Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization
Tani E. Barlow

タ ニ・ E ・バ ー ロ ウ 教 授 は、１９８５年、カ リ フ ォ ル ニ ア 大 学 デ ー ヴ ィ ス 校 で
中国の小説家、丁玲の研究で歴史学の博士号を取得。その後ミズーリ大学コロン ビ ア 校 を へ て、１９９４年 よ り ワ シ ン ト ン 大 学 歴 史 学 部 で 女 性 学 担 当 の 教 授 を勤めている。また、東アジア、ならびにアジア系ディアスポラの文化と政治の諸問題をあ つ か う 学 術 雑 誌 positions: East Asia Cultures Critique の 主 任 編 集 者 として活躍している。
近代中国におけるジェンダーの歴史、および東アジアの植民地的近代におけるジェンダーの比較研究を専門とし、 Gender Politics in Modern China （１９９４）
、Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia（１９９７）ほ か 多 数 の 著 書 を 執 筆 している。
バ ー ロ ウ 教 授 は２０００年１０月 か ら２
００
１年３月 ま で、ジ ェ ン ダ ー 研 究 セ ン
ターに外国人客員教授として赴任した 。本稿はその間行われたシンポジウム「 アジアにおけるグローバル化とジェンダー」での基調報告をもとに作成され、ご寄稿いただいたものである。

It has been widely suggested throughout the Clinton Presidency by many attentive observersthat its efforts in economic statecraft have been mainly directed at one particular geographicalarea: East and South-East Asia.

Rothkopf suggests this was the main motive for the entire

drive, saying: ‘Commercial diplomacy, however defined and practised, owes its development asmuch to the rise of Asia’s emerging economies as it does to any other factor.’ East and South-East Asia were of decisive importance if the United States ‘was to maintain its economic
leadership.’Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London:
Verso Press, 1999), p. 78.

Policy changes within the PRC has led to regional economic growth, particularly in coastal
China, through decentralisation, localisation, and the policy of the ‘open door’.

Theneighbouring economies of East Asia, faced with limits to their own economic growth andseeking to restructure, have not only traded with and invested in China’s new dynamic
regions, but have moved enterprises and even whole industries to off-shore processing andproduction in the PRC.

The result is a new pattern of economic regionalism unlike earlier

regionalisms experienced in China, and one whose impact on domestic politics and international

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Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

relations remains relatively undiscussed . . . .

The primary concern of this book is the impact of

the twin dynamics of China’s new regionalism on its domestic politics and international
relations.

The first and domestic source of this dynamic is the policy changes of the 1980s . . .

The second and external source of dynamics is the increased economic integration of different
parts of China with different parts of East, South-East and Central Asia on its borders.
David S.G. Goodman and Gerald Segal, eds., “Introduction,” and David Goodman, “Thepolitics of regionalism: Economic development, conflict and negotiation,” both in China
Deconstructs: politics, trade and regionalism, (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. xiii and 17 (myemphasis)With billions of dollars in trade surpluses to recycle, China’s secretive monetary agencies are
becoming big buyers in the U.S.

Treasury markets.

This raises fears on Wall Street andamong some U.S. trade experts about how Beijing will use its newfound heft.

. . . . someWashington trade experts fear China wants to gain clout in the tough talks over Beijing’s
joining the World Trade Organization. “Just as Japan gained significant leverage over the U.
S. [as a lender], China feels it can, too,” argues Greg Mastel of the Economic Strategy Institute,a Washington think tank.

The U.S. treasury, though, welcomes Beijing’s buying, figuring

more buyers means Washington pays lower interest rates.
Mike McNamee, “Uncle Sam’s Big Creditor: China,” Newsweek, November 4, 1996.

There is almost no equation in the formulas for sustainable development and peace in which
China will not be an important factor.

The world has entered a period in which China’s andthe planet’s fates are linked, and this period promises to be long and dangerous.
Peter C. Goldmark, Jr., “The President’s Letter” The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1997.

Just recently two leading feminists have directly addressed globalization and gender in relation to
the question of a re-regionalizing Asia. In her, “A feminist critique of modernity and Korean
culture,” Cho Han Haejoang situated South Korean “turbo capitalist” culture in relation to globalized
capital (“transnational capital”). She argued that in a post-1997 Asia finance crisis world Korean
intellectuals confronted the need to reformulate the basic discursive and social institutions situatingthem as subjects, starting from “nation,” “state,” and “family” and seguing into a debate over “class,gender and capital only after those notions are successfully deconstructed.”１ Li Xiaojiang, on theother hand, sought to show that as a normative process at work in the world, so-called “globalization”
had originated elsewhere. Li argued that to understand Chinese women’s status within“globalization” a researcher would need to grasp how earlier, successive waves of local development
discourses had already primed gendered Chinese subjects to cathect into international discourses ofglobalization unfolding outside their purview２. Taking the lead from Cho and Li, I want to use thisoccasion to speculate about three related analytic questions. They are globalization as discourse, re-2

ジェンダー研究 第５号 ２００２

regionalization and its relation to area studies (in my definition, academic work that attends to theparticularities of a place), and the question of gender. To anticipate my conclusion, this presentation
will suggest that gender remains a useful critical category. Yet to be put to best use it may benecessary to show how “gender” is embedded in discourses of globalization and international
development. That being the case, the gender analytic may work critically as a window onto
specific practices that, by mobilizing value creating subjects differentially, are actually extracting use
value in the production and consumption dynamic of the globalized segment of the world economy.

