Political Economy, Power and The Body

Political Economy, Power and the Body
International Political Economy Series
General Editor: Timothy M. Shaw, Professor of Political Science and

International Development Studies, and Director of the Centre for Foreign
Policy Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Titles include:
K. Barry (editor)
VIETNAM’S WOMEN IN TRANSITION
Dong-Sook Shin Gills
RURAL WOMEN AND TRIPLE EXPLOITATION IN KOREAN DEVELOPMENT
Cecilia Ng
POSITIONING WOMEN IN MALAYSIA
Class and Gender in an Industrializing State
D. Stienstra
WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION
Sandra Whitworth
FEMINISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Gillian Youngs (editor)
POLITICAL ECONOMY, POWER AND THE BODY
Global Perspectives

International Political Economy Series

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Political Economy,
Power and the Body
Global Perspectives
Edited by
Gillian Youngs
Lecturer
Centre for Mass Communication Research
University of Leicester
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Political economy, power and the body : global perspectives / edited
by Gillian Youngs.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-22588-9 (cloth)
1. Consumption (Economics) 2. Power (Social sciences) 3. Body
image in men. 4. Competition, International. I. Youngs, Gillian,
1956– . II. Series.
HC79.C6P627 1999
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Contents
List of Tables vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Part I Embodied Political Economy

1 Embodied Political Economy or an Escape from
Disembodied Knowledge 11
Gillian Youngs
2 Disembodiment, Embodiment and the Construction

of Hegemonic Masculinity 31
Charlotte Hooper
3 Writing the Body: Transnational Sex 52

Jan Jindy Pettman
Part II Technologies, Symbolism and Representation

4 Globalization, Technology and Consumption 75
Gillian Youngs
5 Imagineering Value: Good Neighbourliness in an

Era of Disney 94
Cynthia Weber
6 Missing Mother? Reproductive Technologies into the

21st Century 112
Marysia Zalewski
Part III Embodied Identities

7 The Political Economy of Meat: Food, Culture
and Identity 135
Marc Williams
v
vi Contents
8 The Widow Refuses: Embodied Practices and Negotiations

over Inheritance in Zimbabwe 159
Jane L. Parpart
9 Population, Politics and the Pope: Universal Agendas and

the Bodies of Women 180
Palena R. Neale
Index 200
List of Tables
7.1 World meat production annual growth (percentages) 139

7.2 World meat consumption trends: percentage changes,
1981–93 142
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Charlotte Hooper has recently completed her PhD, ‘Manly States: Mas-
culinities, International Relations and Gender Politics’ (for which she
thanks the Economic and Social Science Research Council for financial
support) and is currently involved in developing and teaching a new
master’s degree in gender and international relations in the Politics
Department of Bristol University. Recent and forthcoming publications
include focus on the relationships among masculinist practices, mul-
tiple masculinities and international relations.
Palena R. Neale is Sustainability Officer, International Planned Parent-

hood Federation (IPPF). She has recently completed her PhD at the Uni-
versity of Wales, Aberystwyth, ‘Constructions, Catholicism and Cairo:
The Catholic Construction of Woman, the Holy See, and the Interna-
tional Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)’.
Jane L. Parpart is Professor of International Development Studies,

Women’s Studies and History at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.
She writes extensively on women, gender and development in Africa,
colonial/postcolonial history and gender and development theory and
practice. Her latest publication is The ‘Man’ Question in International
Relations, co-edited with Marysia Zalewski.
Jan Jindy Pettman is Reader and Director of the Centre for Women’s
Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Worlding
Women: a Feminist International Politics, and has written extensively on
the gendered politics of nationalism, and on the international political
economy of sex. She is co-editor (with Gillian Youngs and Kathy Jones)
of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Cynthia Weber is Chair of International Studies and Director of the

Centre for International Studies at Leeds University. She is the author of
Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange and
co-editor (with Thomas Biersteker) of State Sovereignty as Social Construct.
Her latest book is Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era.
Marc Williams is Professor of International Relations at the University

of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has previously taught at the
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
University of Sussex, and the School of Advanced International Studies,

Johns Hopkins University, Bologna, Italy. His current areas of research
include: the environmental movement and global economic organiza-
tions; identity and environment politics; culture, consumption and the
global political economy.
Gillian Youngs is Lecturer at the Centre for Mass Communication

Research, University of Leicester. She is author of International Relations
in a Global Age (1999), co-editor with Eleonore Kofman of Globalization:
Theory and Practice (1996), and co-editor of the International Feminist
Journal of Politics. Her current areas of research and publication include:
critical theories of state-market dynamics; inequality and globalization;
technology, culture and power.
Marysia Zalewski is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s

University, Belfast. Her most recent publication is The ‘Man’ Question in
International Relations, co-edited with Jane Parpart. She is currently com-
pleting Feminism after Postmodernism: Theorising through Practice.
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
AIC advanced industrial country

BSE bovine spongiform encephalopathy
EC European Community
ECPAT End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism
EPCOT experimental prototype community of tomorrow
EU European Union
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization
FDI foreign direct investment
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GPE Global Political Economy
ICPD International Conference on Population and Development
ICT information and communication technology
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPE International Political Economy
IPPF International Planned Parenthood Federation
IR International Relations
NGO non-governmental organization
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
PROS Prostitute Rights Organization for Sex Workers
TNC transnational corporation
TRIPS trade-related intellectual property rights
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNESCO UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
UNFPA UN Fund for Population Activities
WIR World Investment Report
WLSA Women and the Law in Southern Africa Research Project
WTO World Trade Organization
x
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all the contributors for their work, creativity and patience
with the editing process; all those at British International Studies Asso-
ciation and International Studies Association panels, where earlier ver-
sions of chapters were presented, for the comments and suggestions
that have contributed to what appears here; series editor Tim Shaw and
Aruna Vasudevan and Tim Farmiloe at Macmillan for their encourage-
ment and enthusiasm for the project; and last, but certainly not least,
Keith Baldock for his valued editorial assistance throughout.
xi
Introduction
This volume represents a collection of diverse perspectives on the prob-

lem of the body in the study of International Relations (IR) and Interna-
tional Political Economy (IPE)1 or should I say the problem of the
missing body. The range of the subjects covered by the contributors
indicates the degree to which this is a collective endeavour. Each of the
chapters offers a different piece of the jigsaw towards a detailed under-
standing of embodied political economy. As this is a new area of study
there is no claim to comprehensive coverage. This would be an imposs-
ible task given the space available. The aim is rather to indicate the
extent of conceptual, theoretical and substantive areas that can be ad-
dressed in this field of investigation and to provide detailed analysis of
a number of them.
Variations on the theme of power
In common with much of IR and IPE this volume focuses on power but
it does so by exposing, analysing and challenging the abstractions
which dominate mainstream disciplinary thinking. It brings the macro
level most common to IR and IPE into contact with the micro level and
thus offers fresh ways for thinking through, for example, structure/
agency dynamics.2 There are three major themes relating to power
which run through the volume and which are interrogated in a range of
ways by different chapters:
1. Dominant knowledge structures including in IR and IPE but also of

powerful institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church.
2. Technology and its links to various forms of experience including
pregnancy and childbirth, food and other, symbolic, forms of con-
sumption.
1
2 Political Economy, Power and the Body
3. Identity in the context of dominant definitions of gendered sub-

jectivity and struggles against them.
Many of the chapters build explicitly on the arguments of the grow-

ing fields of Feminist IR/IPE and demonstrate how these are funda-
mental to the development of embodied perspectives. The volume is
divided into three parts:
I. Embodied Political Economy

