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Dominations Old and New:
Subjugation and Agency in SE Asian Women

Mahruq Khan and Lauren Langman
Loyola University Chicago

Globalization, Agency and Domination

Globalization, as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, must consider relationships between 1) its political economy, a seamless global market, 2) its political dimension directions, neo-liberalism is hegemonic and the power of Nation States attenuated, and 3), its culture and the interaction of its culture, Western, rational, yet hedonistic, impacting the traditional culture of a “people. The emergence of more or less autonomous world market of Trans National Capital, delinked from particular Nation states, has fostered an new kind of “network society” (Castells, 19 ) in which its corporate actors, especially those the “global cities” (Sassen, 2001), are highly interlinked with each other in a world where time and space have become highly compressed. In this new world, “anything can be made anywhere”, and shipped anywhere within a few hours, as Castells has argued, there are vast flows of raw materials, goods, services and labor, as well as flows of ideas, tastes and values. Similarly, trillions of dollars in capital freely circulate throughout the globe everyday. With the recent transition from International to Globalized markets, there has been a vast increase in the production of wealth, while a “trans-national” capitalist class has become hegemonic (Sklair, 2001). Hence, given the enduring logic of capital, this wealth had not been equally distributed.

There are positive and negative aspects of globalization. Many of its proponents and apologists argue that economic globalization, from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), World Bank and IMF loans and the expansion of export oriented production, has helped to reduce third world poverty by creating jobs and improving incomes. In addition, the expansion of trade and foreign investment has accelerated upward social mobility and strengthened a small but emerging middle class; in countries like China and India that class is not so small. New communication and information technologies from cell phones to the Internet, now cheaper and easier, have helped disseminate knowledge in many fields of study and disciplines. Finally, issues like business transparency, violations of human rights and women’s rights are made highly and quickly evident and are brought to the fore.

But so too are there great adversities, beginning with the inequalities of distribution, both globally and within particular regions. Thus there is far greater inequality today than a few generations ago and for many people, abject poverty has become a way of life. Perhaps 1/3 of the world lives on less than a dollar a day. Environmental degradation is pervasive due to unrestrained activities of transnational corporations whose sole aim is to multiply profits. But it should also be noted that many of the economic and environmental hardships of the day most adversely impact women, already cast as subordinates in many traditional societies.

Globalization has popularized the hedonistic consumer culture of the West, indeed that consumerism serves to secure the hegemony of global capital (Cf, Langman, 1992; Sklair 2001). Consumerism has fostered privatized, hedonistic materialism wherein people are more interested in personal pleasure rather than social good; identities become construction on the basis of personal possession rather than the essential aspects of common humanity (See Langman, 1992). This is especially problematic when global consumerism is now forming a homogenous global culture whereby indigenous cultures are being challenged by Western cultures, this is often especially true when traditional sexual moralities are challenged and discarded as on indication of the contestation of traditional, and typically male authority. In many cases, there is a great deal of resistance to the Western culture. Indeed, fundamentalism is often one form of resistance to globalization and its values of personal freedom, secularism and egalitarianism.

On the one hand, while the power of TNC has grown enormously, so to have various resistance movements as dialectical responses. Power in the global political economy in its economic, geopolitical and cultural dimensions is something that cannot be easily confronted or resisted. Yet at the same time, the flourishing of various electronically mediated “virtual public spheres, together with a growing global justice movement of transnational advocacy groups, INGOs, etc, has become more contentious, boisterous and more aggressively confronts the injustices of global capital. As is often said, the two superpowers are Empire and the people (multitudes for Negri and Hart, 2003) .

Effect of globalization on Asian women’s lives

Globalization has contributed to displacement, commodification, and often modern-day slavery of women in Asia . “Those that are greatly affected are industries of predominantly women who work in jobs dealing with textiles and clothing, electronics, food, and other assembly-type sectors. Technological advances in computers has pushed even more women out of the production processes, adding greatly to unemployment. This further depresses an already low workers’ wages. Women workers must contribute to the family income and have no choice but to accept low wages.”

Despite violence and patriarchal oppression, women were traditionally the economic agents in family/community life. Production in subsistence economy was localized and community based, where women had the repository of knowledge and skills. Industrialization of agriculture had shifted women out of their familiar domain of “local” and put them in a space where they have no control, where commodity prices are determined by multinationals, where new technologies are being promoted to create more disparity.