Discourse and practices of “globalization”
What might prove a useful way for a feminist to think about “globalization” in relation to thegender question? As Li Xiaojiang had noticed, the debate on globalization began in the early Clintonera. According to Peter Gowan, Clinton policy makers looking for a way to justify the use of
economic instruments against emergent, competitive regional blocs or regional markets (what theycalled BEMs or Big Emerging Markets located primarily in Asia), hit on the term “globalization.”
From the perspective of U.S. policy makers and their allies, the globalized economy should resemble
a wheel with a hub (the United States) and spokes (bilaterally established economic relations of
exchange and indebtedness with specific nation states). Any competing hub or economic region
such as a Japan-centered, intra-Asian bloc would complicate the Clinton agenda of U.S. dominance in
the international sector of world capitalism. Consequently, the Clinton globalization doctrine rested
U.S. hegemony on the centrality of the dollar and of the Wall Street stock market. Throughout thenineties this policy of economic globalization forwarded the U.S. “neo-liberal” posture established in
the seventies when Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods pact shifting international finance from thegold to the dollar standard. Clinton’s Washington Consensus forwarded the Nixon doctrine ofglobalization into the nineties. My point in raising this issue is to suggest that globalization is not a
spontaneously occurring economic incident, but, rather is a “state-policy-dependent phenomenon.”３
Provisionally, then let me accept two current theses: (1) that Clinton policy was made by agents,
who though conditioned by events did possess clear objectives, and (2) that these agents or policy
makers understood “globalization” to be both a policy of economic statecraft and a description of the“new economy.”４

Given these theses, it is not unreasonable to suppose further that U.S. economic

foreign policy actually precluded any period of economic tutelage structuring Western-Eastern
European relations and instead administered the “Shock Treatment” policy. This both routed
development through Washington rather than Moscow, Berlin, or Paris, and eventually has
devastated Eastern Europe and de-industrialized Russia. But also and directly to my point, Clinton
policy seemed vigorously focused on disrupting the emergence of an Asia Pacific trading bloc or
economic region. Where Clinton policy recognized the possibility of regional economic blocs forming
multilaterally and without reference to the United States and its financial instruments (the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, large donor organizations like Ford and so on) it acted in a3

Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

hostile fashion.
In her article “From ‘Modernization’ to ‘Globalization’: Where are Chinese Women,” Li Xiaojiang
notes in passing that the discourse of globalization had barely begun to surface in 1992 during her
visit to Boston. In extricating the exogenous ideology ── globalization as it has unfolded in Chinese
policy and critical circles ── from what she claims was an earlier, indigenous discourse of “getting
onto track” (jiegui), Li raises a good point. There were in China preexisting ideological conditions
that belie the presumption of U.S. globalization advocates, that all nations including China were or
ought to develop similarly. Indeed, Li makes the point that actually among endogenous policy
makers, government strategists and in academic venues where a U.S.-style globalization theory(quanqiuhua lilun) is currently being considered, Chinese theorists have actually introjected nationalist
content because of preexisting, localized understanding of what globalization means. Li’s own
position on the relation of globalization ── Chinese style and gender need not concern us here.５
The point is that since “globalization” is theory and practice, a policy originating in the specificpolitical formation of the Clinton era, globalization elsewhere in specific regions is best grasped not as
naturalized process, but as always mediated through local ideological formations. Accepting thisproviso would mean that any time “globalization” is raised as a central concern the question of whatsort of ideological and institutional mediation is implied must also be raised.
The outlines of the debate over globalization in the People’s Republic of China are clear enough.
Like all of us, Chinese intellectuals have also engaged in a strong, albeit at times muted, debate overglobalization. Some of the more contentious discussion has focused on China’s accession to the
WTO and the nation’s relationship to Washington and the Washington consensus. A debate onwhether or not “globalization” was a natural economic stage or a largely rhetorical and ideologicalformation broke out in the journal of opinion Dushu in the late nineties. Essays like Wan Junren’s“Another Face of Globalization” engaged the question of WTO through evaluations of AngloAmerican critical opinion on economic policy questions.６

