“Skeleton Women”: Feminism and the Antiglobalization MovementAuthor(s): Catherine EschleSource: Signs, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 1741-1769Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426793 .Accessed: 07/03/2011 04:43

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C a t h e r i n e E s c h l e

“Skeleton Women”: Feminism and the Antiglobalization

Movement

Skeleton woman—the uninvited guest—also showed up in Seattle. Andthe illusion of wealth, the imaginings of unfettered growth and expan-sion, became small and barren in the eyes of the world. Dancing, drum-ming, ululating, marching in black with a symbolic coffin for the world,Skeleton woman wove through the sulphurous rainy streets of the night.She couldn’t be killed or destroyed.—Hawken 2000, 33

T he powerful metaphor of “Skeleton Woman” is used by Paul Hawkento convey the inexhaustible and growing opposition to the policiesof global elites, sharply revealed at the protests against the World

Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle at the end of 1999. Skeleton Womanserves as a reminder to the architects of the WTO that “Life always comeswith Death, with a tab, a reckoning”; she is growing “anew her flesh andheart and body” and must ultimately be accommodated (Hawken 2000,33–34).

For Hawken, the fact that the skeleton is a woman appears incidental.She stands for ungendered resistance to globalization. Yet this is strikinglygendered imagery. Hawken takes it from the work of feminist psycho-analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Her retelling of what was originally an Inuitpoem also indicates the need to face up to “the Life/Death/Life cycle”(Estes 1998, 127) but in the very different context of committed loverelationships. Further, Estes emphasizes the symbiotic resolution of thestory. When a fisherman hooks up the bones of a dead woman from thedeep, he runs screaming to his home to hide, dragging the skeleton behindin his fishing lines. Eventually the terror of the fisherman subsides, andhe reaches out to untangle the bones of Skeleton Woman before falling

I would like to thank Bice Maiguashca, Peter Waterman, Debra Liebowitz, Denis Don-oghue, and four anonymous readers at Signs for their perceptive, helpful, and often chal-lenging comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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asleep. As he dreams, he weeps a single tear, which Skeleton Woman drinks.She then uses his heart as a drum to renew her flesh and creeps into bedbeside him. Thus it is through acceptance of their deepest fears of com-mitment, death, and the “not-beautiful” in themselves and others thatlovers become transformed: “The strength and power of each is untangled,shared” (Estes 1998, 163). Finally, Skeleton Woman is for Estes onemanifestation of the universal “Wild Woman” archetype, signifying thedeeply knowing and instinctual way of being that needs to be recoveredwithin the modern female psyche (1998, 1–12).

What happens if the gender of Skeleton Woman is acknowledged assignificant in Hawken’s retelling of the story? Perhaps Skeleton Womancan be seen as a metaphor for embodied feminine resistance juxtaposedagainst an abstract masculine globalization. Such an abstract, universal-izing reading would greatly simplify complex global realities and genderidentities, and I want to push inquiry in a different direction. Hawken’smetaphor motivates me to investigate the actual gendering of activism atSeattle and elsewhere. More specifically, I want to examine the role andposition of feminism and feminists within the antiglobalization move-ment.1 I propose that feminists are the “Skeleton Women” haunting thismovement.

One strategy for my investigation is suggested in a parallel debate aboutthe relationship between the antiglobalization movement and antiraciststruggle. Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez (2000) has asserted that people ofcolor from the United States were marginalized at Seattle because of theirpreoccupation with day-to-day survival, their relative ignorance about the

1 The notion of an “antiglobalization movement” is highly contentious. Many activistsreject the label antiglobalization on the grounds that it is purely oppositional, that it mis-represents the movement as parochial and protectionist, that the term globalization is itselfideological, and that the movement is actually anticapitalist or dedicated to putting forwarda different kind of globalization (e.g., Graeber 2002; Callinicos 2003, 13–14). Nonetheless,it seems to me to that antiglobalization still functions as the only widely recognized shorthandamong English-speaking activists and academics, and it is for that pragmatic reason that Icontinue to use it here. It is also debatable whether the term movement is an accuratedescription of the diverse activisms that have emerged under the antiglobalization label.Critics fear that it imposes totalizing and hierarchical assumptions about identity and or-ganization (e.g., Esteva and Prakash 1998, 13). Many theorists prefer the language of the“politics of resistance” (e.g., Gills 2000; Gill 2003; for background, see Abu-Lughod 1990;Chin and Mittelman 2000). However, this terminology is not without its own problems,potentially positioning activism as microlevel, fragmented, and purely oppositional. I continueto use the label social movement because it actively assigns a continually contested collectiveagency and identity to diverse resistances. For a fuller discussion, see Eschle 2004b and Eschleand Maiguashca 2005.

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WTO, and their correct perception that anti-WTO activism is white dom-inated. Others have since claimed that the success of the Seattle protestshas encouraged too much emphasis on spectacular mass demonstrations,which necessitate transnational travel and favor young, white, middle-classactivists (Crass n.d.; Dixon n.d.). While Martinez responds by arguingthat people of color must mobilize themselves, others urge those dominantwithin the movement to develop “a more multidimensional focus on di-verse forms of radical activism. And further, we can recognize and allyourselves with preexisting movements of diverse peoples who are orga-nizing in their communities—and have been for a long time” (Dixonn.d.). Naomi Klein has made a similar move with regard to what she seesas the marginalization of feminist concerns. She insists that the answer is“less about changing the movement than the movement changing itsperception of itself” (in Thomas 2002, 51).

There are two things going on here simultaneously: exclusionary hi-erarchies within the movement are being exposed, and received under-standings of what constitutes the movement are being challenged. I adoptsuch a strategy in this article. However, I do not follow the injunction tofocus on local, community-based struggles. Such studies have successfullydrawn attention to the extensive mobilizations of people of color, partic-ularly in third-world contexts, both for survival and against globalization(e.g., Esteva and Prakash 1998). When conducted by feminists, theyreveal the widespread participation of women (e.g., Rowbotham andLinkogle 2001). Nonetheless, in this article I will retain a more generalfocus on feminism and antiglobalization as globalized movements withsimultaneously local and transnational manifestations (Naples 2002,1–8). I will unpack dominant discourses that represent the two move-ments as entirely distinct and highlight alternative discourses that allowfor the possibility of interconnection.