Moreover, with the devastation of traditional means of survival, it is typically women who pick up the pieces with redoubled work. If water is polluted and scarce, women walk twice as far to car it back. Women go out to work to clean the houses of the rich. If the health centers are closed down, women recover traditional herbal medicine, growing it in their gardens. It is they who nurse the sick and the dying. If there is no food or nursing staff for patients in hospitals, it is the women who arrive to feed and clean the sick family member. In short it is women’s redoubled work that staves off disaster for the poorest.

In addition, women in poor families are often poorer than the adult males of their own families, since material goods are appropriated by the men in the family. At the same time, they are redoubling the labor of daily survival; women are often suffering from the anger and loss of status of their unemployed men. It is they who are beaten in the family, raped in their homes or in the streets, as they struggle to provide means of livelihood for their children. It is they are who are coerced into the sex trades.

Feminist voices conveyed the context of struggle against violence in each country, and placed the causes and effects under careful scrutiny. Research in the Indian State of Kerala revealed that 49% of women are without land or property and have experienced the long-term physical abuse in the home, while women who owned land or held title to a separate house were far less likely have endured such violence, at 18% and 10% respectively. In Pakistan , despite the erosion of hard-won women’s rights when the military regime gained power in 1983, the women’s movement has resisted polarization by sect or class, remaining cohesive and particularly vocal against “honor killings”.

As we can see, globalization and marginalization go hand in hand. The UPD Reports since 1991 have drawn pointed attention to the growing economic inequality and poverty in the world. The reality is more sharply focused when it is noted that 70% of the one billion absolute poor consists of women. In India the reduction of fertilizer subsidies most severely affected the marginal peasants who cannot afford the higher prices. The victims most seriously affected by these changes were women and children.

Health care also was cut. This cut down of rations for malaria, tuberculosis and leprosy prevention led to an increase in the number of persons below the poverty line from 310 million in 1989-90 to 355 million in 1991-93. Impoverishment exacerbates gender inequality within each household. Cutbacks in personal consumption primarily affects women and girls.

In general terms, the current process of globalization, in which the vast powers of Trans national capital are dominant, its economic, political, social and cultural dynamics foster the ultimate destruction of all life. The financial power of capital in the global market, especially IMF/WB “structural readjustment programs” directly cause the radical impoverishment of people and the massive death of people due to hunger. The worsening poverty in India has led to thousands of women going to other countries to find better opportunities. Migration policies by sending governments have encouraged the trafficking of women, as trading in women’s bodies has become a very lucrative industry at a very limited investment…Modern-day slavery of women brought about by globalization is clearly seen in commodification of women’s bodies through prostitution.

With regard to AIDS in India , there are many untested people with Aids. Most of the spread of AIDS is happening through heterosexual activities, especially prostitution. Women are the main victims of this situation. The abuse of women was prevalent in India long before globalization. But globalization has caused the rapid increase of violence toward women, because of the stress and strain of the community and the changes in the traditional lifestyle. In the joint family system there were social control systems which helped women with these issues. But due to the individualistic lifestyle brought about by modernity, women often suffer alone or without strong social networks.

Cultural Hegemony and Its Impact On Sectarian/Religious Violence

The economic dimensions of globalization are not the only factors that need reconsidering. The global market and its technocratic powers dominate the world of culture. Historically, there is an unholy alliance of western modernity and its cultural dynamics with the Christian theology of culture, which has condemned the cultures of the people. “Cultural imperialism has 2 major goals—one economic and other political—to capture markets for its cultural commodities and to establish hegemony by shaping popular consciousness…Cultural domination is an integration dimension of any sustained system of global exploitation. There is a systematic cultural penetration and domination of the cultural life of the popular class of the West in order to reorder the values, behavior, institutions, and identity of the oppressed people to conform with the interests of the imperial class (Panikar, 374). In response, some argue that culture should be guided by moral universal values whereby a strong ethic of restraint is within one culture is applied to prevent the dominance of another culture.

Nevertheless, the process of globalization has ushered in new cultural identities whereby traditional cultural values, such as the reservoir of beauty, are destroyed in various manners. This is experienced in Asia and other parts of the world. For instance, globalization, with its ability to provide cheaper goods imported from around the world, has engendered “false needs’ for ever more goods. This has had a direct impact in India, especially, as more of a dowry is demanded on the part of young women and their parents to meet the groom’s family’s expectations of a new TV, car, home, etc before the wedding day.

Beyond dowry though, urbanization has brought a lot of other changes to Indian culture. Many marriages are breaking up for many reasons such as modern lifestyles, professional ambitions, and unrealistic expectations. In cities, young people are starting to choose their own partners, though arranged marriages are still the norm. The impact of satellite TV and industrialization has changed the cultural values of the upper middle class and the upper class.