Certainly the best known and mostcontentious of these disputes, however, erupted in 2000 when the editors of Dushu became embroiled
in a damaging debate over whether the journal itself was biased in favor of criticism of globalizationand neo-liberalism.７
Knowing where, under what conditions, and to what ends the ideology and the practices ofglobalization have unfolded can help to denaturalize what remains otherwise a mysterious,
ahistorical, seemingly inevitable process.８

The portrait of mediated, yet shared economic processes

that emerges when the term of globalization is strictly disciplined in this way, in my view, canenlarge the critical potential of the category of gender. Li Xiaojiang may be implying somethingsimilar. When globalization is uninflected and the analytic term gender is applied to it, the resulting“theory” cannot explain why overwhelming numbers of female workers in China opt to ruin theirhealth, sojourn among strangers, risk reputation and so on to labour on Shenzhen’s assembly lines.
As Li points out, “[f]rom one perspective, the macroscopic, globalized, a perspective of reflexivity on‘modernization’ and capitalism, we see what is patently Capital’s accelerating exploitation of women4

ジェンダー研究 第５号 ２
００２

in the developing countries. From the other indigenous perspective, we must squarely face the factthat women’s lives and status in ‘modernization’ and ‘globalization’ has improved for the better,though simultaneous, absolute impoverishment may (compared to the West) have occurred,
individuals may actually have (compared to the West) greater comparative affluence.” This includes,
she suggests, the “choice” of women to prostitute themselves in sexual labor.
The question of national formation in late capital, which I had raised in an earlier essay stresses
the degree to which the economic trajectory of reform in the PRC is not accidental, is not simply
reactive, and is not the simple effect of globalized capital. I noted there that in mainstream U.S.
economic theory during the nineties Chinese reforms (resisting the forces of global capital, retaining
state control over direct foreign investment, refusing money convertibility and so on) wereconsidered either simply reactive or even eccentric or threatening economic behaviour. Whenrather than presuming states should be helpless against global capital ── core tenants of neo-liberal
theory and the aura of globalization construed as a natural process ── we presume that policy
makers intend outcomes, a relation opens between globalization and regions that is open ended.
Questions arising as a consequence include, “What is ‘Asia’ in regional terms? What is China inregional terms? Is the region of “Asia” with China in it a stable place? What constitutes region?
What are processes of re-regionalization? And what relation does areal scholarship, defined asformal, academic research about place, have to do with these processes of re-regionalization?”９

Re-regionalization and Area Studies
It may be useful to develop the concept of re-regionalization in several directions. First, reregionalization denotes the emergence of new economic macroregions. Assuming neoliberal
globalization theory has an analogous place in the Asia Pacific region as “modernization theory” didduring the Cold War, informal American empire, changes ongoing since the seventies in commercial,trade, production, banking, criminal and labour migration routes among “Asian” states represents reregionalization in a crude macroeconomic sense. Much scholarship seems to concur that the central
event in the reshaping of the Asia Pacific as an economic macroregion was the Chinese policy of
opening to the world economy and its shift from planned to semi-market driven development.
Tracing the perimeter of the economic macroregion is the job of what economists Masahisa Fujia
and Dapeng Hu refer to as economic geography.１０ It is also the self-appointed work of World Bankeconomists, development communities, Clinton era strategists and other policy minded projects.
But, second, less economistically, the debate over what David Goodman calls the “politics ofregionalism” and Richard Higgott, the “political economy of regionalisation,” involves speculative
thinking about the social, political parameters of regional political economies.１１ Philip F. Kelly andKris Olds, for instance, argue that “perhaps more than any other world region, the boundaries of the
Asia-Pacific are indeterminate and open to contestation and social construction,” and that conceptualvagueness is analytically valuable for area studies scholarship.１２ Many areal studies are preoccupied

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Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