II. Technologies, Symbolism and Representation
III. Embodied Identities
Embodied political economy

The three chapters in Part 1 explain the different grounds on which
dominant perspectives in IPE present a disembodied picture and the
bases for moving away from its abstractions towards analysis which is
grounded, situated and embodied. My first chapter, ‘Embodied Political
Economy or an Escape from Disembodied Knowledge’, harks back to
my early student days and my question: ‘where are the people?’ I dis-
cuss gender analysis as seminal in providing a focus on social relations
of power, a focus which has problematized the assumptions of dominant
masculinist frameworks of IPE. These include notions of ‘actors (whether
individuals, states or firms) too much as given, rationalistic and purpos-
ive entities abstracted from their social conditions’.
The chapter prioritizes the question of spatiality in the contempor-
ary era of globalization and ‘political-economic transformation’ and
explores the role of public and private in the analysis of such change. It
argues that mainstream notions of public and private in this context
follow basically abstract state (public interest) and market (private inter-
est) lines. Gender perspectives on public and private open up the
abstractions of state and market and focus in both respects on the hier-
archical identifications within them of the public sphere of decision-
making and power versus the private sphere of social reproduction and
care (the home). Gendered hierarchies which support patriarchal power
in both the public and private spheres operate significantly on the basis
of dualisms identifying the public with the masculine (active) and the
private with the feminine (passive). While mainstream focus on public
and private maintains a disembodied sense of political economy, gen-
dered senses of them direct our attention to the embodied qualities of
social power and their relevance to global/local dynamics.
Chapter 2 by Charlotte Hooper, ‘Disembodiment, Embodiment and
the Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity’, explores the bases for the
Introduction 3
‘rational actor model’ through which mainstream IPE offers a ‘depiction

of humanity which appears both physically disembodied and socially
disembedded’. Her discussion locates examination of the rational actor
model as central to critical Global Political Economy (GPE), stressing its
impact not only through ‘a philosophical history rooted in (masculin-
ist) enlightenment thinking’ but also through ‘a gendered social and
political history which relates to and has informed the gender identities
of numerous actual embodied men’.
Her discussion unpacks the concept of masculinity and masculinism
and asks us instead to think in terms of overlapping hegemonic forms
of masculinity handed down over history which include ‘the bourgeois
rational subjectivity’ of capitalist modernity but also others such as ‘a
militaristic and rationalistic Greek citizen/warrior model’. As well as
examining the ‘fantasy of disembodiment’ as a major feature of bour-
geois rational masculinity, Hooper also refers to debates about whether
this subjectivity is being ‘significantly undermined by the contempor-
ary communications revolution and the arrival of postmodernity’.
Chapter 3 by Jan Jindy Pettman operates explicitly at the interna-
tional level with a firm focus on embodied boundary-crossing ‘arguing
the importance of sexual servicing in the global economy’. Pettman
stresses that in GPE ‘the body is usually missing’ or where visible ‘is
assumed to be a “normal” male, heterosexual body’. Her discussion of
international sex tourism is located in the analysis of divides between
developed and developing states and the legacies of colonialism including
in representational forms. ‘Now tourist brochures, airline advertisements,
and hosting states’ enticements regularly feature a new Orientalism in
constructing both tourist destination states and their women.’ In sex
tourism bodies are part of the trade, Pettman explains. Her arguments
concentrate on the multiple aspects of material bodies as ‘not only sexu-
alized but nationalized, racialized and culturalized’.
Technologies, symbolism and representation

This section opens with my chapter, ‘Globalization, Technology and
Consumption’, which assesses the central role of technology in our
understanding of globalization and the changing characteristics of US
hegemony. The chapter discusses Susan Strange’s seminal work on tech-
nology and US hegemony and her recent attention to transnational cor-
porations (TNCs) as ‘political players’. In looking at foreign direct
investment (FDI) and its concentration within the triad of the US, Eur-
ope and Japan, the chapter emphasizes that technology flows have been
a substantial and growing element of transnational corporate linkages.
The discussion then moves to technology and materiality in the con-

text of the development of service economy orientation. ‘The developed
economy focus has been increasingly placed on the knowledge-based
areas, notably of financial, business and insurance services, as well as the
communications and technological sectors facilitating their provision
and expanding markets for them. The products of the service era, includ-
ing those associated with tourism and leisure, are characteristically
intangible, prompting the need for new thinking about production and
consumption.’ Marketing is examined as illustrative of the growing
importance of symbolic consumption and as key to the ideology of con-
sumption.
In discussing transnational symbolic consumption the chapter points
out that the weight of US influence in global cultural consumption is one
of the factors contributing to interpretations of globalization as Amer-
icanization/westernization. The Disney theme park and tourism are dis-
cussed as areas demonstrating the complexities of symbolic and material
production and consumption in contemporary times. The technological
intensity of the entertainment and tourist sectors is highlighted.
Chapter 5 by Cynthia Weber, ‘Imagineering Value: Good Neighbour-
liness in an Era of Disney’, brings IPE and IR concerns together with a
detailed analysis of the Disney town Celebration in Florida and its nos-
talgic emphasis on neighbourhoods and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good
Neighbour Policy toward Latin America introduced in 1933. Weber
assesses what occurs when Disney, the theme park creator, moves from
‘the imaginary to the real’ in its creation of a town, Celebration, an
‘imagineered’ copy of an original. In an era of Disney, Weber explains,
‘since all production is imagineered, the exchange of reproduced/ima-
gineered value/meaning supersedes the value/meaning of production’.
Similarly to Celebration, Weber goes on to argue, the US Good Neigh-
bour Policy has circulated ‘value (understood as meaning) . . . through
the concept of the neighbourhood’. The chapter explains how Roose-
velt’s inaugural address articulated ‘a system of symbolic exchange’,
and then explores, with particular concentration on the policy of non-
intervention, how the ‘revaluation of good neighbourliness’ was applied
to US foreign policy toward Latin America by the Roosevelt administra-
tion. Weber then continues this analysis into the Reagan and Clinton
eras in relation to US foreign policies toward the Caribbean, concluding
that the Good Neighbour Policy has been ‘designed to diminish the
threat to Latin America of intervention, but this threat has always been
defined as a US threat of invasion’. The chapter ends with an examina-
tion of the neighbourhood as ‘a collection of families’, arguing that ‘it is
Introduction 5
an idealized notion of familial exchange which fuels the rhetoric of Cel-

