SCHOLARLY FOCUS AND RATIONALE AND INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION
The Committee on LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona initiated this project for two reasons. First, we are convinced that sexuality cannot be understood without a thorough understanding of the global processes of economic, political and informational transformation in which it is enmeshed, and conversely that no sense can be made of "globalization" without substantial accounts of sexuality, gender and race. Second, this truly interdisciplinary rubric allows us to put into practice institutionally our analysis of the inextricable interconnections between sexuality, gender, race and economic processes, helping us not only to bring together individual scholars from diverse fields but also to develop ongoing alliances among diverse departments and interdisciplinary programs.
The field of Lesbian/Gay Studies provides a uniquely fruitful site for such a project. As it has developed over the last 25 years, the field has emphasized both the need to study, represent and emancipate oppressed sexual minorities and the need to examine and question the processes by which all sexual categories and communities are constituted and hierarchically ranked. Emerging from and in the context of the work that has been done in Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies and other interdisciplinary fields, Lesbian/Gay Studies places questions of sexuality in the context of gender, race, class and nationalism. Through the Sex, Race, and Globalization Project, which brings together members of the Committee for LGBT Studies with faculty and students from traditional disciplines as well as ethnic studies, area studies and other interdisciplinary programs. through this project we sustain the commitments of the field to recognizing the significance of sexuality, intervening against oppression, and critically analyzing the complex processes by which unequal identities and communities are formed.
The location of this project at the University of Arizona is both crucial to its success and arbitrary in ways that are symptomatic of the dynamics of globalization as we will describe them below. Located a mere seventy miles from Mexico and from the maquiladora-filled export processing zone on the Mexican side of the border, surrounded by impoverished Native American reservations, and thus built on and in support of global political and economic processes, both historical and contemporary, the University of Arizona is inhabited by a predominantly white faculty. These faculty, drawn from the best universities around the country and the world, are generally more engaged with their colleagues at other universities than with the local communities. Despite and because of our location--responding to cutting-edge scholarly concerns, but also trying to problematize and enrich our links with the communities in which we live--the members of the Committee on LGBT Studies have worked hard to create an intellectual community that recognizes its implication in and is sophisticated about the intertwined dynamics of sex, race, and globalization.
SCHOLARLY FOCUS AND RATIONALE:
THE SIGNIFICANCE
OF SEX, RACE AND GLOBALIZATION
The imbrication of sexuality with race with globalization is clearly demonstrated in daily news reports. The newspapers regularly notice--without adequately analyzing--phenomena such as racially marked international sex-tourism, controversies over female genital mutilation, the emergence of North American style gay movements around the globe, the divergent and changing shape of the AIDS epidemic in different parts of the globe and in different ethnic and class segments in the US, the fact that access to AIDS treatments around the world depends on highly problematic economic and political contingencies, the murders of young female maquiladora workers in Mexico reportedly motivated by changing gender roles for paid labor, the transformations of family structures induced by "development" and in particular micro-lending to women in "developing" countries, the deployment of rape as a tool of what is called "ethnic warfare" in the former communist countries. In each of these cases (and any number of others) sexuality or gender is manifestly central even as it is also clear that these phenomena are profoundly linked to, and have emerged in the context of, economic and political processes, processes in which global and local forces interact in complex ways. But what are these processes? How do the links and interactions work? How might we intervene in them to promote a more humane and just future for people around the world?
The mainstream media daily trumpet "globalization"--the emergence of a "new world order," in which expansions of information technology, capital flows and human migrations unite us all as never before. Popular discussions of globalization tend to be framed in oppositional terms. While some celebrate what they see as the inevitable forces of progress and modernity, others lament the acceleration of American economic and cultural domination. While some claim that globalization offers an expansion of human rights, others argue that it exacerbates global inequities. Transnational corporations' investment in offshore manufacturing plants is represented as either offering the fruits of development and rising living standards or as exploiting workers who are excluded from participation as consumers and citizens. For example, reports of the recent protests at the WTO meetings in Seattle and of the responses of the WTO delegates to the protests portrayed just such oppositional framings. These mutually exclusive representations assume that globalization is a universal, all-powerful force and that it interacts with fixed categories of identity and cultural formations. Both representations thus ignore the agency of the diverse participants in globalization and the flexible nature and shifting boundaries of culture and identity. In order to comprehend the complexities of the social, economic and cultural transformations that constitute so-called globalization, we view globalization not as a uniform universal force but (following geographers David Harvey 1995, 1989 and J.K. Gibson-Graham 1999, 1996) as a process of "uneven development," in which changing economic and political processes interact with changing cultural formations to produce dynamic hierarchies of wealth and power, locally and globally (Lash and Urry 1989; Smith 1984).