with political re-regionalization. These are comprised of “evolutionary economics,” concerned withhow actors, such as policy makers, who are constrained in politically defined regions act to survive
within and change regional political structures, and “regional development studies,” which focus on
economic prognostication in policy formulation. Included in this domain would also be the recent
work of urban geographer, Saskia Sassen, who raises the issue of economic forces and their impact
on sovereignty through the concept of “territorial organization.”１３
In a series of prescient publications beginning in the early middle nineties, David Goodman and his
scholarly collaborators in Australia (now re-regionalised as an Asian nation) speculated about thedegree and kind of economic development in Asia. They have fixed for the most part on how theinternal re-regionalization of the People’s Republic of China affects and is affected by globalizationand neoliberalization of intra and international political economy or domestic and international
economic re-regionalization. Goodman argues explicitly that scholarship cannot ignore the vital
powers of the China’s political or state structure and its flexible conventions of statecraft and policy.
So when questions of re-regionalization occur as such in a political context Goodman sees two
dynamics in play. As he puts it,
The twin dynamics of China’s new regionalism on its domestic politics and international relations. . . [are] domestic politics and international relations.
The first and domestic source of this dynamism is the policy changes of the 1980s that haveencouraged localised economic growth and the development of localised comparative advantage.
The second and external source of dynamism is the increased economic integration of different
parts of China with different parts of East, Southeast and Central Asia on its borders. In East
Asia, specifically Taiwan and Hong Kong, these dynamics were of course additionally driven by
the somewhat sudden late 1980s needs of those economies to restructure.１４
In other words, the new or re-regionalized political economy that supports the People’s Republicstabilizes itself through contradictory movements in Goodman’s conception, as political elements of
the nation, such as provinces and major cities, enter into dynamic, independent relations with extranational economies without circuiting through the PRC’s political center. This analysis conceives“region” as a widely heterogeneous field that is structured in relation to a nation’s center, though inthe conception of Goodman and his colleagues, the center may not always be the state.１５
Thirdly, as my argument has implied all along, re-regionization is occuring at the level ofscholarship. We already know that political economy cannot be extricated from discursivity
understood technologically as a means of visualizing, materializing and consequently of differentially
racializing, gendering, classing and sexualizing laboring bodies.１６ Another way of saying this is thatscholarship is the means through which spatial categories like regions are situated. Political reregionalization is a matter of mapping, or the spatialization of writing.

I mean something broader

than the professional area studies practice of information gathering in the service of policy
formulation, such as World Bank reports. I include in this category social science and humanist

6ジェンダー研究 第５号 ２００２

projects, which find scholars in effect fixing and enframing educated public opinion, media, or popularnational sentiment in an ideological fashion. It is not that such scholarship is merely discursive, butrather that discursivity in scholarship works within presuppositions and theoretical constraints thatare conditioned and centered by forces lying outside the terrain of the merely academic.１７
Re-regionalizing area studies (which in the United States covers all professional studies of places
outside of Euro-North America), scholarship has focused in the last decade on the space or region
renamed variously as “Asia Pacific,” “Asia-Pacific,” or increasingly less commonly the “Pacific Rim.”１８
In the “new metropolises” that form the skeleton of this newly regionalized space ── Singapore,
Hong Kong, Seoul, Jakarta, Tokyo, Taipei, Bangkok, Sydney, etc. ── neoliberal economic policy andinflowing, liberalized capital are said to be conditioning national and racial, ethnic, gender codes andforms of citizenship. Two characteristics have been particularly highlighted in recent area researchon the Asia Pacific region. First, a shift is alleged to be occurring in these urban nodes towardsocial differential based on life style distinctions, and commodified performative, consumerism.
Second, research stresses the degree to which inter-Asian competition within established notions ofgood taste further consolidates Asia Pacific as a regional entity. As Michael Pinches notes in his
study of a significant trans-regional group he calls the “new rich,” “Asia’s” heightened global status
has seen these new rich engaging in chauvinist forms of consumption that are intended to signify
relative national economic standing and relational status in the region.１９ According to Pinches sucha cultural focus does not preclude examination of structural forces that account for the emergence orcharacter of consumers. However, focus on life style practices “draw[s] attention to the culturalarena as crucial to an understanding of these new and powerful layers of people in Asia.”２０ Akhil
Gupta, Inderpal Grewal and Aiwha Ong, make a similar point in their special issue of the journal
positionson “Asian Transnationalities.” The effect of signifying cultural systems on re-regionalization practices is reinforced in Aiwha Ong’s analytic of flexible citizenship in her recent
volume Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality which proposed the emergence of
ethnicized or “Chinese capital” and consequently of an imaginary region called Asia Pacific andpopulated with overseas Chinese.２１ In other words, scholarly projects that track regionalization
through cultural flows (cultural studies), media forms (mass communciations studies), distinctive localorganization of daily life practices or social spaces (anthropology and ethnology), are not neatly
reducible to economic macroregional studies but contribute to the ways that “region” isconceptualized.２２

Gender as a category
Where in this unsettled process of re-regionalization is it best to situate the gender analytic then?
How would feminist work in the context of re-regionalization best use the gender analytic? How
would gender remain a useful critical category in the processes I have provisionally defined as
globalization in a strictly discursive sense? In what ways has the term “gender” itself become

7Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

embedded in neoliberal discourses of globalization and international development? Are there waysthat the gender analytic obscures these processes, seeming artificially to stabilize the processes
themselves? How then would gender work critically as a window onto the specific practices that in
mobilising creative subjects differentially, are actually extracting use value in the production andconsumption dynamic of the globalized segment of the world economy?
At the end of the Cold War, state formations like China’s that had frozen protocols of female
citizenship (i.e., the ideal typical female subject cast in nationalist terms) de-institutionalised statist
notions of women’s liberation. Among transnational capital, labor and cultural flows and among
policy elites in Asia and in the regimes of transnational corporations, there was concurrently ascaling back of modernization policies based on state welfare logics.２３ At the same time, the more
flexible concept of “gender” ── in Chinese “social gender” (shehui xingbie), to distinguish it fromanatomical, sexual bimorphism ── moved gradually to centre stage in policy and theory circles
internationally. Gender, like all ideological terms (e.g., civil society), is part political policy and part
analytic category. Conceptually, as we know, gender has been accepted into common academic
usage in the U.S. through the work of Esther Boserup, Natalie Davis, Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Lata
Mani and many others. In the People’s Republic, the concept has disseminated through a Ford
Foundation policy which local collaborators like Du Fangqin and Wang Zheng developed with Marion
Burros, and through the translation projects, joint publications and annual in-country seminars heldby theU.S.-based Chinese Society for Women’s Studies (CSWS), and specific scholars and academic
units in the PRC.２４ The projects of CSWS are wholly consistent with, indeed exemplify, the political
reformulation of gender in policy terms under regimes of ideological globalization. Reformulation of
the analytic concept of “gender” mediated through international civil society organisations is part of
the new post-Cold War, global ideology and governance system disseminated through the United
Nations, its quasi-official NGO system, and associated donor and civil society organizations.２５
Now a primary agent of globalization at the ideological level, the post-Cold War United Nations
institutionalises, through its information gathering and peacekeeping missions, a vision of global
governance that is equal parts localist, environmentalist, human rightist, and quite explicitly neoliberal in its economic posture. Globalized United Nations ideology holds that its surveillance andglobal monitoring will end regional anarchy and curtail the alleged anarchism of rogue states, which
is why its emphasis on policy making studies has taken such a disciplinary form.２６ As part of theinternationalisation of the gender concept through its disciplinary and policy making processes, then,the United Nations and related civil society organisations have mainstreamed the term if not thepractice of “gender equality.” The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975-1985 and Conferences
on Women, including the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference and the “Platform for Action” thatemerged out of it, mark the accession of gender as policy into global circulation. These politicalevents and the World Bank’s Policy Research Report (2000) on gender and development stabilize theview that gender means “an important axis of inequality.” Because it is construed to be an “axis ofinequality,” remedies to gender inequality appear to lie in civil and juridical action. Indeed, because8ジェンダー研究 第５号 ２００２U.S. advocates often blame non-Western states (like China) for gendered inequality, gender is said torepresent an interstate development index, capable of forcing perceived noncompliant nations toredress the relative poverty and the social vulnerability of female citizens by extending civil rights
and due process to them.２７ “Gender policy” then is one aspect of the international human rights law
movement. It offers to build a body of international law capable of instituting the rights of all
women beyond the individual states where they reside. Contemporary gender policy publicises theconcept and theory of gender and consolidates its universality.
The limitations of this conceptualisation is not only that it tends to overlook the fact that law for all
its universality can only be administered through the state form, but also, as I will argue shortly, thatit restricts gender to an overly simple formula. Naihua Zhang makes this point implicitly inimportant paper analysing NGO discourse within the institutional matrix of the ongoing Chinese
women’s movement. As she points out, the U.N. pattern of promoting women’s human rights
through the NGO system poses special problems in the People’s Republic. In 1995 when the All
China Women’s Federation (ACWF) confronted the task of hosting the United Nations Fourth
Women’s Conference in Beijing/Huairuo, a debate began about whether or not a bureaucratic unit
with very strong ties to the state (the ACWF is semi-autonomous mass organization charged by thestate charter with representing the interests of women citizens) could legitimately be called an NGO.
By U.N. standards, Zhang argues, the ACWF might not qualify because of that organization’s links tothe party-state. But by its own lights and within the governance system of the PRC, the Federation
is indeed a grass roots organization established for and by women. Zhang argues that if the U.N.
“essentialist” notion of what constitutes an NGO is strictly observed then there are no NGOs in
China. But if “NGO” is locally defined and presented as such to the United Nations governing
bodies, then not only is the strictly globalized norm defining NGOs “de-essentialised,” thecontradictions that the ACWF itself faces ── both autonomously for Chinese women but only in
relation to the state ── are brought to fruitful discussion within China.２８
Yet, there may be another avenue, other than Zhang’s reliance on what I would classify as alocalist strategy.２９ The problem for Zhang and others, who seek to widen the applicability ofuniveralized notions of women’s human rights and to measure gender equality strictly in juridical
terms as an “axis of inequality,” is that gender will remain a political concern, with assumed political
remedies. Let me give a concrete example of what I mean. The United Nations Economic andSocial Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), initially ECAFE or the Economic Commission
for Asia and the Far East, established in 1947, is a “regional think tank” for “spreading the growth
momentum from its more dynamic member countries to the rest of the region.” In other words
ESCAP is itself a re-regionalization project. ESCAP has undertaken a series of projects for the twoyear period of 2000−2001, including the following: (1) Regional Economic Cooperation, Development
Research and Policy Analysis, (2) Social Development, Environment and Natural Resources
Development, (3) Transport, Communications, Tourism and (4) Infrastructure Development. The
project as a whole conceives of the need to “coordinate the ESCAP-wide activities related to gender9

Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

so that a gender perspective is properly integrated into the mainstream of all areas of work of
ESCAP.” In actual fact, gender is ghettoized in one project called “Social Development.”
In practice, the “gender concept,” even within the project of “Social Development” is a passive
signifier of relative deprivation. “Women” are classified along with other key target groups for“human resource development . . . disadvantaged and socially excluded groups . . . [of] the poor,
youth, women, older persons and people with disabilities.” Women, in other words, and the “genderconcept” in this sort of thinking are simply one among many other axes of inequality.

Genderbecomes a palliative concept that is alleged to enable the political “empower [ment of] women,” andthe protection of “women’s rights as human rights through strengthened legal and institutional
mechanism,” which will, in turn, promote “integrated means to combat violence against women,
including women migrant workers, and trafficking in women and children.”３０ In this juridical andpalliative form the gender concept cannot play a central role in other of ESCAP’s projects, such as
economic and infrastructure development policies, where women produce and consume alongsidemen, children and other social groups. As a concept, in other words, it is conspicuously lacking in
discussions about regional economic cooperation, such as the sex and tourist industries where in fact
the labor of women and the sexual differentiation of labor are central to “successful development.”
I do not intend to disparage or make light of the important work being carried out under the
auspices of the “gender concept” in the neoliberal discourse of United Nations and World Bank
ideology.３０ Nonetheless, it strikes me that in the context of ongoing re-regionalization and in light of
the unknown future that theories and practices of globalization place on the horizon, it might also be
helpful to consider other, more interrogative and flexible ways to use the gender concept critically.
In the essay “‘green blade in the act of being grazed; ’ Late Capital, Flexible Bodies, CriticalIntelligibility,” I argued that one step toward such a retooling of the gender concept would be theuse of relational logics, reflexive historicity and critical reading of regional representational orders. I
suggested that in considering relational logics, reflexive historical material and the ambiguous
contexts of ongoing re-regionalization projects the subject of gendered analysis would have to remain
prepredicative. That is, rather than situating the gender analytic in social forces and confronting aneed to marshall data that test the universality of gender “as an axis of inequlity,” I supported theview that ambiguous subjects will always appear in heterogenous regimes and demand historical,
critical explanation. This is the difference between asking the question “are there NGOS is China?”
rather than “how do I explain for this institution that is seeking to call itself an NGO?”
The instance I used in that paper was an ambiguous subject of “women in transition” that I
noticed had emerged onto a transnational capitalist, pan-Asian, multinational cinema screen in thenineteen nineties. This subject of “women in transition,” I argued, was an ideological effectcombining the following elements. (1) The newly regionalizing “Asia Pacific,” (2) a refiguring of
Asian social relations of production at the intersection of socialist market reforms and worldly capital
flows and (3) the unhappy ghost of the older hope that women’s liberation and gender equity would
emerge through women’s productive labor in the public sphere. I concluded that the ambiguous