ebration’s advertisements and US foreign policy rhetoric’.
Chapter 6 by Marysia Zalewski, ‘Missing Mother? Reproductive Tech-
nologies into the 21st Century’, assesses reproductive technology in
relation to the pregnant body on the basis of ‘invasion’, ‘erasure’ and
‘alienation’. In considering how the pregnant body is invaded Zalewski
discusses the various applications such as ultrasound which allow ‘inva-
sion by the gaze of the outside world’. She questions the use of the
information these technologies provide in an environment of state-
market drives for ‘grade-A humans’. Thus, this invasion may not be
benign. ‘Patriarchal and capitalist systems – here represented by medi-
cine and economics manifested through the practices of prenatal
screening techniques – constrain and mould women’s choices, coercing
women to fulfil their economic duty to the state by carrying out the
eugenic needs of the state.’
Zalewski then looks in detail at how reproductive technologies effect-
ively erase the female body, arguing that ‘instead of women being seen
as indispensable in the reproductive process, they are rapidly being con-
strued as incidental’. The increasing visibility of the fetus/baby which
these technologies have allowed ‘has arguably encouraged the develop-
ment of “fetal rights”. Mother and fetus were once imagined as part of
the same body. With ultrasound technology, medical practice now tends
to see two separate patients’. The next part traces alienation through
the institutions of patriarchy and capitalism, suggesting that ‘the eco-
nomic (and other) needs of the state have consistently dictated when,
where and how the labouring (re)productive body produces’. However,
Zalewski goes on to outline the importance of women’s agency and its
enduring effects: ‘women have always resisted and often evaded capture
by practices that attempt to constrain and control them’. In this con-
text ‘the prospect of mothermachines does not have to mean the final
triumph of patriarchy’.
Embodied identities
Chapter 7 by Marc Williams, ‘The Political Economy of Meat: Food,
Culture and Identity’, argues that of all the foods we eat meat is ‘prob-
ably the most controversial’, having ‘attached to it more taboos than
any other food source’. Williams’ discussion assesses ‘non-economic
factors’ in the production and consumption of meat, ‘the cultural
reasons behind meat-eating’. He emphasizes eating as ‘a social act’ and
argues for ‘an awareness that the body/subject is constructed in relation
to food, itself contexualized in a world of multiple meanings’.
The chapter begins by exploring the changing structure of meat pro-

duction. Technological developments, standardization and global
restructuring are discussed in this context together with the domina-
tion of TNCs in changes in ‘the meat complex’. The ‘world steer’ is noted
as a new phase in the internationalization of production. ‘The world
steer is a product of the foodgrain-feedgrain-livestock complex, where
land is brought out of cultivation as foodgrain and turned over to
feedgrain for consumption by cattle. The result of cattle ranching is
grain deficits. Hence beef, a product for those with higher incomes, dis-
places grain consumed by the world’s poor.’ This part traces the growth
in poultry production stimulated by demand from those in advanced
industrial countries moving down the food chain and by higher in-
comes in the developing world. The next part explores further the link-
ages between consumption and production of meat on a global basis.
In investigating the dominant meat culture the chapter goes on to
consider ‘the meanings attached to the consumption of meat within
society’, explaining that ‘meat’s contemporary dominance has been his-
torically constructed’ on a two-fold basis: its status as an expensive
source of protein and a number of myths associated with it. The discus-
sion traces in detail how mechanization, transportation and technolo-
gical developments such as refrigeration shortened both time and
distance in meat production and distribution. Williams’ subsequent con-
sideration of ‘the ideology of meat’ examines the ways in which meat-
eating is associated with power (particularly in relation to red meat). In
assessing ‘challenges to the culture of meat’ the discussion next turns to
vegetarianism as ‘the most focused opposition to meatology’.
Williams also refers to the health advice which has privileged lean
cuts and white meat over red and has affected total consumption and
the relative share of different meats in the market. ‘It is not accidental
that it is in the most affluent countries that the most marked change in
consumption patterns has been noted. If knowledge is power, the abil-
ity to act on that knowledge remains a function of wealth and socio-
economic class.’
Chapter 8 by Jane Parpart, ‘The Widow Refuses: Embodied Practices
and Negotiations over Inheritance in Zimbabwe’, draws on a research
project interviewing a group of widows about their experience of inher-
itance procedures between 1984 and 1994.
Parpart identifies inheritance as ‘a crucial point for controlling access
to resources and status, with important implications for the distribu-
tion and maintenance of power’. The analysis draws on different
aspects of Michel Foucault’s work on disciplinary practices and sites of
Introduction 7
resistance but argues that it must be extended to examine the ways in

which ‘power intersects with gender, race and colonial/postcolonial
experience(s)’.
Parpart explains that, against the background of post-independence
Zimbabwean government commitment to gender equality and corpora-
tions’ and legal practitioners’ official commitment to protecting the
nuclear family, custom continues to play a central part in inheritance
practices, with variations between ‘official’ customary law and custom-
ary practices on the ground. The chapter focuses on how inheritance
practices are ‘embodied and engendered’. It points out that among both
the Shona and Ndebele peoples ‘burial practices reinforce the central
role and rights of the deceased husband’s kin group’. For example, in
the year or more of mourning the widows are expected to wear mourn-
ing clothes chosen for them by the family and all key decisions on
property and children must be referred to the extended family. Parpart’s
discussion of the different practices also stresses, however, that cultural
beliefs and practices are never static and that, for example, ‘the right of
widows to inherit some marital property is increasingly accepted,
although more as mothers than contributors to the marital estate’.
The chapter draws on direct evidence from the research project on the
differentiated experience of inheritance practices of individual widows
and their efforts to actively negotiate them, as well as disciplinary tactics
used against them. ‘The women moved most decisively to redefine their
control over property and children’, Parpart explains. ‘The widows’
redefinition of their inheritance rights . . . remained within the terms of
customary inheritance discourses which emphasized the protection of
widows and children, rather than the rights of individuals or the nuc-
lear family. This strategy deflected criticism and garnered much sup-
port.’ The chapter concludes that this research illustrates the unhelpful
nature of notions of ‘all-or-nothing struggle between “custom” and
“modernity”, or men and women’. It shows how individuals have
‘resisted and acceded to disciplinary practices, often in rather contra-
dictory and unexpected ways’.
Chapter 9 by Palena Neale, ‘Population, Politics and the Pope: Uni-
versal Agendas and the Bodies of Women’, focuses on the relationship
between bodies, power and politics in relation to the Catholic Church’s
involvement in the UN sponsored international conferences on popula-
tion and development. The first part of the chapter examines the politics
of the spiritual in the production of the identity of woman (‘wom(b)an’)
according to Catholic doctrine. ‘At the most basic level, woman’s voca-
tion is defined, realized and represented in relation to the female body’,
Neale explains. The figure of the Blessed Mary (‘virgin–mother–spouse’)