My method here could be called “feminist postmodernist,” althoughI acknowledge that this label is problematic. As categories, both feminismand postmodernism are complex and contested, and the relationship be-tween them is fraught. Feminist commitments to “women,” to the epis-temological value of experience, and to collective organization for liber-ation face a significant challenge from the postmodern decentering of thesubject, skepticism toward claims to truth, and emphasis on microresis-tances (e.g., Flax 1990; Nicholson 1990; Ramazanoglu 1993). Further,many feminists are uncomfortable with the postmodern focus on discourseas the locus of inquiry, as this can be interpreted as a move from “things”to “words,” from material structures to the terrain of culture, and fromwho speaks to what is said (Barrett 1992; Ransom 1993). However, there

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are some fruitful convergences between feminism and postmodernism.Both share a concern with power, knowledge, and the construction ofthe subject. They insist that how we represent and speak about the worldhas constitutive effects on that world, and they are critical of the waysthat some voices and representations are universalized while others aremarginalized. Some feminist pioneers have extended the methodologiesof genealogy and deconstruction found in the work of Michel Foucaultand Jacques Derrida to feminist concerns (e.g., Butler 1993; Landry andMacLean 1996). Others stress an ongoing if fruitful tension between theirfeminist and postmodernist commitments, a position Christine Sylvesterdescribes as “feminist postmodernist.” For Sylvester (1994, 11–14), thisinvolves interrogating the construction of subjects like “women” whilesimultaneously resisting the total erasure of subjectivity by paying em-pathetic attention to what such subjects say, to who speaks. Feministsworking in this vein tend to be pragmatic and eclectic in their method,concerned less with the rigorous application of deconstructionist tech-niques than with the general task of unpacking dominant discourses andrevealing alternatives (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, 35).

It is in such a “feminist postmodernist” spirit that I draw on the cat-egorization of discourse provided by Jennifer Milliken (1999, 229–30).2

Milliken argues that there are three ways of studying discourses: as “sys-tems of signification” that operate as “background capacities” throughwhich meaning is fixed; as producing the world, bound up in relations ofpower, and authorizing who can know and act; and as “the play ofpractice” whereby authorizing discourses are understood as unstable andcontinually challenged by subordinated discourses. Although Milliken isnot explicit about this, her categorization could be mapped onto differentconcepts of discourse. A distinction has been widely noted between dis-course as strings of words in an utterance or text and discourse as a generalnarrative of meaning, generated by and through social practices and in-stitutions (Weedon 1987, 20, 22; Howarth 2000, 2–5). Milliken’s firststrategy applies to texts and her second to more general narratives. Herthird could be applied to both, but I am most intrigued here by the use

2 I cite Milliken’s work here with apologies, given that her express purpose is to encouragerigor and precision in the application of discourse analysis. For example, she specifies thatthe study of discourse as systems of signification should adopt the specific methods of pred-icate and metaphorical analysis. The term deconstructionist is reserved for the specific tech-niques of Derridean double reading. However, I do not deploy these specific methods inthis article.

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of the word practice. It seems to me that the relationship between dis-course and practice needs more attention, a point to which I shall return.

This three-part categorization of types of discourse and strategies foranalyzing them maps to some extent onto the three parts of the analysisthat follows. In the first part, I examine texts that have some authorityamong activists to “fix” the identity of the antiglobalization movement.Echoing Martinez, I ask, “Where are the feminists?” and find them largelyabsent. This leads me in the second part to identify the broader socialnarratives underpinning these texts in the form of exclusionary discoursesof globalization, social struggle, and feminism and to highlight alternativediscourses that allow for a fuller recognition of movement interconnec-tions. In the third part, I explore the ways in which such alternativediscourses are elaborated in Web sites associated with the movement. Thisis in effect to study movement practice as a site for the generation ofsubjugated knowledges. I look particularly at Web sites associated withthe World Social Forum. Here I find a feminist presence within the anti-globalization movement, although it currently remains rather skeletal.Through this line of inquiry, I hope to contribute to making feminism amore fully acknowledged, thriving presence within the antiglobalizationmovement more generally—to help put flesh on the bones of SkeletonWoman. As the story told by Estes indicates, such a move holds out thepossibility of transforming both feminism and the antiglobalization move-ment within a more equal partnership.

Where are the feminists? Exclusions in authoritative movement texts

I begin by looking for the presence of feminism and feminists in booksabout the antiglobalization movement. This is to follow Milliken’s firsttype of discourse analysis—the study of a system of signification througha focus “upon a set of texts by . . . authorized speakers/writers of adominant discourse” (Milliken 1999, 233). My selection of authoritativetexts must be acknowledged as partial and situated. Published in2000–2001 in the wake of Seattle, they are explicitly concerned withdelineating what was at the time an emergent movement. They are oftenwritten by prominent activists within that movement, in English.3

3 It is likely that a very different picture of the composition of the movement would berevealed by a survey of Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, given the relatively highprofile of Latin American feminist Encuentros (encounters, or conferences) and of womenactivists in the Zapatistas, and also given the location of the World Social Forum 2000–2003in Brazil. Certainly, there are several texts in Spanish and Portuguese that appear to deal

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• Klein’s highly influential No Logo (2001) investigates resistances tocorporate influence and “branding,” including culture jamming;campaigns against Nike, Shell, and McDonalds; and campus and cityattempts to instigate consumer boycotts against sweatshop-producedbrands. No Logo is in many ways informed by a feminist conscious-ness. It is also explicitly critical of what Klein sees as a feministpreoccupation with a politics of identity in the 1980s (2001, chap.5), and antiglobalization activism is positioned as a move toward amore materialist politics.

• Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, and Allan Sekula’s descriptionof “the new movement” evident at Seattle traces connections amongthe Ruckus Society, Earth First!, groups campaigning for economicjustice, movements of Third World solidarity, anti–North AmericanFree Trade Agreement (NAFTA) organizing, and a “new studentactivism” around sweatshop labor (2000, 2–3). The authors declare“the new movement” to be “less sexist” than older movements “andrich in ethnic diversity” (2000, 4), though they do not develop thisclaim in the rest of the text.

• Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach trace the outlines of a “globaldemocracy movement” encompassing trade unions, the corporateaccountability movement, “citizen empowerment” groups, and ef-forts to bridge the concerns of environmental groups and socialjustice struggles (2000, 9–10). Their section on “dealing with di-versity” has nothing on women or feminists. Although ecofeministsStarhawk and Vandana Shiva contribute to the collection, they donot write with an explicitly feminist voice. One contributor, DeborahJames, acknowledges in a final chapter on the democratization ofthe global economy the need to tackle gender inequalities (James2000, 206–7).

• Amory Starr’s (2000) survey clusters groups into three main strands.She titles these “contestation and reform” (including groups rangingfrom peace and human-rights organizations to cyberpunks); “glob-alization from below” (including labor and the Zapatistas); and “de-linking, relocalization, sovereignty” (anarchists, small business ac-tivists, and religious nationalists). Starr does not include feministorganizations in any of the strands, though she makes fleeting ac-knowledgment of a gender dimension to the analysis produced by

explicitly with feminist voices and demands on the Web pages for the 2003 World SocialForum (see also Alvarez with Faria and Nobre 2004, the translated introduction to a Por-tuguese-language journal collection on feminists and the forum).

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some groups such as the Zapatistas.• In a compendium titled Anti-capitalism: A Guide to the Movement

(Bircham and Charlton 2001), Susan George lists “workers and un-ions, small farmers and their organizations, consumers, environ-mentalists, students, women, the unemployed, indigenous people,religious believers” (George 2001, 21). The book has a section on“Actors” that includes chapters on unions, students, anarchists, andsocialists, and a directory of groups ranging from the ATTAC (As-sociation for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid ofCitizens) to the Zapatistas (Bircham and Charlton 2001, 269–336).Unusually, the book echoes George’s inclusion of women by ded-icating a chapter to them in the “Issues” section (Egan and Robidoux2001). However, the only women’s group included in the directoryis the Lesbian Avengers, who marched topless in the streets in Seattle.

So what are the commonalities in these depictions of antiglobalizationresistances? First, the following surface repeatedly: the Zapatistas, militantenvironmentalists, consumer-rights and anticonsumerism groups, labor,social justice organizations (including debt relief campaigners), and NorthAmerican students campaigning on sweatshop labor. Second, the ac-knowledgment of diversity in the movement leads to a preoccupation withthe need for “coalitions.” However, there is marked lack of attention tothe processes by which such coalitions could be constructed and sustained.Further, some coalitions are seen as more desirable than others, with muchemphasis on building links between environmentalists and labor. None ofthe above texts is concerned with making alliances between “their” move-ment and women’s groups and/or feminists.

This brings me to the third feature of these texts: there is occasional,but usually limited, recognition of the participation of women. Someanalyses draw attention to, or involve interviews with, women as wellas men activists (Coates 2001). However, gender is not commented onor presented as relevant to motivations or styles of activism. The chapterdedicated to women in Emma Bircham and John Charlton’s (2001)anticapitalist compendium is in the section on issues rather than the oneon actors. This is despite the fact that the chapter authors emphasize that“women have been in the streets and organising at every level of themovement from Seattle to Prague to Porto Alegre to Quebec City” (Eganand Robidoux 2001, 81). Some wider acknowledgment is made of thehigh profile of women “leaders”—Shiva, George, Klein, Arundhati Roy—and this is perhaps one reason why Cockburn, St. Clair, and Sekula claimthis movement to be “less sexist” than its predecessors. However, a wel-

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come for women leaders is not in itself evidence of a wider feminist sen-sibility or a guarantee of feminist leadership. It is also surely not accidentalthat the only women’s group that receives particular mention in severalaccounts is the Lesbian Avengers. It is difficult to judge whether thisshould be seen as successful participation by the Avengers and other queeractivists in a new politics of spectacle or as a worrying remnant of an olderpolitics of the left in which women activists are either sexualized or mar-ginalized. Alternatively, could it be that women are rarely active in thisnew movement in specifically women’s groups, in which the fact thatmembers are women is a key organizing element? Feminist writings onactivism against globalization dispute this, drawing attention to the ex-tensive participation of individual women and women’s groups at all levelsin ways that draw on or challenge gender identities and roles (e.g., Miles2000; Rowbotham and Linkogle 2001; Naples and Desai 2002).

This brings me to the fourth and final feature of the texts discussedabove: the fact that explicitly feminist contributions are rarely included.This is despite the fact that several of the acknowledged women “leaders”are known in other contexts as feminists. Klein is an interesting partialexception here. Her work is clearly influenced by a background in feministactivism. No Logo (2001) stands out for the extent of its awareness of thegendered impact of globalized economic processes, and Klein acknowl-edges some feminist impetus behind “anti-logo” and anticonsumptionactivism. However, as I indicate above, the book also contains a critiqueof feminist “identity politics” on U.S. campuses, and it positions the anti-globalization movement as a whole as a move away from such politics.Significantly, Klein has returned to this argument in a recent interviewbecause of what she perceives as its misuse by activists. She has criticizedthose who see feminism as irrelevant to antiglobalization struggles andhas drawn attention to a more materialist strand of feminism that shouldbe incorporated (in Thomas 2002). I will return to this move below. Itis worth noting here that the interview appeared in a feminist journalrather than in an antiglobalization movement handbook.

On the whole, feminists and feminism are rarely found in the author-itative movement texts examined above. These texts occasionally acknowl-edge the role of women and the need for an antisexist movement, butthey do so only fleetingly and superficially, and there is no concern forbuilding coalitions with feminism. Worse than that, they fail to recognizefeminism as an integral presence within the antiglobalization movement

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and even position the movement as transcendent of feminism. This hasthe effect of actively excluding feminism from antiglobalization politics.4

Productive discourses: (Anti)globalization, social struggle, and

feminism

Following Milliken’s second strategy for discourse analysis, I now expandmy focus to broad narratives of meaning that are generated through prac-tices and institutions, that naturalize certain ways of life and courses ofaction, and that feed off and into “common sense” (Milliken 1999, 236).I begin by examining the following: general narratives of globalization asdriven by economic forces, discourses of social struggle in terms of violentconfrontation with the state, and representations of feminism as centeringon identity and as universalizing and imperialist. The combined effect ofthese discourses is to produce a “common sense” view, reflected in thetexts above, of feminism and the antiglobalization movement as separate,even incompatible, entities. Blurring Milliken’s neat tripartite categori-zation, I immediately move to challenge such discourses by pointing toalternatives. This “juxtapositional method” aims “not to establish the‘right story’ but to render ambiguous predominant interpretations . . .and to demonstrate the[ir] inherently political nature” (Milliken 1999,243). Specifically, I draw attention to discourses of globalization as hav-ing multiple dimensions, of social struggle as nonviolent, and of femi-nism as focusing on intersecting inequalities and struggling for democ-racy and diversity in movement organizing. Taken together, thesediscourses point to ways in which feminism and the antiglobalizationmovement can be perceived as interconnected.