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ジェンダー研究 第５号 ２００２signifier, “women in transition,” considered in light of national formation in late capital, bodies inpolitical economy, and the competing claims on enlightened thinking or feminism, could not be fullycomprehended in neoliberal, feminist scholarly frameworks and that another approach should besought.３２ In the language of this paper there is in the heterogeneous regime of Asia Pacific a
disjuncture between gender and globalization.
Another avenue for this conceptual disjuncture of globalization and gender is a retooling of thegender concept through political economy. Priti Ramamurthy has recently commented in her
history of the dialectic between feminism and development studies, that the analytic of “gender” hasproved enormously useful in the last thirty years.３３ The problem for “gender” in discussions about
global social-economic change, however, is that the concept’s creativity of the eighties and nineties
appear to have been exhausted. Martha Nussbaum’s recent polemical attack on Judith Butler is a
symptom of this exhaustion. Nussbaum’s most telling criticism is not so much of Butler’s work per
se but is a version of a question that many critics outside the United States have raised, what does
the concept of gender as social norm do for thinking about simple social and economic exploitation?３４
In Ramamurthy’s call to reknit the relation of feminism and development studies, gender as aconceptual resource does not play a role. Absorbed into juridical arguments and policy categories,
the critical usefulness of gender is abrogated, because Ramamurthy makes clear, gender remarks on
difference rather than on the nature of difference or the worldly roots of differentiation. That is theconceptual weakness of simple social constructivism as Judith Butler herself pointed out many yearsago.
But in the midst of the global re-regionalization of Asia Pacific, the question has to be put. Is thegender analytic capable of critically addressing social practices for extracting use value in relations ofsexually differentiated production and consumption in the globalized segment of the world economy?
Cho Haejeong seems to suggest that it is. She argues implicitly that a deconstructive feminist
critique of institutions which distinguish and discipline human subjects as women and men ── theinstitutions of nation, state, family ── are a ground clearing exercise. Once the ground is cleared adebate must occur on problems in political economy and on political tactics in social movement. Li
Xiaojiang makes a similar point to the one I posed in my analysis of the reasons why the subject“women in transition” resists emancipation in labour, proves unemancipatible even when, a free
agent, she raises her standard of living and that of her family through creative, autonomous labor.
Nonetheless, the point each critic makes is that the recognition of gendered difference is itself asimple precondition to scholarship that will address the radical quality of these ongoing social andeconomic transformations. Perhaps such projects are underway already. Maybe in the work of Li
and her colleagues there are viable feminist projects reworking the gender analytic. In this reregionalizing area of “Asia” the need may be more acute to develop ways to reuse the genderanalytic as a means of grasping how use value ── our human creative labor, socially invested value,
imaginary desires and all the material, erotic drives which sustain us through our everyday lives ofwork and social life ── is extracted in processes of globalization, re-regionalization, marketization,

11

Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

structural adjustment, and the general crisis.

Notes
１．Cho Han Haejoang, “A feminist critique of modernity and Korean culture,” in “Problematizing ‘Asia’,” in Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 1. 1 (April 2000), p. 66.
２．Li Xiaojiang, “From ‘Modernization’ to ‘Globalization’: Where are Chinese Women,” (trans. Tani Barlow) in Signs
Volume 26. No. 4 (Summer 2001): 1274−1278.
３．Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999) p. 4.
４．I am not ignoring the caution that Masahisa Fujita and Dipeng Hu forward in their essay, “Regional disparity in
China, 1985-1994; the effects of globalization and economic liberalization,” to the effect that while “State policy isimportant,” still “overstating its role can be misleading.” The Annals of Regional Science 35 (2001): 3−37, p. 4.
５．Li Xiaojiang’s position is that while the PRC has its own trajectory, its exploitation of female labor in the effort toreach global standards of economic development is both necessary and, from the point of view of indigenous women,
preferable to previous, less exploitative, less explosively developmental state policies.
６．Wan Junren’s, “Quanqiuhua de ling yimian,” Dushu, 1999. 7, pp. 3−10
７．See He Guimei, “Wenhua meidi yu sixiangjie de fenhua: yi ‘dushu’ shijian” lunzheng wei hexin, “(Differentiating
cultural media and the intellectual world: on the crux of the debates around the ‘Dushu’ incident”), (positions,forthcoming). He stresses the degree to which this violent attack on the Dushu editors was generated from within
the intellectual world and was shaped by the internet.
８．See Lisa Rofel, “Discrepant Modernities and their Discontents: A critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire,” positions
9. 3 (2001).
９．See Tani E. Barlow, “Degree Zero of History,” in “Globalization and The Humanities.” A Special Issue ofComparative Literature. Volume. 53. No. 4 (Fall 2001): 404−425.
１
０．Op. Cit., “Regional disparity,” p. 30. See also Yehua Dennis Wei, Regional Development in China: States. Globalization.,and Inequality (London: Routledge, 2000) for another interesting study of China as a macroregion.
１
１．My own position is closest to that of Richard Higgott, “The political eocnomy of globalisation in East Asia: The
salience of ‘region building,’” in Globalisation and the Asia-Pacific: Contested Territories, ed. Kris Olds, Peter Dicken,
Philip F. Kelly, Lily Kong, and Henry Wai-chung Yeung (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 91−106.
１
２．Philip F. Kelly and Kris Olds, “Questions in a Crisis: the contested meanings of globalisation in the Asia-Pacific,” inGlobalisation and the Asia-Pacific, ed. Kris Olds, et al. p. 2. Kelly and Olds argue for what they call “scales ofanalysis” as an alternative. Although I do not follow them in this concern and suggest that they have once again
left out local ideological formations in their commitments to social science, their caution about region andregionalisation scholarship is exemplary.
１
３．See for instance Jan G. Lambooy, Ron A Boschman, “Evolutionary economics and regional policy” in The Annals ofRegional Science 35 (pp. 113−131). Also Somik V. Lall, Serdar Yilmaz, “Regional economic convergence: Do policy
instruments make a difference?” in ARS 35 (2001): 153−166. Later versions of this paper will address the academic
standing of “regional science” as a subdiscipline. See Saskia Sassen, “Servicing the Global Economy: Reconfigured
States and Private Agents” in Kelley and Olds, pp. 150−62.
１
４．Op. Cit. David Goodman, ed. China Deconstructs: Politics, Trade and Regionalism, eds. David S.G. Goodman and
Gerald Segal (London: Routledge, 1995) p. 17.
１
５．See for instance Hans Hendrischhke, “Provinces in Competition, Region, identity and cultural construction,” in
Hendrischeke and Feng Chongyi, eds., The Political Economy of China’s Provicnes: comparative and competitive advantage(London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 1−25. The distinction between the spatial notion of the center and the political12

