’ men - of lower classes, castes and weaker ethnic groups - were co-opted into the elite nationalist programmed despite the local struggles waged by them in their own interests (see Guha 1982: 1-7).
Links – Nation Building
Nation building creates the image of the “weak woman” and perpetuates gender roles of the public man and private woman.

Shirin M. Rai, professor in the department of politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, 2008 [The Gender Politics of Development: essays in hope and despair Chapter 1, pages 11-12 Strong]

The gendered ideologies of nationalism framed the ways in which women’s labor was configured, counted, assessed and rewarded. Masculine pride and humiliation in the context of colonialism had fashioned ‘the (colonized) woman’ as a victim to be rescued - first by the colonizer and then by the colonized male elites - and as the centre of the household to be protected and cherished. Thus, she served many purposes – to provide a node of self-awareness of a particular kind for men, and hence to be made visible in the public arenas in particular ways. As I will make clear below, in decolonized nation-states, policy-making acknowledges some of these complexities only by denying them.

Women’s labor and women’s citizenship are markers of this confusion that we see repeatedly in liberal nationalist discourses as we as in Marxist ones. Whether it is population policies, human right conditions of employment or endorsement of monogamous family structures. Nation-states have used the discourses of both nationalism and development to circumscribe women's lives. And because of the history of colonialism, the pain of struggling against the idea of the community, culture and family, women have found it at times’ hard to oppose the boundaries being down around them, sometimes in their own names, by others - largely nationalist, masculine elites. In this way, the power of discourse was systematically used to frame women’s role in development’ - whether as reproducers of the nation and markers of its cultural boundaries, or as participants in its economic life. Nationalism is a much-theorized concept; as is development. While feminist scholarship provided a gendered critique of the concept of nationalism, interventions in the post-structuralism mode have opened up new spaces within development studies which allow us to examine the discursive power of nationalism in the economic agenda setting of the nation-state (Escobar 1995; Crush 1995; Marchand and Parpart 1995; Sylvester 1999). Building on both these sets of literature, I illustrate the importance of the language of nationalism for the construction of the agenda of development, and suggest that women’s particular positioning within the family and society were central to both these projects. I argue that nationalism allowed conversations to take place about development between colonial and nationalist male elites. Women were largely excluded from these conversations, which took place in very different contexts of power. I emphasize, however, that these conversations, while exclusionary, were by no means discrete; on the contrary, they were untidy, contradictory and allowed spaces for contestation that were utilized by women. The partiality of these conversations and exclusions was also reflected in the unfolding story of development in decolonized states. Nationalism and development then were' ‘Janus-faced’ (Nairn 1981) creatures at once mobilizing and excluding women from the project of ‘nation-building’

Links – Free Trade
The assumption that market integration improves quality of life is empirically false and furthers the economic insecurity of women

J. Ann Tickner, Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, ’92, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 75-6

If capital is being rewarded disproportionately to labor in the world economy, then men are being rewarded disproportionately to women. A 1981 report to the U.N. Committee on the Status of Women avers that while women represent half the global population and one-third of the paid labor force and are responsible for two-thirds of all working hours, they receive only one-tenth of world income and own less that 1 percent of world property. 10 While much of women's work is performed outside the formal economy, these data suggest that women are not being rewarded to the same extent as men even when they enter the market economy. Although no systematic data on men's and women's incomes on a worldwide scale exists, an International Labor Office study of manufacturing industries in twenty countries, conducted in the mid-1980s, showed that women's wages were less than men's in each case. 11 Earning lower wages and owning an insignificant proportion of the world's capital puts women at an enormous disadvantage in terms of power and wealth and thus contributes to their economic insecurity. While feminist economists are just beginning to explore the differential effects of the operation of the market economy on men and women, one area where these effects have been examined in some detail is in studies of Third World women and development. 12 Liberal modernization theory, a body of literature that grew out of assumptions that free markets and private investment could best promote economic growth in the Third World, saw women's relative "backwardness" as the irrational persistence of traditional attitudes. For example, the United Nations' Decade for the Advancement of Women (1975-85) assumed that women's problems in the Third World were related to insufficient participation in the process of modernization and development. In 1970, however, Esther Boserup, the first of many women scholars to challenge this assumption, claimed that in many parts of the colonial and postcolonial world, the position of rural women actually declined when they became assimilated into the global market economy. 13 Women's marginalization was exacerbated by the spread of Western capitalism and culture. In the preindependence period, Western colonizers rarely had any sympathy for the methods women used to cultivate crops; assuming that men would be more efficient as agricultural producers, they attempted to replace women's cultivation practices with those of men.
AT: Development/Economic Growth Helps Women