4 More recent publications, especially the excellent We Are Everywhere by Notes fromNowhere (2003), show some interesting discursive developments. These include a strength-ening of the tendency to provide detailed case studies of local, community-based activism,which has the effect of highlighting the extensive involvement of people of color and third-world communities and can also sometimes draw attention to women within those com-munities: for example, in the Sans-Papiers (without papers, or undocumented) in France,the piquetero (picketer, or blockader) movement of the unemployed in Argentina, and theSouth African neighborhoods struggling for housing and electricity (Notes from Nowhere2003, 38–45, 472–81, 488–89). In addition, Notes from Nowhere’s publication has manypieces by women, including, unusually, a couple of explicitly feminist contributions focusingon the actions of women’s groups (Notes from Nowhere 2003, 290–95, 340–45). Thusthere appears to be increasing space opening up in “authoritative texts” for feminist voices,perhaps partly as a result of the feminist struggles outlined in the third part of this article.

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The commonsense understanding of globalization clearly places eco-nomic processes center stage. In particular, most analyses focus on therole of corporations and international financial institutions such as theWTO, which push for a neoliberal agenda of “free” trade, the reductionof state barriers to and intervention in trade processes, and the con-tinuing integration of domestic markets. Further, it can be argued thatthis understanding of globalization is, in many instances, economistic,assuming a priori that economic processes are causal, even determining,of other social, cultural, and political phenomena (Robertson andKhondker 1998; Eschle 2004a, 104–9). Indeed, an emphasis on thedetermining impact of the global economy has become so widespread thatit now dominates approaches to globalization in academia, activist circles,and the media and is characteristic of both neoliberal advocacy of glob-alization and critical opposition.

In a highly significant move, many critics redefine globalization as thelatest stage of capitalism. According to Klein, “The critique of ‘capitalism’just saw a comeback of Santana-like proportions” (2002, 12). I wouldadd that Marxist critiques of capitalism in particular are making a come-back. While Gramscian modifications of Marxism dominate in the disci-pline of international relations (Rupert 2000; Gill 2003), activist textstend rather toward an ad hoc, strategic appropriation of elements of Marx-ism (Starr 2000) or a reductive, even structurally determinist version thatdepicts globalization as driven by changes in the mode of production.This usually brings with it an attempt to reframe “antiglobalization” ac-tivism as “anticapitalist,” that is, as a struggle against more fundamentaleconomic structures (e.g., Callinicos 2003), which functions to root themovement in class identity and interests. Some effort may be made toconceptualize class-based resistance in an inclusive manner (Barker 2001,332). However, alliances with groups that cannot be defined primarily interms of class location, or that are suspected of reformist accommodationwith capitalism, are likely to be hierarchical—if such groups are granteda role at all. Certainly, it becomes difficult to imagine that gender mightlie at the root of globalizing dynamics and that feminist mobilization istherefore integral to reshaping them. Thus it is no accident that SamAshman’s account of resistances in India touches on the Narmada damprotest without mentioning either that many of its leaders are women orthat there is an extensive tradition of women’s ecological and antistateactivism in India, concluding instead by emphasizing recent strikes thathave “tied together opposition to neo-liberalism” (2001, 240–41; cf. Raj-gopal 2002). Or that Mike Gonzales’s (2001) description of resistancesin Latin America does not incorporate the extensive mobilization of

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women’s groups in opposition to structural adjustment and militarizedrule.

These reductive analyses of (anti)globalization do not go uncontested.See, for example, the long-established pluralist approach to globalizationin academia, which focuses on the interplay of economics, state power,and cultural formations (e.g., Held and McGrew 2000). A more criticaldiscourse is also emerging—one that recognizes the devastating impactof capitalism without privileging it as universally determining—throughan insistence on the need to analyze the intersections of capitalism withracial and gendered hierarchies. Evident in Gramscian and anarchist ap-proaches (Peoples’ Global Action 1998; Rupert 2000), this “intersec-tional” discourse is most developed in feminist accounts (Eschle 2001,128–30, 204–6; 2004a, 116–19). Black and third-world feminist schol-arship has long stressed that multiple forms of power intersect in differentways in different localities, requiring context-specific contestation.5 Theseideas have been further elaborated in a recent wave of feminist literaturefocusing specifically on globalization.6 Thus, for example, KimberleyChang and L. H. M. Ling (2000) argue that globalized high-tech capi-talism is underpinned by sexualized, racialized, and national hierarchies,as manifested in the large-scale migration of Filipinas to fulfill domesticservice roles. They examine the multiple, ambiguous strategies that Fili-pinas deploy to cope with their positioning. Sharon Ann Navarro’s (2002)study of the women’s organization La Mujer Obrera demonstrates thatits opposition to NAFTA is motivated by a profound awareness of theinterconnections between economic liberalization and gendered inequal-ity. Its efforts to resist draw heavily on, but also face obstacles within,Mexican culture. In effect, feminist intersectional analyses of globalizationopen up space for the recognition of the multiple axes of oppression andidentity that structure and motivate but also limit mobilization. They pointto a more inclusive understanding of the antiglobalization movement astaking different forms in different contexts and as needing to integrate afeminist sensibility if it is to be effective and emancipatory.

However, the marginalization of feminism and women’s groups indominant representations of the antiglobalization movement is reinforcedby another discourse, one that depicts social struggle as centering onviolent confrontation with elites. This surfaces strongly in some Marxist

5 See, e.g., King 1988; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Alexander and Mohanty 1997;Collins 2000.

6 See, e.g., Afshar and Barrientos 1999; Marchand and Runyan 2000; Basu et al. 2001b;Brah et al. 2002; Naples and Desai 2002.

