Focus. Globalization refers to the fluidity of capital, the mobility of production, and the deregulation of trade barriers between states, and the ensuing cultural transformations and exchanges. There are sufficient studies to suggest that globalization has a particularly gendered impact, mostly negative, but in a paradoxical way as evidenced in the resistance practices of individual women, and the transnational activism in response.

Rationale and Significance. Globalization, both in its cultural and economic manifestations can well be considered the most compelling force of the 21st century. The ways in which women and gender concerns intersect with globalization is complex and often contradictory. Compelled by the driving force of neoliberal economic policies and practices, and propelled forward by global production designed to meet the ever-increasing demands for popular consumption, we know that globalization constructs, represents, and incorporates women in diverse ways -- in the realms of culture and morality, politics and discipline, labor and economy.

Implications for Feminist Anthropology. The globalization of production has meant a feminization of the global labor force. This in a world that has seen the increasing feminization of poverty over the past few decades. Perhaps it is no coincidence that of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty worldwide, 70 percent are women, and women constitute the bulk of the labor force in global production, with their economic activity rates rising over the past thirty years. Despite their increased economic activity rates, women are still concentrated in low-paid service sector or agricultural work, their work in the unprotected and low-remunerated informal sector has increased, and their share of unpaid labor in the home has also increased as many states have undertaken cuts in the public funding of health, education and social services, including state run child care services. Women's placement in globalized production is at the lowest rungs of the occupational hierarchy --- in assembly-line work on the shop floors, or in informal sector piecework production. The low overall wage compensation to all workers in global production sites means that women are generally paid the lowest, insufficient as a living wage. Women's low wages are justified in this scheme, and indeed women workers are preferred in global production sites because the wage they are paid can be justified as secondary income to the household, based on the presumption that there is a male breadwinner who is the primary earner, while the woman worker's wage represents a mere supplement to the latter's wages. This presumption is far from the global reality where in some regions, up to one fourth of all households are headed by women. In addition to low wages, and by virtue of their low hourly wages, women workers are also subjected to long hours, frequent overtime, and little or no leave.

The technological advances of this globalized era has also made it possible to gain visibility for local struggles, forge cross-national networks, and mobilize transnational action. The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the public protests launched at many sites around the world since 2000 against the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, and the 2001 conference on Race, Racism etc. exemplify instances of powerful transnational coalition building.

Possible Research Issues/Questions. There are several research themes within women and globalization as a research focus that the AFA might pursue:

1. Documenting the ways in which globalization as a cultural force constructs, redefines and represents women.
2. Documenting the ways in which globalization as a cultural force globalization as an economic force incorporates, subordinates, and marginalizes women further.
3. Exploring and explaining how the exercise of power and hegemony in globalization processes employ pre-existing gender hierarchies to re-inscribe patriarchal norms and practices, thereby exacerbating the contours of women's subordination.
4. Unearthing the ways in which globalization is implicated in gender violence, as women's labor is subject to over-regulation, often via violent means.
5. Understanding transnational collective action by women against globalization, and an exploration of the significance of variant strands of feminist praxis for transforming local and global gender systems/constructs.
6. Analyzing how women forge individual and collective resistance tactics and assertions of agency in the face of globalization's assaults on their identities, representations, livelihood concerns and experiential realities.
7. Research on the discourses surrounding women and gender inherent to global production, and the construction and representation of women on the global stage (i.e. in nationalist movements, human rights struggles, labor movements), and an interrogation of the dilemmas, contradictions, and facile dichotomies that are inherent in the study of globalization.