becomes ‘the disciplinary and regulatory ideal working on and through
the female body’.
The chapter goes on to analyse how the Holy See’s involvement in
the population conferences offers insight into ‘how the Catholic “truth”
about woman is promoted in the international’. Here we are dealing, in
Neale’s terms, with a manifestation of ‘the politics of the spiritual’
whereby ‘the Catholic conceptualization of woman is used to articulate
and advance the Catholic perspective on women in society. This per-
spective is advanced as the universal in the international, is arguably
conservative, and works to homogenize women.’
The next part reviews yet another manifestation of the politics of the
spiritual by examining the Catholic hierarchy’s ‘ability to represent
woman based on the exclusion of women’. There follows a detailed dis-
cussion of the Holy See and the three population conferences in Bucha-
rest (1974), Mexico City (1984) and Cairo (1994). Neale concludes: ‘The
Vatican’s population policy, specifically its efforts directed at limiting
and, in essence, determining reproductive choice and sexuality, demon-
strated just how important the corporeal figured in the politics of the
spiritual executed in the international.’
Notes
1 For indicative purposes only, capital letters are used in this volume to refer to
the fields of study or disciplines, for example IR and IPE, and lower case to
refer to the substantive realms to which they are attached, for example inter-
national relations. This is not to suggest a separation of theory and practice.
Indeed, a number of chapters explore the explicit links between them. It is
just to assist the reader. See Hollis and Smith (1990: 10).
2 For discussion of associated issues see Youngs (1999).
References
Hollis, M. and S. Smith (1990) Explaining and Understanding International Relations
(Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Youngs, G. (1999) International Relations in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity).
Part I
Embodied Political Economy
1
Embodied Political Economy or
an Escape from Disembodied
Knowledge
Gillian Youngs 1
A student’s starting point
This chapter explores overlapping concerns rooted in my experience of

the study of IR in general and IPE more specifically. In my early student
days, a naive question haunted me about IR. I would repeatedly, and of
course silently, ask myself the following question: where are the
people? This was long before I understood the high politics orientation
of the field and the implications for its representation of ‘the people’. It
took me many years to begin to obtain satisfactory answers to my
query, at least to start to explain to myself why there appeared to be no
people in this strangely structured world called IR. It remains a pertin-
ent question for newcomers to the discipline whose direct experience of
its prime high politics domain will often be limited and who are there-
fore left with the feeling that they are entering a rather alien world of
analysis. Once I became fully familiar with the foci of the discipline,
such as foreign policy analysis, international history and international
theory, I started to understand that ‘the people’, which from my per-
spective at that time just meant people in general, were distant but they
were there, encapsulated in representative terms such as the state, bur-
eaucracy, interest groups and so on.
I was attracted to IPE because, as an approach, it seemed to offer more
potential for revealing ‘the people’ with its incorporation of economic
issues and influences, and thus opportunities for understanding funda-
mental questions of inequality. These preoccupied me and appeared too
obscured by the major framework of the discipline of IR. Its state-
focused high politics orientation did not seem disposed to highlight
such matters – far from it. They seemed almost to stand outside its con-
cerns, to enter them only in a deliberate fashion through so-called
11
‘normative’ approaches. 2 The overriding concern in IR with interna-

tional interaction, conflict resolution, the big questions of war and
peace, was clearly about humanity in the deepest sense. It seemed to me
that what IPE permitted was a more detailed and less abstract interest in
the different dimensions of that humanity. These were often termed
‘structural’ issues of inequality and it was important that they took into
account the history of global capitalism and its impact on world rela-
tions economically and politically.3 Marxist arguments (see, for example,
Maclean 1981) pressed them, but so, in contrasting ways, did those of
the liberalist approaches which considered ‘transnational relations’
(Keohane and Nye 1972) and ‘interdependence’ (Keohane 1989) and
their various meanings.4
But I remained dissatisfied about how ‘the people’ were being under-
stood and represented. ‘The market’ seemed as abstract a category as
‘the state’ and the dependence on comparative statistics as a major
means of interpreting inequalities hid the human experience of them
too much. Writers such as Susan George (1986 and 1989) stood out
because their focus on life-and-death issues such as starvation and debt,
and their causes and impacts, were in stark contrast to the limited
emphasis on them in most of the literature. In recent times, Gramscian
approaches to GPE (see, for example, Cox 1981; Gill and Law 1988; Gill
1993; Hettne 1995; Gill and Mittelman 1997) have been the most
prominent in addressing questions of inequality and political economy,
including, importantly, in direct relation to neoliberal knowledge struc-
tures and ideology (see, for example, Murphy and Tooze 1991; Gill 1994
and 1995). But the problem of how to make IR and IPE more funda-
mentally ‘human’ as forms of investigation remained to be solved, from
my perspective at least.
Gender analysis and social relations of power
This chapter seeks to argue that it has taken the arrival and develop-
ment of gender analysis to begin to address the question in any sub-
stantial way. Much remains to be said about this process and the nature
of its importance more broadly to IR and IPE as fields of study, and it is
the intention here to contribute to the debate on this topic (see also
Tickner 1997; Youngs 1999). More than any other form of critique,
gender analysis has demonstrated straightforwardly and emphatically
that social relations concern the exercise of power to the advantage of
some and the disadvantage of others in human terms. Thus, to deepen
our understanding of power, we must address them in such terms.
An Escape from Disembodied Knowledge 13
Power may be represented, as realism claims, through possession of

weapons, prestige and influence, and control of territory (Morgenthau
and Thompson 1985), and, as neorealism (and neoliberalism) claim,
through hegemonic structures such as regimes and institutions (Krasner
1983; Keohane 1986; Baldwin 1993), but in order for us to understand
how power is exercised, challenged and transformed, what it has been
and is becoming, its social fabric as it were, we need to consider it in
terms of its differentiated impact on people. Gender is a pervasive basis
for such differentiations. As the UNDP (United Nations Development
Programme) (1997: 39) Human Development Report states, ‘no society
treats its women as well as its men’. By adopting this situation as a basic
starting point for investigating power, gender analysis fundamentally
challenges generalized, universalized notions of hu-man/hu-manity. It
exposes the extent and social meanings of masculinist assumptions
about the nature of the hu-man subject (see also the chapter by Hooper
in this volume). As well as exposing the degree to which women’s exist-
ence and experience have been effaced by social analysis through such
means, gender critiques directly challenge the status of the knowledge
processes which make this possible.
The feminist reconstruction of theory shifts from ‘adding women’ to