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and anarchist texts, pointing to their revolutionary tradition. Jeffrey St.Clair emphasizes that the violence of the “Battle of Seattle” was produc-tive: “Along with the poison, the flash bombs and the rubber bullets,there was an optimism, energy and camaraderie that I hadn’t felt for along time” (in Cockburn, St. Clair, and Sekula 2000, 52). The volumein which St. Clair’s Seattle diary is featured goes on to develop a critiqueof the “jackboot state” in which the police are exposed as increasinglymilitarized (Cockburn, St. Clair, and Sekula 2000, chap. 6). There is astrong resonance here with the analysis of participants in the so-calledblack bloc, who respond to state and corporate violence with the tacticaldestruction of corporate property and by escalating confrontations withpolice (Infoshop.org 2004; Sullivan 2005). We seem to be seeing thecrystallization of what is often referred to in the United Kingdom as a“spiky” discourse of social struggle among sections of antiglobalizationactivism. This discourse is reinforced to some extent by elite and mediarepresentations of protest as a “war zone” and of activists as “violent” oreven “terrorist,” although state and corporate violence are evacuated fromthis version (e.g., Klein 2002, pt. 3). Further, I suggest that this discoursedraws on overtly masculine imagery, privileging the position and activitiesof some male activists and marginalizing most women and feminists. Thisis alluded to in Jo-Ann Wypijeski’s “DC Diary” (in Cockburn, St. Clair,and Sekula 2000), which complains of the “one-upmanship” or “ma-chismo” displayed by protesters bragging about the number of times theyhave been gassed (Cockburn, St. Clair, and Sekula 2000, 76–77).

Of course, this spiky discourse is not uncontested. Its converse can befound in a “fluffy” discourse of nonviolent direct action that is also wide-spread within the antiglobalization movement, although often obscuredby the media attention given to violence. A strong relationship betweenwomen and nonviolence has been postulated in essentialist terms, attrib-uted to women’s physiology, spirituality, and capacity to bear children.Alternatively, it has been seen as socially constructed, deriving from thesocial division of labor, gendered archetypes, or feminist analysis of theconnections between militarism, male violence, and patriarchy (McAllister1982; Elshtain 1987; Ruddick 1995). I would stress that a straightforwardequation of men with violent and women with nonviolent modes of strug-gle is impossible to sustain in the face of critiques of essentialism, countlesscounterexamples, and analyses of gender identity that posit multiple mas-culinities and femininities, all of them crosscut by other hierarchies andmanifesting themselves in context-specific ways (e.g., Connell 1987;Hooper 2001). My argument is rather that discourses of social struggleare gendered and that, in particular contexts, nonviolent discourses of

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direct action may have the potential to open up more space for womenand feminists to participate. A connection between women, feminism, andnonviolence has featured particularly prominently in Western peace move-ment discourses. Several of the snapshots of the antiglobalization move-ment discussed in the first section include a role for peace activism, andthis role has grown in significance in the context of the post–September11 wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. It is notable that Lindsey German’s(2001) chapter on the peace movement in Bircham and Charlton’s an-ticapitalist compendium is one of the few to foreground the role of womenactivists.

However, I now want to turn to discourses of feminism that representit as unconcerned with, or complicit in, globalized processes. At least twosuch discourses are relevant here. First, as evident in Klein’s No Logo(2001), feminism can be represented as operating on the terrain of identityand culture. Klein focuses on feminist campaigns for fairer representationof women in the media and academic curriculum, but feminist debateson identity are more complex than that, including extensive strugglesover the content of the category “women” and its relation to feministpolitics (e.g., Riley 1988; Parmar 1989). The notion that such debatesare what feminism is most centrally about has been given force by ex-ternal commentary in academia. Notably, “new social movement” theorytends to classify feminism with other “new” movements concerned withculture and identity, in contrast to “older” movements concerned withmaterial redistribution and access to state power (e.g., Melucci 1989;cf. Habermas 1981). When combined with economistic discourses of(anti)globalization, this positions feminism as unconcerned with, andsurpassed by, the return to materialist movement politics exemplified bythe antiglobalization movement.

A second relevant discourse presents feminism as a universalizing ide-ology and movement. Feminists are characterized as making claims aboutwomen’s identity and oppression that they allegedly believe are universallyvalid and as responding by promoting a global movement of women, onethat transcends national boundaries. This understanding of the feministproject was widespread in liberal and radical feminism in the 1970s and1980s, and the debates about identity described above emerged partly inresponse to its limitations. It has been thoroughly critiqued within fem-inism, particularly with regard to the notion that feminism thus constitutedis somehow transcendental, “already oppositional or outside global pro-cesses” (Basu et al. 2001a, 944). Feminist critics reveal this discourse tobe an imperial Western construct, exported throughout the world on theback of iniquitous colonial and globalization processes and serving to mask

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geopolitical, economic, and racial hierarchies among women (Mohanty1998). A universalizing/imperial discourse of feminism still circulates to-day, as evident in its mobilization by British and U.S. elites in the contextof the war against Afghanistan (Brah 2002, 38–41) and the tendency ofhostile nationalist and fundamentalist elites to conflate universalizing/imperial feminism with feminism as a whole. The effect is to positionfeminism as integral to globalization—as part of the problem rather thanpart of the solution.

Needless to say, these discourses of feminism are partial, contradictory,and contested. It is significant that Klein, as noted above, has modifiedher earlier depiction of feminism in terms of identity politics to point tothe coexistence of a more materialist discourse. She claims that identitypolitics were “an aberration from the history of the feminist movementand an aberration within the global feminist movement, which neverstopped focusing on economics. It’s not that people stopped making thearguments—they were—it’s just that they weren’t being heard within themore privileged mainstream of feminist discourse” (in Thomas 2002,49–50). Klein’s move is useful in reminding antiglobalization activists ofthe long-term existence of more materialist versions of feminism, but heranalysis remains somewhat oversimplified. A concern with identity is notincompatible with a concern with economic inequality; further, there aredifferent “mainstreams” of feminism depending on the location of theobserver. I would argue that the focus on identity highlighted by Kleinoccurred simultaneously with the intensification of transnational feministorganizing during and after the UN Decade for Women, in which blackand third-world feminist arguments about the inequalities of global cap-italism became increasingly influential. This fed into an explosion of fem-inist theorizing and practice around “development” and subsequently intothe recent wave of feminist critiques focusing explicitly on globalization,as highlighted above (Eschle 2004b, 99–104). It should be recalled thatsuch critiques insist on the intersections of economic hierarchies withgendered, racial, and cultural forms of power. They remain centrally con-cerned with how gendered identities are constituted and with how theseidentities structure women’s resistances to, or complicity in, globalization.Many feminist analysts also foreground the impact of globalization onfeminism itself, grappling with the implications of globalized inequalitiesand solidarities among women, tracing the complex relationship amongstruggles in different localities, and challenging hierarchies between localgroups and transnational federations (e.g., Sperling, Ferree, and Risman2001; Naples and Desai 2002). Strictly speaking, this is an intersectionalrather than reductively materialist discourse of what feminism is concerned