While the pace of global interaction has clearly increased, this interaction has not, as some have feared, produced (only) a homogenized, McDonaldized, global monoculture (Mander and Goldsmith 1996). Rather, the ongoing changes in international divisions of labor, wealth and power that are currently called globalization must be worked out in relation to particular local and national social relations and hierarchical divisions such as sex and race (Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995; Miller 1997; Cox 1997). As Arjun Appadurai (1996) notes, the uneven flows of people, information, technologies, and capital, produce unpredictable disjunctures and discontinuities at local, national, and global scales. In the US for instance, major corporations have embraced (and depoliticized) differences of gender, race and sexuality through niche marketing and diversity policies in employment, even while, in their off-shore production sites, these same corporations exploit patriarchal gender norms to obtain cheap female labor (Gordon 1995).
Appadurai points out that the interaction of global economic and political forces with local cultural formations not only provokes local renegotiations but produces deterritorialized social formations, "diasporic public spheres," in which community members are linked not by being in the same place but by media technologies and migrations. Deterritorialization is, however, matched by reterritorialization (Storper 1997); as Aihwa Ong (1997) argues, transnational corporations rely upon everyday labor relations that institutionalize race, age, and gender inequalities. The lived experience of globalization for particular social groups, then, is shaped not by abstract capital alone, or even by what is sometimes called US imperialism, but by the interaction of international contingencies with historically emergent local, national and transnational identities and communities. Our project seeks to explore and explain the links between global processes and local renegotiations and between exploitative economic processes and structures of sexual, gendered and racial inequality at local, national and transnational scales.
As literary theorist Paul Smith and geographer David Harvey have noted, the ubiquitous use of the term globalization actually tends to obscure the social realities entailed by international movements of money, information and populations. Offered as an explanation for rising prosperity but also for a diminishing quality of life and greater income inequality, celebrated for creating global citizens in a borderless world yet blamed for a perceived growth in ethnic violence and fundamentalism, most invocations of "globalization" leave unanswered the crucial questions of who becomes a global citizen and who is disenfranchised, who gains and who is excluded from economic growth, and how particular people are selected to gain or lose.
The Sex, Race and Globalization project seeks to address these questions by bringing together the study of transnational economic processes with study of sexual and racial formation. Building from a critical assessment of some of the major theories of globalization and drawing upon the insights of queer theory, while trying to move beyond its deficits, we hope to produce politically useful, sophisticated, interdisciplinary analyses of the contemporary conjunctions of culture, politics, and economics at local, regional, national and transnational scales. As US-based feminist and gay activists seeking to work internationally have learned (often the hard way), without such careful analyses of the different and dynamic configurations of sexuality, gender and race in different locations--and without an understanding of economic and political contingencies as they play out locally--their well-intentioned efforts will quickly be viewed as (and become factors in) promoting US domination (Grewal and Kaplan 1994).
The theories of globalization offered by economists, geographers and anthropologists have tended to claim that globalization is a) a new phenomenon, (see collected essays in Amin 1994) b) a system of flows (Appadurai 1996) of information, money and people (Castells 1996), and c) that these flows move across previously unbroached political and cultural borders (Ohmae 1990). While recognizing the insights offered by these theories, we are also persuaded by critiques that have pointed out that globalization: is in many ways just a new name for, or a new version of, prior systems of global interaction, such as colonialism and development; features blockages as much as flows, excluding many, even as it includes others into its operations; and transforms social relations that have themselves been constructed through long histories of global economic and political interaction (Allen and Thompson 1997, Cox 1997, Lee and Wills 1997, Smith 1997, Hirst and Thompson 1996). As Lisa Lowe's (1997) work demonstrates, the situation of contemporary Asian American women sweatshop workers reflects a long and complex history of racialized immigration policies. According to Lowe, their labor has been sexually and racially differentiated within the international division of labor by US immigration laws aimed at managing the contradictory demands of economic internationalism and political nationalism.
The global "flows" of capital, information and people are facilitated, blocked, diverted, and reshaped by local sexual and racial categorizations (Pred and Watts 1992, Mitchell 1997, Featherstone 1995, Olds et al. 1999). As Martin Manalansan pointed out in a paper on Filipino gay men in New York and Manila that he presented at our "A Queer World" symposium last fall, while these men may come to the US seeking a "gay American Dream" of economic opportunity and sexual freedom, what they often find--if they can make it past the immigration officials who would exclude them for effeminacy--is racial discrimination both within the gay community and in the wider society. Several recent US immigration rulings based on interpretations of female genital mutilation and sexual orientation have recognized that sex and race are critical determining factors in the motivations and ability to migrate as well as the outcomes of the migration process. While the recognition of these factors is clearly important progress the reification of sexual and racial categories that often occurs in such legal processes and the rigid imputation of cultural and political "backwardness" to the non-Western countries from which the migrants come is problematic.
