Challenges for Feminism in a Globalized World
http://alainet.org/publica/retosfem/en/

Introduction

Irene León^*
ALAI

Putting into perspective the feminist proposals expressed in the globalization process, bringing into the debate some of the major pending issues of feminism, such as diversity and multiple forms of combined discrimination – this is one of the indispensable ingredients for renewing feminism and its participation in building a different world.

Proposing diversity, in the context of globalization, is a collective exercise, far-reaching, stretching from the individual to the world arena, and involving the construction of thought and practice.

This calls for focusing on the linkage among gender relations and racism, homophobia, classism and all forms of discrimination, locating the different contexts in which women’s overall proposals are developed, and the multiple range of perspectives and priorities inherent in each of the inter-relationships that they produce.

In the framework of neoliberal globalization, whose excluding effects make most of the rights attained by women over the last few decades inapplicable, it is also indispensable to propose real alternatives in order to face the new kinds of inequality gap between the genders, resulting from the universalization of the dominant vision and process.

Gender realities are tightly interwoven with class realities, with belonging to ethnic groups and cultures, with geopolitical location, with situations of human mobility, of individual choices and each group’s insertion into economic, social and cultural integration processes. Therefore, we hope that the feminist visions to be presented here will contribute to reinforcing the feminist proposal itself, in the global context.

A visualization of the critical approach characterizing feminist thought will contribute to the necessary break with that single-minded thinking that is inherent to neoliberal globalization. In an alternative setting, such as the World Social Forum, WSF, this is the equivalent of laying the groundwork to enable that “other, possible world” to be inclusive, to recognize diversity and gender equality.

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