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with and how it operates. But the upshot is that feminism is representedas centrally concerned with the many dimensions of globalization and theways in which they shape feminism itself.

This brings me finally to a discourse that represents feminism as strivingto organize democratically in ways that are sensitive to global diversity.Western radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s developed a participatorydemocratic model of autonomous movement organization intended, amongother things, to enable diverse women to speak for themselves.7 The modelhas since been criticized for generating its own hierarchies and exclusionsand for neglecting centers of power (Eschle 2001, 118–23). This may beresponsible for a turn in some feminist quarters to more formal democraticparticipation. Certainly, much contemporary transnational feminist orga-nizing adopts formal, institutionally oriented organizational modes, as ev-ident in critical assessments of the phenomena of “NGO-ization” and“mainstreaming” (e.g., Alvarez 1999). However, as Valentine Moghadam(1995) points out, many transnational feminist organizations are charac-terized by flattened horizontal networks and the devolution of power tolocal contexts. Also relevant here is the black and third-world feminist lit-erature on coalitions, which insists that complex intersections of power, andthe multiple, crosscutting identities and oppressions they produce, requirediverse struggles for social change to connect with one another on a strategicand democratic basis (e.g., Albrecht and Brewer 1990; Reagon 1998). Itcan be argued that feminist efforts to develop modes of organizing that aredemocratic and sensitive to diversity remain incomplete and in process. Buttaken together they constitute a discourse about feminist organizing thatconfronts the stratifications and divergences caused by globalization. Fur-ther, the black and third-world feminist insistence on coalition politics pointsto the possibility that feminism and the antiglobalization movement canand ought to be constructed as intertwined.

Skeleton Woman at Porto Alegre: Web sites and subjugated

knowledges

In this third section, I continue to destabilize the authority and coherenceof dominant discourses and to facilitate what Milliken calls “the play ofpractice” by focusing more specifically on “subjugated knowledges.” This“is essentially an extension of the juxtapositional method, with the difference

7 A participatory democratic model is also evident within antiglobalization activism. Thisseems to me to be due less to the influence of feminism than to the influence on bothfeminism and antiglobalization of anarchist traditions of organizing (Graeber 2002).

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that alternative accounts are not just pointed out but are explored in somedepth” (Milliken 1999, 243). Further, this method pays systematic attentionto the concrete ways in which subjugated knowledges are produced andmight provide the conditions for resistance (Milliken 1999, 243–45). Inwhat follows, I turn again to movement texts but this time to the debatesand declarations posted by activists on the Internet about a key antiglob-alization event, the World Social Forum, between 2001 and 2003. I focusonly on English-language texts, mainly those published on the Web site ofthe forum itself and also some from associated feminist and antiglobalizationWeb sites. Internet documents seem to me to provide access to a discursiverealm that is highly contingent and contested. They reveal a more complexpicture of the movement and its relation to feminism than that evident inthe authoritative movement texts explored above.

The World Social Forum (WSF) met for the first time in Porto Alegre,Brazil, in the last week of January 2001 as a counterweight to the regulargathering of global elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Swit-zerland. Convened under the banner “Another World Is Possible!” theWSF was intended as a space in which alternatives to neoliberal ortho-doxies could be discussed. It has since spawned a huge mobilization pro-cess in the form of a rolling series of national and regional forums, withthe numbers of participants and issues discussed expanding exponentially.I will focus my attention here on the annual global forum. The organizersclaim that the first forum was attended by approximately twenty thousandparticipants, “around 4,700 of them delegates for a wide range of or-ganizations from 117 countries”; since then, participation has grown atan astonishing rate, with the third gathering drawing “close to 100,000participants from all over the world. Some 20,000 delegates, from a totalof 123 countries, took part” (WSF 2003b). These numbers alone aretestimony to the growing importance of the forum as a site of movementconstruction. In its “Charter of Principles,” the WSF declares itself “anopen meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas,formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinkingfor effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that areopposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital andany form of imperialism” (WSF 2002).

The Charter makes it clear that the WSF is not meant to have a de-termining vanguard role but rather seeks to enable the expression of di-versity and plurality within a context of “mutual recognition.” This res-onates with feminist approaches to movement organizing. However, thisdoes not mean that there are no hierarchies within the forum. Severalcommentators (e.g., Hardt 2002) emphasize the continuing influence of

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founding groups, particularly the French branch of ATTAC, which cam-paigns for the reform of international finance, and the local BrazilianWorker’s Party (PT). At the second forum, the “Declaration of a Groupof Intellectuals” (Amin et al. 2002) pointed to a tension between a “neo-Keynesian” accommodation with capital and a “post-capitalist” insistenceon the need to develop “another economic logic.” For Michael Hardt(2002), the key division lay between an antiglobalization, prosovereigntyposition (which included social democratic as well as Marxist strands andwhich dominated, thanks to the PT and ATTAC) and a “non-sovereign,alternative globalization position” (which included internationalist Marx-ists, among others). According to James Cockcroft (2003), the forumof the following year may still have been numerically dominated by socialdemocratic reformists, but a “participatory socialist position,” includingsome Marxists and also anarchists, became ideologically dominant. It isworth noting that all these categorizations focus on economic analysesand connected strategies for political organization. To some extent, thisreflects and feeds into economistic discourses of (anti)globalization.However, there is also considerable disagreement on where the fault lineslie—hardly surprising, given the size and scope of the forum. Certainly,reductive Marxist formulations have not become entirely dominant, andthe overall impression is that the forum has not been, and perhaps cannotbe, entirely captured by any one doctrine.