One major consequence though of the rapidly changing social norms and values is a resurgence of religious communalism or sectarianism. Here, nation leaders deflect attention from their own allegiance to the TNCs and instead their people’s direct economic and social frustration due unemployment, poverty, and the breakdown of culture towards members of different faiths. Most often, women suffer the most from this inter-religious tension.

With its history of struggles against colonialism and feudalism and independent models of state and nation formation, conflicts in Asia have assumed dangerous proportions and include those between ethnic, religious, sectarian and other contending groups. In 2002, the state of Gujarat , was the scene of a vicious pogrom against its Muslim minority. This resulted in the deaths of more than 2000 people and the displacement of more than 200,000 others, sanctioned by the BJP. Many sanctioned the ferocity of the sectarian violence to people frustrated by unemployment resulting from the closure of the textile mills that Ahmedabad, was once famous for but is now in the doldrums as a result of economic liberalization. “Here is a classic example of increasing disparities and loss of livelihoods getting turned into sectarian and ethnic strife by politicians who then swear that they are fighting international terrorism.

More importantly, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism as seen in the Gujarat genocide is a serious concern for the women’s movement. Saving “Muslim women” is used as part of legitimizing the discourse. Democratic spaces are being lost and fights against injustice construed as anti-state. Military wars were directly linked to the sharpening battlefronts within the home or caste communities. Women’s rights activists named gender-based violence as the precursor to community violence on a larger scale: women are often the first to feel the reactionary consequences of build-up to conflict, in forms such as public killing for inter-caste marriage.

The links between militarization and economic globalization are becoming more clear than ever while at the same time, there has been a fragmentation of popular resistance through religious and ethnic sectarianism. John Desrechers argues that globalization has caused social unrest and communalism in India . “…As a result of globalization the individual is atomized through fierce competition for survival. The general atmosphere of speculation leads to a gambler’s mentality which is compounded by the prevalence of insecurity and impermanence. The indirect, invisible and covert nature of the oppressive forces leads to a non-focused anger and anxiety. Globalization has thus been contemporaneous with an increase in the assertion of ethnic-religious-linguistic subnationalities.”

Myers argues that “First, whatever is coming probably will contain an alternative to the free market as we know it today. Second, globalization will not be the defining reality, as some suggest. Globalism does not provide a satisfactory home for the individual human being. The market may be global; Communication may be global; Technology may be global, but I will never be. Human beings need a place, a story, a set of relationships. This is why ethnicity and religious are emerging as such powerful counterforces to globalism today.”

As previously mentioned, religion is commonly used by the State to impose such imperialist ideology. Hindu fundamentalism in India is one of the most serious problems, Islamic fundamentalism can also be observed as another formidable reactionary movement in the face of globalization. So, in addition to the circle of globalizing capitalists and the global justice movement consisting of thousands of peasant, worker, feminist, environmental and human rights groups across the planet—there is a third force: the military Islamic fundamentalist, representing with arms the political demands of the dissident Muslim bourgeoisie. This group was and is committed to mortal violence and patriarchy, in addition to the control of energy resources against the claims of the TNCs. It stepped into the vacuum of despair the supranatural agencies of globalization inevitably generated, driving by its own crisis.

In the Middle East , the most important factor of crisis has been the hegemonic role of the US in the region. Deep divisions have developed within these ruling classes pitting pro-American governments against a new generation of dissidents, who in the name of the Quran, have accused them of being corrupt, of squandering the region’s resources, of selling out to the US, of having betrayed Islam, all the while purporting to offer an alternative “social contract” to the working classes. As a social program, Islamic fundamentalism has distinguished itself, in addition to its unmitigated bolstering of patriarchal rule, for its attempt to win over the urban populations through the provision of some basic necessities such as schooling, healthcare, and a minimum of social assistance. Thus, today, in many Muslim societies, it is the Islamic fundamentalist networks that organize healthcare, almost functioning as an alternative government at the grassroots level.

However, it is important to note that neither the Muslim fundamentalists (nor the TNCs) really place the interests of the working poor as their topmost priority, especially not poor women in any part of the world. The Islamic Fundamentalists’ misogynist treatment of women—culminating with the politics of open enslavement embraced by the Taliban—the autocratic way in which Shariah law has been imposed on many unwilling citizens; the atrocity of the punishments inflicted on those who break it, and the chauvinistic brand of Islam imposed at all social levels by self-proclaimed Islamic fundamentalist governments –all speak unequivocally on this point.