rethinking such categories and their relationship to knowledge,
power, and community. It simultaneously shifts from treating
women as ‘knowable’ to women as ‘knowers’. The concept of gender
is central to this transformation. In contrast to positivist notions of
biological ‘sex’, gender is a systematic social construction that
dichotomizes identities, behaviours, and expectations as masculine
and feminine. It is not simply a trait of individuals but an institu-
tionalized feature of social life. The concept of gender enables femin-
ists to examine masculinity and femininity as fundamental but not
‘given’ identities: they are learned and therefore mutable.
(Peterson 1992b: 194)
The concept of gender grounds analysis in a number of important

ways which directly challenge the problematic abstractions dominating
masculinist perspectives on IPE. These assume actors (whether individu-
als, states or firms) too much as given, rationalistic and purposive entities
abstracted from their social conditions to the extent that the bases for
particular forms of power, notably the gendered bases, are left unexplored
and unexplained. Such abstraction produces a disembodied notion of
political economy, a predominant sense that aspects of our embodied

identities are not directly relevant to an understanding of power.
Gender critiques strike directly to the core of this issue by demon-
strating the intrinsic significance of gendered bodies and their social
meanings to such understanding. Take Cynthia Enloe’s (1993: 253)
assessment that the ‘militarism’ of the cold war was neither ‘natural’
nor ‘monolithic’, that it ‘depended upon policies to ensure certain sorts
of sexual relations’ including ‘male bonding that stopped short of sexu-
ality’ and ‘men’s sexual liaisons with foreign women that stopped short
of the affection that might reduce militarized racism’. Behind the mas-
culinist facade and symbolism of discourses of defence and war lies the
complex of embodied relations that reflect their deeper social and
material meanings.
War has never been an exclusively male enterprise. It depends signi-

ficantly on female labor, often of working-class women of color, who
represent between one-quarter to one-half of all enlisted women in
the U.S. armed forces. Add to this the ‘support’ work of millions of
military wives, nurses, and prostitutes, and we begin to see how mil-
itaries are dependent on women. The gendered division of violence,
however, continues to obscure this fact through the mechanism of
sexism (as well as racism and classism). In fact, it is the gendered
division of violence that separates men and women into ‘Just War-
riors’ who protect and ‘Beautiful Souls’ who are protected, thus
pressing both men and women into serving the world’s militaries
in respectively gendered ways. This keeps women and men from
questioning the essential purpose and the negative effects of war,
militarization, and violence on their own and others’ lives.
(Peterson and Runyan 1993: 90–1)
These perspectives signal awareness of the intersections of gender

considerations with other facets of social power such as race and class or
social hierarchy (see the chapter by Pettman in this volume). They dem-
onstrate the degree to which gender analysis attacks the many opposi-
tions that are entrenched in the dominant traditions of thinking about
IR and IPE – separations and oppositions such as: domestic/interna-
tional; states/markets; institutional/individual; public/private. These
conceptual constructions have contributed to a highly constrained and
abstract sense of social space. It has tended to be assumed rather than
explored. The embodied social dynamics across, for example, domestic/
international, state/market, public/private, remain hidden as a result.
Thus, when gender analysis reveals them, as in the cases quoted above,
the conceptual disruption includes spatial dimensions.
Spatiality and globalization
Complex approaches to social space are inherent in an embodied sense

of political economy. They locate social experience and explore the
workings of power relations, including how they are expressed spatially.
They help us to identify how individual/institutional and private/public
connections actually operate and are organized in spatial as well as social
terms. The spatial abstractions which have dominated the study of IR
and IPE stand as part of the problem, therefore, in developing perspect-
ives which could be considered embodied rather than disembodied.
State/market has been the main spatial configuration but exploration of
the interactive dynamics of states and markets has been constrained by
the accompanying dualism of politics/economics and the high degree of
abstraction embedded in predominant notions of state and market. The
state is the central concept in realist and neorealist frameworks and, it
could be argued, is therefore the key category defining what is under-
stood as political space. The problem is that the state is largely an empty
category in spatial senses as applied in these frameworks; it is conceptu-
alized as a bounded territorial actor. Such emphasis on ‘the territorial
state as container of society’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 92) coupled
with the timeless and universalized notion of state identity captured by
the influential concept of sovereignty (Ashley and Walker 1990; Peter-
son 1992a; Walker 1993) have inhibited awareness and exploration of
politics as process, states as contingent entities, including as witnessed
in the spatial dynamics that produce them and are reproduced by them
(Youngs 1999). Gender critiques have, along with other critical analyses 5
of state-centrism, worked to explode the black box concept of the state
and to expose the necessity of examining its inner workings with a sens-
itivity to their public/private, domestic/international, institutional/indi-
vidual, political/economic connections rather than separations. Through
such means, the market can also be freed from its abstract conceptual
status as some kind of opposition to the state, something out there, cer-
tainly in spatial terms.
It is possible to get beyond the notion of actors, whether we are think-
ing of transnational corporations, powerful international insitutions
such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or states as economic
rather than political actors in this case, and to think in terms of eco-
nomic processes involving them and the social groupings and individuals
that make them work, influence them and are affected by them in con-
trasting locations. ‘Locations’ has an expanded meaning here, taking in,
for example, various geographical, social and institutional contexts.
Contributions in this volume are further examples of work which
directly address the need for a contingent sense of the state, as well as
the market, a propensity to rescue the two categories from static con-
ceptual constraints and explore how their processes are changing,
including in interconnected ways. This involves grounded analysis
which locates such processes and their generalities and particularities in
certain times and social spaces and investigates how groups and indi-
viduals are negotiating them and are affected by and affecting them
(see, in particular, the chapter by Parpart in this volume). The import-
ance of this grounded form of investigation has been emphasized by
attention to the phenomenon known as globalization. 6 Through the
concept of globalization, the growing complexities of interconnected-
ness, particularly among social spaces at great distances from one
another, is explored, in part at least, in order to understand how state/
market dynamics and linkages are changing. Central focus is placed on
global and local relations and inter-relations. The meanings of state and
market boundaries are openly examined rather than assumed, includ-
ing in relation to the movements of capital, companies, and people (see
the chapter by Pettman in this volume and Youngs forthcoming) as
well as of goods and services with material and symbolic values (see, for
example, the chapters by Williams and Weber in this volume). Political
economy takes on new significance as an approach to understanding
the world because in studies of globalization there is overt recognition
of the major influence of political-economic transformation.
But what is needed is a political economy in search of ‘the actual ter-
ritories’ and social spaces ‘where much globalization materializes [my
emphasis] in specific institutions and processes’ (Sassen 1996: 5). Terri-
toriality and spatiality are key categories of investigation and incorpor-
ate the new challenges of negotiating the meanings and impacts of the
virtual spaces of computerized stock market systems and the Internet
and their embedded connections with wider more obviously material
social spaces and processes of state and market varieties (Agnew and
Corbridge 1995: 95–9; Epstein 1996). Communications technologies of
all kinds facilitate globalization and play major roles in defining its
characteristics, especially those related to radical transformations in
time/space linkages (Mohammadi 1997).
Anthony Giddens (1991: 21) has referred to the ‘disembedding . . . of
social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring
across indefinite spans of time-space’. Such time/space perspectives