ジェンダー研究 第５号 ２００２

notion of the state is also implied in Tschangho John Kim and Gerrit Knaap, “The spatial dispersion of economic
activities and development trends in China: 1952−1985,” ARS 35 (2001): 39−57.
１
６．See my “‘green blade in the act of being grazed’: Late Capital, Flexible Bodies, Critical Intelligibility,” differences
10. 3 (1998), p. 125. Elements of this discussion are repeated from that paper.
１
７．Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: UCS, 1997).
１
８．What is in a Rim?

Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press,

1993).
１
９．Pinches appears to mean by Asia the following regions and nations: Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Singapore,
Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, India and the Philippines. It is unclear from the volume’s organization and his own
analysis whether Japan fits into “Asia” or not. His example is Philippina maids as a status signifier in Malaysia,
Indonesia, and Hong Kong in the nineties.
２
０．Michel Pinches, ed., Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia, (London: Routledge, 1999).
２
１．See Akhil Gupta, et al., ed., positions, 7. 3 (1999), Aiwha Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), and Stephanie Donald and Harriet Evans, ed., “Culture/China,” New
Formations Number 40 (Spring 2000).
２
２．I will not treat here the problem posed by the United Nations recent admission of so-called Central Asian
countries, into the region of Asia. cf http: //www.icarp.org/about.html, and http: //www.unescap.org/
２
３．Richard Higgott, “The Political Economy of Globalisation in East Asia: The Salience of ‘Region Building,’” inGlobalisation and the Asia-Pacific: Contested Territories, ed. kris Olds, et. al. (London: Routledge, 1999).
２
４．For documentation see Chinese Society for Women’s Studies Newsletter, Number 2, October 21, 2000 http: //www/csws.org
２
５．As Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General has pointed out, “The United Nations once dealt only with
Governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving
Governments, international organizations, the business community and civil society. In today’s world, we dependon each other.” Cited on the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific web page, http: //www.
unescap.org/ A good example of the close relation of transnational corporations and the United Nations civil society
campaign is The Global Compact established in early 1999 to include “corporate citizens” in the ideological project of
informal global governance. See http: // www. unglobalcompact.org/ My thanks to Prof. Ruri Ito for alerting me tothese web resources.
２
６．Francois Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 95. Unfortunately, he does not admit into his analysis the role that genderdiscourses play in the extension of United Nations ideology precisely through the discursive regime Debrix calls“disciplinary liberalism.”２
７．See for instance Women’s Rights.

Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Julie Peters and Andrea

Wolper (London: Routledge, 1995).
２
８．Zhang Naihua, “Searching for ‘Authentic’ NGOs: The NGO Discourse and Women’s Organizations in China,”(forthcoming, cited with permission of the author).
２
９．See Barlow, “Teaching ‘International Feminism’ in a Global Frame,”［タニ・E・バーロウ「地球規模の枠組みのな『女性学研究』第９号（２
０
０
１年３月）
：３
０−５
６］
（
（下）
は近刊予
かで『国際的フェミニズム』を教える 上 」萩原弘子訳、
定）。
３
０．Ibid., ESCAP web page.
３
１．The terms of this discourse are contested, of course, particularly as the World Bank seeks to include in its
discussions academics like myself. The recent Policy Research Report titled “Engendering Develoment: Enhancing
Development Through Attention to Gender” solicited my participation along with a long list of others perceived tobe “stakeholders.” The discussion led to serious disputes over how “gender” should be defined. Several

13

Tani E. Barlow Asia, Gender and Scholarship Under Processes of Re-regionalization

contributors touched on the limitations posed by a purely juridical understanding of gender and the weakness ofsocial constructivist notions of gender that are not mediated through poverty. See http: //www.worldbank.org/
gender/prr/draft.html for the resulting draft statement.
３
２．See op. cit., “green blade,” p. 147.
３
３．Priti Ramamurthy, “Indexing alternatives: Feminist development studies and global political economy,” in Feminist
Theory 1. 2 (2000): 239−256.
３
４．See Dr. Khandakar Qudrat-I Elahi, “Economic Development and Gender Equality:
Development,” a letter to the prr@lists.worldbank.org permission to cite by author.

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Engendering Two