Further, there appears to be space at the WSF for groups to elaboratenoneconomistic discourses of (anti)globalization. Declarations posted onthe WSF Web site describe a struggle that is against “the globalization ofcapital, its imperial political expressions and increasing militarization” (Aminet al. 2002) and opposed to “a system based on sexism, racism and violence,which privileges the interests of capital and patriarchy over the needs andaspirations of people” (“Call of Social Movements” 2002). The latter dec-laration moves explicitly away from economism in its insistence on the needto confront the interconnections of capital with patriarchy and militarism.This is an “intersectional” discourse of the kind described above as mostdeveloped among feminists; it recognizes the multiple axes of oppressionand identity around which groups do and should mobilize.

Affinities with some elements of feminism, I would argue, are reinforcedby a growing antimilitaristic discourse at the WSF. The Charter states thatmilitary organizations are not allowed to participate, thus immediatelyprivileging nonviolent modes of direct action. And this emphasis seemsto have been strongly reinforced in the context of the global response tothe U.S.-led wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The “Call of Social Move-ments” (2002) insists that a key goal is the struggle “against war and

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militarism. . . . We choose to privilege negotiation and non-violent con-flict resolution.” The huge march on the penultimate day of the 2002forum, ostensibly against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas,had a strongly antiwar theme. So did the opening march of the 2003forum, and antiwar events had a high profile throughout, including a setof panels on the antiwar theme “democratic world order, fighting mili-tarization, and promoting peace” (see also Osava 2003; WSF 2003b). Atthe same time, some of the “spikier” elements of the movement appearto have been sidelined. A closing panel in the 2002 forum responded toquestions from the floor about “recurring incidents of violence at variousanti-globalisation protests” by criticizing the role of the black bloc (Si-varaman 2002). Black bloc–style actions against property or the policeappeared to play only a limited role in WSF actions that year (Glock 2002),and I could find no mention of them at all on the WSF Web site for 2003.Further, it should be noted that feminist groups are using the forums todevelop and articulate their understandings of the connections betweenwar, violence, and issues of gender inequality and identity (e.g., “AsianWomen’s Statement on Militarism” 2002).

This brings me to the extent to which feminist groups and discoursesare a constitutive presence in the WSF. Participating groups range fromDevelopment Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) to theWorld March of Women (WMW) and from the Women’s InternationalCoalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ) to the Articulacion FeministaMarcosur (AFM). These and other groups met just before the 2003 forumto coordinate their strategies and to produce a feminist antiwar statement,and the WMW then headed up the opening demonstration. There fol-lowed many autonomously organized feminist workshops, on topics rang-ing from education to religious fundamentalism.8 Further, it appears thatfeminists have steadily increased their presence on panels organized byother groups and under the official WSF banner. According to VirginiaVargas, “Feminism . . . mainstreamed in several panels and workshopson trade, financing for development, global reforms, migration, peace andmuch more” in the 2002 forum (2002, 20). In 2003, two of the five“thematic areas” around which the official panels of the forum weregrouped—“principles and values, human rights, diversity, and equality”and “political power, civil society, and democracy”—were coordinated byrepresentatives of the WMW (Diane Matte) and the AFM (Vargas). Un-surprisingly, feminist groups were a strong presence on panels in theseareas (see WSF 2003a). The control of these thematic areas stems from

8 See AFM 2003; DAWN 2003; WICEJ 2003; WMW 2003b.

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the fact that both the AFM and the WMW are on the InternationalCouncil, which advises on the political direction of the forum. The WMWnotes two further achievements. It claims responsibility for the openingemphasis in the “Call of Social Movements” on the intersections of cap-italism with militarism and patriarchy (Burrows 2002), and in 2003 itachieved a strong presence in the Youth Camp, organizing workshops anda demonstration against harassment and violence in a setting previouslyresistant to feminist voices (Beaulieu and Giovanni 2003).

However, feminists also complained about the continued marginali-zation of their concerns at the 2003 forum: “The struggle against capi-talism is still considered to be the primary struggle in the minds of many”(WMW 2003a); “gender issues were as usual very marginalized as notbeing a ‘priority’ given these troubled times and the more ‘serious’ issuesto tackle” (Karadenizli, Allaert, and de la Cruz 2003). In other words,an intersectional discourse of globalization was still overshadowed by morereductive discourses. Also, a feminist analysis was strongly evident in theofficial panels of the 2003 forum only in those thematic areas organizedby feminist groups. In short, the integration of feminist concerns intoantiglobalization discourses remained dependent on the concrete presenceof self-declared feminists.

It is salutary, then, to find widespread recognition that feminists re-mained a marginal presence at the forum in 2003. There is acknowledg-ment among feminists that they bear some responsibility for this becauseof their desire to preserve autonomy and because the “NGO-ization” orinstitutionalization of many women’s groups has delegitimized them inthe eyes of many at the forum (Karadenizli, Allaert, and de la Cruz 2003,1–2; Veneklasan 2003). But there is also a critique of hierarchies at workin the forum. Klein (2003) has issued a stark warning about the increasingrole of “big men”—charismatic male leaders who have come to promi-nence within hierarchically organized leftist political parties. Althoughthere are several feminist organizations on the International Council ofthe forum, with nine listed by one group as members in January 2003(AFM 2003), it seems that the agenda-setting power of this council maybe limited. Further, these nine organizations constituted less than 10percent of the total membership of the council at that time (Albert 2003;Waterman 2003). Indeed, Candido Grzybowski (2002) has pointed to a“structural bias that hinders women from exercising leadership roles.” Hegives the example of the opening press conference in 2002, which, thoughled by a woman, was dominated by nine men, and he argues that the“problem is engendered, developed, and maintained in the culture of civilsociety itself. In fact, a Jurassic macho culture still finds fertile ground”

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(Grzybowski 2002). Grzybowski points here to the deep-rooted discoursesof gender roles and social struggle emphasized above. It is in this context,then, that self-declared feminist groups are not and cannot be fully contentwith their undoubted achievements at the World Social Forum thus far.They continue to struggle for a larger feminist presence and the fullerintegration of feminist insights into the forum and thus into the anti-globalization movement more generally.