challenge static abstractions of state and market and the timeless
assumptions which have predominantly been associated with the concept
of sovereignty to apply to state identity and power in IR. Saskia Sassen
(1996) has directly addressed the new specificities of sovereignty under
conditions of globalization and asks us to think in terms of a ‘new geo-
graphy of power’. This entails recognition that: ‘The institution and
construct of citizenship are being destabilized’ (Sassen 1996: 34). It also,
in her view, should prompt us to think in terms of ‘economic citizen-
ship’ as a description of the rights and legitimacy which have been
accruing to powerful global economic actors, notably transnational
companies and global financial markets (Sassen 1996: 38–9). This
stance disrupts traditional notions of political (state) citizenship as well as,
importantly, the boundaries associated with it, and prompts us to think in
terms of economic forms of citizenship and associated boundary-crossing
capacities. Sassen’s analysis also, via such conceptual moves, links the
embodied and increasingly economically-insecure fate of old-style citi-
zens (state subjects) to the growing power of the new-style footloose
global economic citizens (companies and financial markets).
One of the most disturbing trends today is the vast expansion in the
numbers of unemployed and never-employed people in all the
highly developed countries. And masses of poor in the developing
countries lack access to the means for survival. Thus, while no pre-
cise measure is available, a growing body of evidence signals that
economic globalization has hit at some of the major conditions that
have hitherto supported the evolution of citizenship and particularly
the formation of social rights.
(Sassen 1996: 37–8. See also UNDP 1997 and Youngs 1997a)
Changing relationships between political and economic spaces, and

identities attached to them, are at the heart of processes of globaliza-
tion. They are part of their intrinsic dynamics. The decisions and inter-
actions of corporations, governments, powerful regional groupings such
as the European Union and recently enlarged North American Free
Trade Association, global institutions and social movements are all rel-
evant to our explorations of the precise nature of those dynamics in
specific contexts. Critical work has begun to open up understanding of
the state/market complex and contributions in this volume indicate ways
in which this can be taken further in IPE to, among other things, facilit-
ate understanding of how the bases for political legitimacy, including at
state level, are transforming, implicitly and explicitly. Gramscian cri-

tiques, and assessments of globalization and the state, have demonstrated
that states are taking on new economic roles in direct relation to devel-
opments in global capitalism and the pursuit of national interests (see,
for example, Cox 1994; Gill 1994; Youngs 1997b).
The internal relationships of states to citizens, the ways in which states
contribute to the shaping of national polities, have increasingly taken on
economic characteristics or definitions. The post-welfare state scenario
must be considered in the context of the relationships between political
and economic issues and between the interests of national polities and
global capital (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 211–17). States increasingly
compete with one another, from highly differentiated socio-historical
circumstances and power bases, on economic as well as political grounds
(Runyan 1996). Close attention is thus paid to relationships between
state and market and their precise interconnections and tensions.
Public/private dualities
The question of changing relationships between public and private has

come to the fore in such debates about globalization, and the ways in
which this has happened link mainstream concerns to established critical
interest among feminist theorists in the importance of public/private
social and spatial constructions. Mainstream definitions of public and
private follow dominant conceptualizations in political and economic
study of public and private interests. The former are significantly identi-
fied as located in, and represented by, the state as the main political
actor, and the latter are vested in the private interests of the market,
represented, for example, by major financial and commercial entities.
The state is understood as the protector of the public, that is the general
or collective, interest of the community. Under conditions of globaliza-
tion, the boundaries of such protection have been severely tested with
increasing market power and – at least partly through the processes of
liberalization, deregulation and privatization – greater roles for and
influence of private interests (Drache 1996). The changing capacities of
states to provide what are termed public goods, that is goods in the gen-
eral interest, are of deep concern. In the economic sphere these public
goods can be identified in three ways: ‘regulatory’ over the market; ‘pro-
ductive’ and ‘distributive’ via ‘state-controlled or state-sponsored activ-
ities’; and ‘redistributive’ (Cerny 1996: 125–6). Across all three areas,
‘globalization has undercut the structural capacity of the national state’
(Cerny 1996: 128).
. . . globalization entails the undermining of the public character of pub-

lic goods and of the specific character of specific assets, i.e. the privatiza-
tion and marketization of economic and political structures.
(Cerny 1996: 130)
Gender perspectives on public and private go beyond the traditional

notions of general and collective interests and open the black box con-
cept of the state which the traditional public goods discourses leave
intact. Gender analysis focuses on the public/private dynamics which
lie within or behind the coherent notions of public and private interests
evident in such discourses. The public boundary we are dealing with in
this case is that which defines the world of political and economic
power, of decision-making and influence, to which masculine influence
and identity are primarily attached. The private boundary is that which
defines the world of social reproduction, of home and family, to which
feminine influence and identity are primarily attached. Patriarchal power
is maintained across public/private divides on these bases. Even when
women, as they increasingly do, participate in the public sphere in
political and economic activities, they do so in the context of socially
and historically-defined gendered relations reflecting structural inequal-
ities between men and women. Institutionalized practices and discourses
reflect such structural inequalities and are the sites through which gen-
dered identities are forged, questioned and contested (Weedon 1987;
Peterson 1992b. See the chapters by Parpart and Neale in this volume).
The nature of gendered realities, with all their specificities relating to
particular socio-cultural and historical locations as well as their shared
dimensions across such contexts, are formed and experienced through
such practices and discourses. And, as Marysia Zalewski explores in her
contribution to this collection, technologies and the representational
qualities associated with them are part of that experience, and a powerful
illustration of the pervasive patriarchal ties that bind the public world of
state institutions and the market to the most intimate processes of preg-
nancy and childbirth. Such explorations take, in diverse ways, the familiar
feminist slogan that the personal is political into the expanded terrain of
political economy. They demonstrate that the personal is political and
economic – in other words, that the public is in the private and vice versa.
Further, they illustrate that the fault lines of political-economic change
are gendered fault lines and thus that questions of gender are central to
an understanding of social transformation. The transnational character-
istics of processes of globalization mean that any search for such fault
lines must include a sensitivity to cross-border issues as well as to the
possibilities that such issues impact on public/private social and spatial

