Back | Programme Area: Gender and Development (2000 - 2009), Special Events (2000 - 2009)
Trading to Equality? Gender Equality and Trade Liberalisation (Draft)
Background paper prepared for the UNRISD report "Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World"
In this paper Savitri Bisnath will attempt to construct a narrative of trade liberalization as a gendered, political and historically constituted process. The author argues that the market is a gendered socio-economic formation by building on the notion that the economic is not prior to the social, but constitutive of it. Through this argument Savitri Bisnath claim that to better understand the effects of international trade policies on women and men it is necessary to document, analyse and theorise about the ways in which their positions in production and reproduction, within specific spatial and temporal contexts, influences exports and imports and market structures. In addition analyses of the institutions that facilitate economic liberalisation, such as the WTO, are critical to understandings of the gendered dimensions of trade policies.