Conclusion: Putting flesh on the bones of Skeleton Woman?

In this article, I have been searching for the feminists, and the feminism,in the antiglobalization movement. In the first part, my examination of textspurporting to represent this movement indicated that feminism is barelypresent—granted a fleeting mention at best and deliberately sidelined atworst. In the second part, I argued that this marginalization is at least inpart reflective of broader social narratives. I pointed to the widespreadadoption of an economistic approach to globalization, which has helpedbolster a resurgent, reductive Marxist discourse that turns the “antiglob-alization movement” into the “anticapitalist movement,” predicated on classidentity. I also drew attention to the prevalence of a discourse of socialstruggle that emphasizes masculinist imagery of war and violence, and todiscourses of feminism that represent it as focused on identity and cultureand organized as a universalizing/imperial project. In sum, these discoursesconstruct antiglobalization activism and feminism as distinct entities thatspeak past each other. However, the second section of the article also pointedto discourses on globalization that foreground the intersection of economicforces with other hierarchies, to nonviolent discourses of social struggle,and to discourses of feminism as struggling with intersecting globalizedinequalities and as striving for democracy and diversity in movement or-ganizing. These alternative discourses can aid in the construction of femi-nism and antiglobalization as interconnected struggles. The third part ofthe article sought evidence for such interconnections in the “subjugatedknowledges” of movement practice, as exemplified by the Internet docu-mentation surrounding the World Social Forum. I discovered that feminismhas found increasing purchase at the forum but is still not fully integrated.It remains heavily dependent on the presence of actual feminists, and thispresence remains conditional and contested.

In sum, I found Skeleton Woman at Porto Alegre. Her refusal to bekilled or destroyed ensures that “Porto Alegre man”’ (DAWN 2002, 3)has not achieved total hegemony within the movement. But she needs togrow in strength: by prioritizing the elaboration of a feminist contribution

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to the critical analysis of globalization, by continuing the struggle for afeminist voice within the antiglobalization movement, and by strength-ening coalitions with other strands within this movement (Francisco n.d.).As Estes’s story reminds us, putting flesh on the bones of Skeleton Womanholds out the promise of enriching both feminism and the antiglobali-zation movement as they become stronger, more inclusive, and more fullyintertwined in their joint pursuit of other possible worlds.

I close with brief speculations on the implications of these conclusionsfor the feminist postmodernist approach adopted in this article. First, itseems to me that inquiry seeking to aid in the project of putting flesh onthe bones of Skeleton Woman needs to shift its focus from movementdiscourse to movement practice. More specifically, there is an urgent needfor attention to the mechanisms, processes, and actions through whichfeminists can successfully influence movement agendas and construct dem-ocratic coalitions with other activists. Discourse analysis is of only limitedhelp here. Foucault’s work is ambiguous on the relationship betweendiscourse and practice, with some interpretations emphasizing that prac-tice is constituted by discourse and others focusing on “discursive practice”(Howarth 2000, 64–84). In my view, both interpretations function toflatten out the differences between diverse practices and do not providetools to evaluate them. Alternative methods for the empirical study ofmovement practices, such as interviewing and participant observation, willhave to be used alongside efforts to elaborate criteria for evaluation fromthe standpoint of movement activists. This brings me, second, to the needto shift from the study of discourse as productive of movements to thestudy of movement activists as producers of discourse. I argued abovethat the integration of feminism into the antiglobalization movement relieson the presence of self-declared feminists.

This indicates the need for further examination of exactly which fem-inists, how they come to feminism, how they insert themselves in anti-globalization struggles, and so on. In other words, the call to put fleshon the bones of Skeleton Woman can be interpreted not only as a politicalinjunction to strengthen a feminist presence within the antiglobalizationmovement but also as an epistemological injunction to study feminists asembodied political agents. This involves a shift into feminist standpointepistemology. As Janet Ransom puts it, “It does matter ‘who is speaking’”(1993, 144; emphasis in original). In sum, a feminist postmodernist ap-proach yields significant insights into the discursive construction of trans-national movements. But it also raises pressing questions of political strat-egy and agency that point inquiry in new directions.

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Epilogue

In January 2004, after completing an earlier draft of this article and drivenin part by its conclusions, I went to India to investigate further the feministpresence in the antiglobalization movement, primarily at the fourth WorldSocial Forum in Mumbai. Bice Maiguashca, Rekha Pande, and I con-ducted interviews in Pande’s home location of Hyderabad before Maig-uashca and I moved to Mumbai, partly in an effort to pay attention toongoing local struggles and thus to counter the emphasis on transnationalsites of activism in studies of the antiglobalization movement. Unsur-prisingly, we found that a transnational/local dichotomy quickly collapsed.Many of the Hyderabadi activists considered themselves to be part of awider antiglobalization movement, and some were involved in forum pro-cesses. Further, the Mumbai forum was intensely shaped by its place andtime, as evident in the high profile accorded to issues of caste, commu-nalism, and historic experiences of colonialism.

Most important in the context of this article, Maiguashca and I werefrankly astonished by the visibility and power of women activists at theforum. Many panels were feminist organized and women dominated andprovided complex feminist analyses of war, communalism, and coalitionbuilding. It is notable that “patriarchy” was included among the five keythematic areas for official panels. We were further surprised by our en-counter with a small but highly articulate core of feminist activists in theMumbai Resistance, a Marxist-Leninist alternative to the forum, who drewour attention to the exclusions generated by an emphasis on nonviolentdirect action in the Indian context. The context-specific reasons for thestrong presence of feminists in antiglobalization activism in India clearlyneed more investigation, as do the divisions of ideology and strategyamong them (for a first attempt, see Eschle, Maiguashca, and Pande2004). Further, it remains to be seen whether Indian women’s strategiesfor inclusion can be replicated successfully in other locations. Nonetheless,it seems that the feminist struggle to achieve a greater presence in theforum, and in the antiglobalization movement more generally, did achievea significant boost in Mumbai. Skeleton Woman is gaining “eyes, voiceand spirit. She is about in the world and her dreams are different. . . .She will not be quiet or flung to sea anytime soon” (Hawken 2000, 34).

Department of GovernmentUniversity of Strathclyde

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