Shirin M. Rai

Recasting the Global Political Economy: Counting Women's Unpaid Work

This article presents and seeks to make visible what could be an alarming scenario. There is, we believe, a widespread and growing depletion of the capacities and resources for social reproduction – that is, the glue that keeps households and societies together and active. This glue, as is well recognised, largely depends upon the unpaid work of women at home and in the community. The capacity to do this unpaid work is currently being affected across North and South by the globalisation of production, the move of women into paid work, the commercialisation of services and the changing functions of the state. However, because most of this unpaid work is still largely unmeasured – as we shall show, it is not counted as ‘productive’ in the United Nations (UN) System of National Accounts (SNA) – the depletion in social reproduction is not aggregated and is only ‘noticed’ in ad hoc and small-scale ways. We attempt in this article to assess the reasons for and the consequences of this failure to measure, and argue that it is an issue which demands the urgent attention of statisticians, economists and policy makers, alongside feminist academics and activists. Without unpaid services and their depletion being measured and valued, predictions are likely to be faulty, models inaccurate and development policies flawed. The history of the campaign on unpaid work over the last three decades illustrates, on the one hand, the salience of these issues and, on the other, the resistance which exists to taking them seriously. In 1988 Marilyn Waring, a political economist and former New Zealand Member of Parliament, produced a seminal book If Women Counted – A New Feminist Economics. This was scathing about the fact that neither unpaid work (mainly done by women in the home) nor natural inputs from the environment were given value in current measurements of economic and productive activity. She was particularly critical of the SNA, which formalised the practice of governments in this respect. Her aim was to initiate a campaign to persuade policy makers that the failure to count unpaid work both lay at the roots of gender inequality and caused serious flaws in the way economic trends were evaluated. New Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 3, September 2007

Gender and the political economy of development : from nationalism to globalization

A comprehensive introduction to the impact of development on men and women, and of their differing contributions to politics and economics * Offers a new theoretical account of gender and development * Sets out new challenges for womena s movements in the light of globalization.

Gendering Global Governance

In this article I map out the major debates on global governance and the feminist critiques of the mainstream interventions in these debates. I argue that the shift from government to governance is a response to the needs of a gendered global capitalist economy and is shaped by struggles, both discursive and material, against the unfolding consequences of globalization. I suggest feminist interrogations of the concept, processes, practices and mechanisms of governance and the insights that develop from them should be centrally incorporated into critical revisionist and radical discourses of and against the concept of global governance. However, I also examine the challenges that the concept of global governance poses for feminist political practice, which are both of scholarship and of activism as feminists struggle to address the possibilities and politics of alternatives to the current regimes of governance. I conclude by suggesting that feminist political practice needs to focus on the politics of redistribution in the context of global governance.

Depletion: THE COST OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

Abstract In this article we explore the concept of depletion through social reproduction (DSR). We describe depletion, identify its key indicators and suggest different methodologies that could be used to measure it. We discuss issues having to do with gendered harm as well as questions about how depletion might be reversed. We conclude that recognizing DSR in this way can be a powerful tool for understanding the consequences of non-recognition of the value of domestic work to national economies, as well as the harm that might accrue in the doing of this work at both a systemic and individual level.In this article we explore the concept of depletion through social reproduction (DSR). We describe depletion, identify its key indicators and suggest different methodologies that could be used to measure it. We discuss issues having to do with gendered harm as well as questions about how depletion might be reversed. We conclude that recognizing DSR in this way can be a powerful tool for understanding the consequences of non-recognition of the value of domestic work to national economies, as well as the harm that might accrue in the doing of this work at both a systemic and individual level.

Feminists theorize international political economy

This article introduces the women and international political economy special issue of Signs, tracing its relationship to the crisis of neoliberalism as they developed concurrently and highlighting the key themes elucidated in the articles presented here. Three themes, which are reflected in different ways in these articles, are outlined in this introduction in order to illustrate the importance of gender in analyzing international political economy: first, the benefit of multilayered approaches to governance; second, new insights into debates about social reproduction and work; and, third, pressing concerns of intimacy and sexuality. In particular, the introduction foregrounds transnational and postcolonial approaches to political economy questions, including their application in a national frame. The article then identifies the gaps in the literature, and in the special issue itself, and concludes by reflecting on the Janus‐faced nature of crises. We suggest that discursive and political struggles are already taking place that challenge the power relations entrenched within international political economy.

Analysing ceremony and ritual in Parliament

This article explores the importance of ceremony and ritual as a frame within which to examine political institutions such as parliaments. It suggests that through such analysis we can trace the circulation of meanings, the particularity of institutional cultures and the sedimentation of power in political institutions. Methodologically, the article challenges the popular view that ceremony and ritual can be regarded simply as ‘trappings’ of power; it thus emphasises their continued political relevance. Finally, the article assesses the values ascribed to particular forms of institutional power rather than the other – to understand why certain norms, rituals and ceremonies are normalised and others deemed deviant, thus rendering marginal those that are seen to be the ‘others’ within the institutional space.

Legacies of common law: ‘crimes of honour’ in India and Pakistan

Abstract Through a comparative analysis of crimes of ‘honour’ in India and Pakistan and an examination of appellate judgments from the two countries, we reflect upon how a rights-based discourse of modern nation-states forms a complex terrain where citizenship of the state and membership of communities are negotiated and contested through the unfolding of complex legal rituals in both sites. We identify two axes to explore the complex nature of the interaction between modernity and tradition. The first is that of governance of polities (state statutory governance bodies) and the second is the governance of communities (caste panchayats and jirgahs). We conclude that the diverse legacies of common law in India and Pakistan frame an anxious relationship with the categories of tradition and modernity, which inhabit spaces in between the governance of polities and the governance of communities, and constantly reconstitute the relationship between the local, national and the global.

Democratic institutions, political representation and women's empowerment: The quota debate in India

This article reflects upon the debate on quotas for women in representative institutions of government. It poses the question whether current debates about quotas for women are relevant to debates on womens empowerment. In doing so, it points to the bases upon which the arguments for and against quotas have been presented within the Indian political system, taking into account the historical debates on caste, the emergence of coalition politics, the strength of the womens movement, and the engagement of womens groups with the politics of difference. The central argument of the article is that unless the issues of class‐based and caste‐based differences are taken seriously by womens groups in India, the wider question of empowerment cannot be satisfactorily answered. The conclusion assesses whether the Indian example is of relevance to wider debates on quotas as strategies of empowerment.

Agency, injury, and transgressive politics in neoliberal times

Through an analysis of agency and risk, this article argues that an outcome-driven agenda of neoliberal developmentalism treats women’s agency as an instrument of social change without giving sufficient attention to existing power relations in which agential capacities are formulated and exercised, and in which risk is negotiated and managed. Analyzing the Women’s Development Programme in Rajasthan, India, we argue that an individualized development logic continues to disregard the injuries to those it mobilizes; we suggest that this trend needs to be challenged in order to support sustainable participation.

Feminism, Imperialism and Orientalism: the challenge of the 'Indian woman'

Abstract This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each authors social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the authors representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the authors uncritical use of earlier writers; an...