All of these religious movements appropriate identity politics, which is used for control and to capture power; this has grave consequences for women. It impacts the relationship with the State, the functioning of non-religious social movements and women’s engagement with issues and struggles. In all of these instances, the State complies with the agenda of the religious right, as it also imposes a homogenized identity upon its people, while denying their diversity. Pakistan is a case in point, where religious identity supercedes ethnic identity. In Bangladesh , women’s struggle was a challenge to the notion of “brothers” in Islam identity, which, by definition, marginalized women further. The situation in Indonesia is quite similar where Muslim women are caught between fragmentation and regionalization. Consequently, growing fundamentalism has lead to increasing practice of “female circumcision”.

The subordination of women within the religious anti-global movements has created a space for resistance against globalization that condemns the social destruction brought about by the religious extremists as well as the TNCs. Among these women there is a shared recognition that across many religious and cultural traditions a male hierarchical concept of the divine and the universe has functioned across the millennia as a major reinforcement of the patterns of social domination. In this context, the priority of many women in the global justice movements is to offer an anti-war, anti-patriarchal alternative to the deadly politics of the fundamentalists and their globalizing adversaries.

Feminist Resistance

This women-led vision of global justice demands a major turnaround to corporate-led globalization. Instead of more and more control over wealth by a small male elite in distant centers of power, it calls for a redistribution of power and control over decision-making at the local level. It calls for a re-empowering of national government more democratically elected, reflecting local interests. Instead of stripping local people of protection for their agriculture and industry, it calls for state governments to protect the national economy from being overrun by large corporations.

This very redoubled labor of women to bridge the gap of survival needs for themselves and their children also impels some women to found women’s groups that become sites of resistance to devastation wrought by globalization by creating cooperatives that market their products through alternative market connections. Common examples of such cooperatives include communal kitchens, mixing raw ingredients obtained from INGOs with locally grown products and creating health clinics with natural medicines. In Pakistan , women have been the main users of micro-credit schemes in which very small loans are given to women to start a small local business, with the promise that it is paid back with very small interest. This repayment is used to start more women in small business. Bangladesh is witnessing an increasing global and corporate control over its economic system. So, women’s movements are working to reclaim their space to engage in public debate about these critical issues.

In addition, many Asian women, both Muslim and Hindu, reject the notion that activism, motivated by faith, necessitates the subordination of women. Because these particular groups are led by women, they can articulate an alternative understanding of practicing their faith and resisting globalization because it’s on their own terms. So, for instance, we witness women leaders critiquing the elements of imperial power of globalization through a theological lens, claiming that the transnational corporate entities are extremely pretentious and hypocritical. Furthermore, they are addressing the military hegemony of the US and its allies as worthy of a thorough economic and theological examination, as they link military weapon systems which destroy all life on earth as contradictory to spirituality.

Women-led religious organizations are major sponsors of such alternative movements. Also religious faith, inspired particularly by recent developments of liberation and eco-feminist theologies and spiritualities, are important motivators for people making commitments to such projects. This involvement of religious communities in social justice and ecological struggles is becoming increasingly interfaith. Women’s groups are arguing that the roots of this form of resistance lie in the processes by which who are critical of the dominant global system. They are responding to similar challenges and coming up with similar alternative worldviews in the context of a 21 st century world threatened by military violence, economic exploitation, and ecological collapse.

Conclusion

The power of the global justice movement is in its potential to build a real, not simply ideological, political struggle of the world’s working people against the plans of globalizing capitalism. Farmers from India , landless peasants of Brazil , trade unionists from Canada , and students from Europe marched, talked and organized together in the great alternative global justices events of the last two years. This increasing unification of people across barriers of all kinds—geographical, religious, gender, political—has challenged the agendas of both the religious fundamentalists and the capital globalizers. The suicidal attack on Washington and New York and the Bush administration’s response also are attacks on the anti-globalization movement because they both are calculated to bring increasing divisiveness and despair within a planetary working class that was beginning to see, articulated in both words and images, an alternative non-violent, non-chauvenist, non-racist, and non-sexist reality taking shape. It is crucial that we do not let the war drums and increasing restrictions on civil liberties and the freedom to move across borders succeed in erasing the movement’s organizing achievements. Since men are often more likely to condone violence to an unknown Other, women can and must gain greater voice and power in order to achieve the Other world that is possible.

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