Ilse Lenz

Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries

New forms of migration and their gendered dynamism suggest fundamental changes around the turn of the millennium. New flexible forms of migration are increasing and transnationalism is becoming a marked trend. Female migration is no longer invisible but recognised as an important phenomenon in scholarly research and in policy making. The high percentages of women in labour, refugee, educational or marriage migration are believed to constitute a new trend. While this is a flawed view because women have always participated in migration movements, the focus on the gender dynamics of these developments is indeed new. Gender relations are now seen as fluid and changing: In the past, female migrants have been portrayed as symbols of national or traditional culture, expressed in clothes and body postures, or as representatives of different moral norms and life-styles, of chastity or communalism. However, in transnational communities young women and men are nowadays developing new flexible and syncretistic identities. Over the last years scholarly debates have redrawn the boundaries around the andocentric and national understanding of migration and have integrated gender as a core concept. Scholarly work shifted from describing women as passive objects or victims of migration structures to viewing them as social actors who conceive and follow strategies of their own in often difficult and complex situations. In short: Gender is interwoven with migration and gendered migration is on the move.

Feminist and Migrant Networking in a Globalising World Migration, Gender and Globalisation

Globalisation promotes the movement of people, but migration is also a basic process of globalisation. In the last decades women’s and men’s migration was largely motivated by the pull of global or transnational labour markets. For example, while Turkish and Korean men migrated to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s to work in car factories or mines, Turkish women migrants worked in the electronics industries or as domestic workers, and Korean women migrated as trained nurses. Migrants are also forced out of their countries by environmental degradation, which, for example, increases the stress for women to provide food and water, or by the numerous wars and conflicts, which are increasing in the shadow of the new global world order. Whereas older people, women and children tend to stay in the refugee camps close to conflict areas, younger men and women search for opportunities for global migration. Political and gender repression by dictatorships, military regimes and some fundamentalist patriarchal rulers, have also led to increasing numbers of refugees. Finally we have the global intellectuals, scientists, business people, writers, artists or filmmakers who simultaneously live in Bombay and New York or Moscow and Berlin. Migrants take the initiative to realise their wishes and visions of their future. They are actors (not victims) — often moving in difficult environments — and therefore we want to focus on their agency in this article.

Globalization, Gender, and Work: Perspectives on Global Regulation

This article proposes a working definition of globalization, which, although recognizing power asymmetries and risks, focuses on the changing options of actors. I link globalization to the options of diverse actors such as feminist networks and supranational and state institutions and enterprises. These options are related to resources, power, and capacities. The United Nations Decades of Women provided a dramatically opening opportunity structure for the global womens movement that could enlarge and diversify their options. They had developed a common charter while respecting differences and capacities for global orientation. Finally, I illustrate the argument by looking at processes of feminist regulations, which were negotiated by womens movements in Japan and Germany. Both cases suggest that negotiations and regulations in the global context are possible from an asymmetric position and that innovative capacities for transnational and global orientation and horizontal organization are crucial. Further research is necessary on innovative and egalitarian forms of regulation in globalization. Copyright 2003 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Equality, Difference and Participation: The Women’s Movements in Global Perspective

To analyse women’s movements in a long-term and global perspective constitutes a fundamental challenge indeed, but it also opens up new opportunities in analysing and understanding them. These new prospects are related to basic issues of globalization research: focussing on shifting multiple power relationships beyond the national framework and theorizing the present reconfiguration of time and space, we are led to reconsider their changing relationship. These aspects are highly relevant to some basic issues in researching women’s movements and feminisms. Therefore, a long-term, global perspective offers prospects for reconsidering these movements’ ‘deep development’, their regional diversity and their continuities, ruptures, innovations and transformations.

Reflexive Körper? — Zur Modernisierung von Sexualität und Reproduktion: Einleitung

Die Welt der Filme entwirft Zukunftsbilder: Korper werden fliesend, sie fliegen durch den Cyberspace und sie konnen ihr Geschlecht wechseln. Wenn Charlie Chaplin noch vor achtzig Jahren in dem Film Moderne Zeiten eine riesige industrielle Fliesbandanlage mit seinem Korper stoppen konnte, so sind in Filmen die Korper heute ebenso verflussigt wie die Gesellschaft und die Technologie.

Streit, Geschlecht, Konflikt?

Georg Simmel fasst Streit und Konflikt als eine Form der gesellschaftlichen Integration, die nicht nur die Konfliktfuhrenden, sondern auch die relevanten Offentlichkeiten einbezieht. In der Weiterfuhrung wird am Beispiel der sexuellen Belastigung (#MeToo) ein Ansatz zur Analyse von Geschlechterkonflikten vorgeschlagen, die unter Einbezug der Offentlichkeit darum gefuhrt werden, was in Bezug auf Geschlecht ‚gerecht‘ ist. Er fokussiert das Handeln der unterschiedlichen Akteure (nicht allein die Diskurse) und verfolgt Prozesse und Ergebnisse der Konflikte. So eignet er sich, starre identitats- und postidentitatspolitische Debatten um ‚Frauen‘, ‚Manner‘ und ‚Queere‘ zu uberwinden. Zum Schluss wird uber das ‚Geschlecht der Geschlechterkonflikte‘ nachgedacht, wobei struktur- und diskurstheoretische Zugange zusammengefuhrt werden.

Neukonfigurationen von Geschlecht im flexibilisierten Kapitalismus

Die Geschlechterverhaltnisse verandern sich gegenwartig widerspruchlich. Sie bewegen sich zwischen rasendem Stillstand und stiller Revolution: So stromen Frauen auf den Arbeitsmarkt, aber die glaserne Decke vor dem oberen Management erweist sich als stabil. Handelt es sich um kontinuierliche Bruche oder gebrochene Kontinuitaten, um grundlegende Veranderungen oder um die gleiche Mannerherrschaft (weiser) Eliten? Schlieslich entwickeln sich die Geschlechterverhaltnisse heute zwischen Gleichheitstendenzen und vertieften wechselwirkenden Ungleichheiten.