Queer theory offers a set of rubrics for questioning stable, fixed categories and the epistemologies that promote them. We take as axiomatic here the view offered in the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, among others, that sexual and gendered identities are socially constructed. However, this approach has been critiqued for an over-emphasis on fluidity that does not adequately account for the material constraints placed on identity transformations. Specifically, queer theory has been critiqued for its failure to incorporate dynamics of race and economics that might limit the ability of various individuals to reshape their genders or sexualities. On the other hand, as Arnaldo Cruz-Malave' pointed out at our symposium, fluidity is not always an indicator of power or agency. In his paper on migrations back and forth between the Carribean and NY, he argued that while migrants in fact deployed mobility and fluidity as survival techniques, such mobility and fluidity did not represent empowerment; he described the migrants as "defeated but not cornered." And so while sustaining the commitment of queer studies to questioning representations of identity categories as fixed and mutually exclusive, we seek to promote scholarship that accounts for diverse communities and their interventions in larger economic and political forces.
INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION
In undertaking an analysis of the conjunctions of economic processes with sexual and racial formations, the Sex, Race and Globalization project is pursuing an experiment in new forms of knowledge production. While interdisciplinarity is a familiar buzz word, the difficulty of the practice of interdisciplinarity is belied by that very familiarity. The epistemological frameworks offered by the existing disciplines, and even by the various interdisciplinary projects that we are bringing together, are inadequate in themselves to address the phenomena that we seek to explore and explain. No single discipline can address the complex of material and symbolic, local and global forces that constitute contemporary everyday relations. We find especially unhelpful the polarized caricatures of empiricism and postmodernism that have dominated the debates and discussions between humanities and social science scholars (Fraser 1997).
Interdisciplinary programs developed over the last several decades have worked to change these problems, but they too can be divided in ways that make it difficult to comprehend inter-connections like those among sex, race, and globalization. In part through the institutional force of universities structured to handle individual units as disciplines, interdisciplinary programs are often divided into identity categories--American Indian, Africana, Mexican American, Women's, Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual--or areas--Latin American, Middle East, East Asian, as they are at the University of Arizona. These academic divisions are often mirrored in the political arena. American social movements have had difficulty addressing relations among the groups that these movements work to represent and transnational connections have been even more difficult for these movements to build. So for instance, efforts at the University of Arizona to connect student protests against sweatshops to advocacy for gay rights have sometimes foundered on the division between a class-based politics focused on material effects and a rights-based politics of recognition: gay rights advocates argue for the importance of recognition even within capitalist structures that are the very forces of harm resisted by Students against Sweatshops. The Sex, Race, and Globalization project seeks to address these problems by developing a model for projects that are not contained within the particular boundaries of the different units of the university or within the boundaries of the university itself. In fact, the Committee on LGBT Studies has initiated the SRG project deliberately as an institutional site that can and in fact must breach these boundaries and impasses. The first divide that we address is that between the social sciences and humanities, a divide that reiterates the split in American social movements between those concerned with social structures and those focused on cultural issues. In order to bridge this gap and comprehend historically contingent, complex, and dynamic, yet still patterned, consequential, and all too often oppressive social relations we have brought together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, as well as the fine arts and natural sciences, who are interested in working collaboratively to learn from and educate each other. For example, the SRG committee includes political scientists who are interested in enriching their own studies of formal, informal and domestic economies with understandings of the cultural and symbolic processes that make sense of (and make) those material structures. The committee also includes humanities scholars who, in pursuing post-structuralist and post-colonial studies of the homogenizing, particularizing, and especially, hybridizing effects of cross-border flows, have recognized, as geographer Sallie Marston pointed out in her response to the "A Queer World" panel, that they lack the social science tools--for instance, theories of scale and space or methodologies like ethnography--that might enrich their work. The second divide we seek to address is that between faculty who function as global but not local citizens and our local communities. We have thus assembled a group of scholars who are interested in bringing their work into dialogue with community activists working on public policy issues that are relevant to our project. Our upcoming symposium (Feb 25-26) on "The Future of Lesbian and Gay Studies" will include a meeting with twenty-five local activists who are working on a range of issues in the Tucson area, from human rights and border issues to questions of economic justice, queer youth, AIDS service provision and gay rights. We brought this particular group of activists together under the conjunction of LGBT studies and "sex, race, and globalization" because we believe that connections to the community on this range of issues is the future of lesbian and gay studies. We recognize, however, that, in light of the obstacles presented by the structure of the university, bringing together interested individuals is simply not enough. A variety of forms of institutional support are also necessary. We are heartened in our efforts by the fact that we not alone in undertaking this work--we are following in the footsteps of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York--and we hope, through a Rockefeller Residency program, to both support and be supported by creative and intellectually ambitious scholars from around the country. Meanwhile, at the University of Arizona, we have developed an innovative institutional structure for the Committee on LGBT Studies that we believe provides a solid foundation for carrying out the SRG project.