constructions, not just as these are understood in traditional public
goods senses, but also, importantly, in gendered terms.7
As I have argued elsewhere, the conceptual challenge we face now is:
. . . the spatially dynamic quality of multiple linkages among public

and private spheres operating frequently across state boundaries and
associating patterns of oppression of different social groupings
which might superficially be regarded as separate on nationality, race
and class bases. To put it simply, the global economy, traditionally
interpreted as public space, can overtly be demonstrated, for
example in the case of migrant service workforces, as privatized.
Furthermore, these workers from less developed or developing eco-
nomies become an explicit as well as implicit public force in relation
to their input to both their host and home economies.
(Youngs forthcoming)
Globalization is disrupting and restructuring public/private linkages

in transnational as well as national settings, local as well as global ones,
and the search for knowledge about how this is happening and what are
its results takes us to the embodied and gendered experiences of those
involved. But in the context of mainstream disembodied approaches to
IPE, it is important to remind ourselves that this is a process.
‘Materializing the body’ (Pettman in this volume) in IPE as a field of
study is a process which, in large part, draws on a history of feminist
work on embodied social relations of power, and explores its themes in
international contexts, probing, in conditions of globalization, the cross-
border qualities of public/private dynamics (see especially Kofman and
Youngs 1996 and Marchand and Runyan forthcoming). It is a process
which must take due account of the hierarchy that exists between the
traditional construction of public and private in relation to state and
market interests and the critical construction of public and private
through which gender analysis seeks to expose the inner workings of
social relations of power. The gendered characteristics of these remains
hidden in the mainstream construct of public and private (state and
market) interests. The disembodied nature of this construct is a deeply
embedded dimension of its abstract nature. The dominant role and
influence of this mainstream abstraction continues to reassert itself
through institutionalized practices and discourses, including academic
ones. 8 In this respect, disembodied approaches to IPE are continu-
ally restated and accepted ‘common sense’ (Murphy and Tooze 1991)
frameworks for understanding, whereas embodied approaches are

alternative or critical frameworks seeking to gain recognition as valid
perspectives. The ‘common sense’ status, which is a reflection of the
historical purchase of disembodied frameworks, offers the significantly
secure basis on which they are accepted as legitimate and viable forms
of knowledge. On the other hand, embodied frameworks lack such a
secure basis and must continually be pressed, with the grounds for their
cause set out explicitly, as the contributions in this volume do.
Discourse, power and the disappearing body
With a strong awareness of the ways in which power works through dis-
courses, the problem of the disappearing body comes to the fore. For it
is the continual and pervasive restatement of disembodied perspectives
in dominant discourses related to state and market that perpetuates and
supports the abstract notions of them. The effect of dominant disem-
bodied discourses is to efface embodied experience on a continuing
basis. Thus, it is crucial to combine an emphasis on the materiality of
the body and of discourse. 9 They are both material in the structures and
practices of IPE in interconnected fashion. And it is through explora-
tion of these interconnections that the precise ways in which power
relations work can be seen, including the ways in which resistances are
articulated and practised and, thus, how they contribute to change (see,
in particular, the chapter by Parpart in this volume). In fact, it is
through such exploration that the precise nature of their materiality
can be revealed. Binding attention to the materiality of bodies and dis-
courses together also provides an active sense of the subject and subject-
ivity. People are no longer hidden behind the statistics of disembodied
frameworks, which tend to gesture toward them only as some passive
backdrop to the workings of IPE. They become present in very particular
and influential ways as living and acting subjects engaging with struc-
tural forces and negotiating them, often with transformative intentions
or effects. The discourses through which these processes occur and their
institutionalized settings also come alive in an analytical sense because
focus is placed on their operation, their procedures and the interactions
that reaffirm and test their foundational qualities.
The sense of ‘institutionalized settings’ referred to here is extensive in
social and spatial respects. First and foremost, in terms of IPE, we are
clearly addressing state and market forms. Secondly, we are dealing with
the familiar institutions of the law, various bureaucracies associated
with state and market interests and commercial concerns. Thirdly, we
are dealing with knowledge-based areas associated, for example, with

science and technology and medicine, including as spheres where dom-
inant ideas and values are generated and sustained and individuals
are ‘disciplined’ according to them10 (see the chapters by Hooper and
Zalewski in this volume). Fourthly, the influence of and engagement with
such discourses is investigated across the public/private and not simply
within the public and formal institutional locations. Indeed, the ways
in which such discursive processes operate across public/private bound-
aries becomes an explicit area of concern, revealing, among other
things, how those boundaries are shaped, maintained and attacked, and
ways in which they can be understood as intrinsic to the formation and
reformation of subjectivities. I see this as being among the subtle qualit-
ies of perceiving the personal as political and economic 11 – subtle for
two major reasons: the prioritizing of connections across rather than
separations between public and private, and the search for the material-
ity of discursive structures and practices in this analytical context. For,
in ‘common sense’ terms (Murphy and Tooze 1991), the materiality of
discourse evades us just as bodies evade us in dominant frameworks of
investigation which take ‘the prevailing order of the world’ as given
(Cox 1981: 129). A critical, in this case embodied, perspective ‘does not
take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls
them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and
whether they might be in the process of changing’ (ibid.).
Discursive structures and practices are embedded in, and reflective of,
those origins and processes. Thus, we must think about the extent to
which ‘the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,
organized and redistributed’ (Foucault 1984: 109). 12 Discourses operate
on the basis of what can and cannot, should and should not, be said in
particular circumstances and social locations.
In the taboo on the object of speech, and the ritual of the circum-
stances of speech, and the privileged or exclusive right of the speak-
ing subject, we have the play of three types of prohibition which
intersect, reinforce or compensate for each other, forming a complex
grid which changes constantly.
(Foucault 1984: 109–10)
For Michel Foucault, sexuality and politics in this respect represented

the areas where the ‘grid’ was ‘tightest’:
. . . as if discourse, far from being that transparent or neutral element

in which sexuality is disarmed and politics pacified, is in fact one of
the places where sexuality and politics exercise in a privileged way

some of their most formidable powers. It does not matter that dis-
course appears to be of little account, because the prohibitions that
surround it very soon reveal its link with desire and power.
(Foucault 1984: 110. See also Foucault 1976)
Sexuality and public/private
One of the most powerful messages of Foucault’s work is the commun-

ication of the public in the private and vice versa in the most pervasive
senses. Sexuality, that part of our lives often regarded as the most intim-
ate and private, has to be considered in its full social sense, incorporat-
ing the discourses which link the public ordering of it to the individual
expression of and challenge to such disciplinary influence. Feminists
have long argued that sexuality and embodied aspects of identity,
including those related to reproduction, are essential to understanding
gendered social relations of power and the discourses which work to
maintain and disrupt them. 13
To bring sexuality and politics together is a radical move14 largely
because of the degree to which the latter as constructed in the public
sense veils the former by containing it within the private. To bring sexu-
ality and international politics together is an even more radical step
because of the extent to which international politics is framed as the
highest form of politics. This brings us back to spatial issues in relation
to the hierarchy of politics. The traditional approach to the ‘level-of-
analysis problem’ works on the basis of ‘the international system’ and
‘the national or sub-systemic level’ of analysis (Singer 1961). This lay-
ered approach to IR helps us to understand some of the complexity of
the conceptual procedures through which the invisibility of private con-
texts of social relations of power are maintained. At the national level
these contexts are made invisible in politics through its masculinist def-
inition in public terms, socially and spatially. The national boundary of
politics is defined and expressed in this reductive public fashion and
this is then replicated in the state-to-state relations contained within the
understanding of international (inter-national) politics.15 The construc-
tion of the state as a political actor and the political identity associated
with agency through, for example, concepts of citizenship reflect this
public orientation (Peterson 1995: 12).
There is a two-fold removal of the private from politics in the trans-
ition from national to international politics, where the dominant percep-
tions and framings of the latter are based on the dominant assumptions
which prevail in masculinist models of the former. It is thus not an over-

statement to argue that women and their experience, the importance of
public/private social dynamics, of gendered relations of power, are hid-
den Russian-doll style within the assumed boundaries of masculinist con-
structions of politics – the higher the politics, the more they are hidden.
This is one of the major problems feminist analyses of international pol-
itics have confronted (see, in particular, Enloe 1989 and Pettman 1996).
Disrupting and ‘transgressing’ (Peterson 1992b) masculinist conceptual
boundaries has been a fundamental endeavour. The notion of ‘worlding
women’ (Pettman 1996) signals the degree to which this involves social
and spatial revisioning of women and their experience. It indicates the
global scope of feminist searches for the implications of public/private
social dynamics and, thus, their intricate cross-boundary workings and
manifestations. These efforts towards ‘resiting the political’ (Dean 1997)
in contemporary conditions of globalization produce fresh perspectives
on how we should think about the social contexts of people’s lives and
how they are influenced, shaped and changed.
Jan Jindy Pettman’s (1996) ‘international political economy of sex’
framework explores sexualized bodies and the power relations which
work through and around them, with and across state boundaries in
market settings. Her analysis illustrates clearly that the very issue of
‘women on the move’ is a highly political one in gender terms because
of the fixity attached to their identification through the public/private
construct. The socially-assumed location of women in that construct is
hidden from public view in the private. Thus, whenever women are ‘out
of place’ there is an implicit threat to the assumed public/private order
of things and they risk being policed or disciplined (Pettman 1996:
185). Importantly, too, there are degrees of being ‘out of place’ which
configure with the hierarchies of political spheres – national and inter-
national. The ‘domestication’ (Pettman 1996: 186) of women means
that they will be most out of place in international senses where they
are most distant from their national domestic locations.
The gendered nature of the global economy, however, frequently
means that women are transferred merely from their home domestic
setting to a foreign domestic setting where they perform servicing roles
of one kind or another. In this respect they can be playing a hidden but
vital part in global restructuring. Take, for example, the case of domestic
workers from the Philippines in Hong Kong, whose household roles
facilitate local women joining the workforce without, and this is key,
fundamentally disrupting the domestic feminized roles of cooking, clean-
ing and caring for children and elderly relatives (Youngs forthcoming).
Here we have a clear illustration of cross-border gendered social relations

playing a direct part in the maintenance of historically-established patri-
archal forms while also contributing to economic restructuring through
feminization of the workforce.
The maintenance of patriarchal forms happens partly through substi-
tution of Philippine women for local women in domestic roles. The
processes of feminization of the workforce involved here cover both
public and private spheres. While local women are being freed from
domestic roles to participate in other forms of work, the Philippine
workers, as part of a major migrant worker flow, are generating vital
income to send back home to their national economy.16 In studying
such gendered dynamics of state/market interactions, some of the
potential of embodied perspectives on IPE is clearly revealed. These take
us to the intersecting state and market, public and private contexts,
where restructuring is taking place, and indicate how fundamental the
actual embodied and gendered experiences of individuals and groups
involved is to our understanding of what is actually happening and
why and how change is occurring and, importantly, being negotiated
and managed.
Conclusion
This chapter has travelled a long way from its starting point: that of a
student fresh to IR with concerns about how the discipline conceived of
an inhabited – peopled – world. The journey through IPE started with
strong hopes because of its concerns with political-economic factors
and, thus, more overtly with issues of inequality. But still the problem
of abstractions meant that too much of what counted was hidden from
view. These abstractions, in their constant repetition through dominant
perspectives, presented a disembodied world where the lives and experi-
ences of people, the basics of social relations of power, were left unre-
vealed, treated as of little or no significance.
This common sense of mainstream IPE just didn’t make sense: too
much was missing. Top of the list substantively and analytically was the
question of gender, not least because of its direct explanatory relevance
to the reductive and distorted public lens17 on the world. When the pub-
lic world, as presented, depended so heavily on the gendered construc-
tion of relations in public/private terms, how could these not feature as
part of the explanation of international economy?
Intrinsic to a disembodied standpoint was a continually assumed mas-
culinist interpretive framework. Feminist theory provided the tools to
break through to the hidden public/private dynamics and the means to

explain their importance. The spatial as well as social conceptual limita-
tions resulting from a disembodied standpoint were quickly evident.
These gained increasing critical importance in relation to globalization
where state/market boundaries and linkages became a central focus.
This also emphasized that the mainstream attention to a masculinist
construct of public and private maintained the dominant abstractions
of state and market, at least in relation to the public/private dimensions
of gendered social relations.
Processes of globalization indicated that these dimensions would
increasingly need to be considered in international rather than national
settings, in cross-border and inter-societal conditions. This entailed
breaking through the spatial as well as the social abstractions embedded
in a disembodied standpoint. But it also entailed recognition that this
dominant standpoint would not simply disappear but, through its mul-
tiple discourses, would continue to reaffirm its perspective. Thus, the
problem of the disappearing body would continue in the study of IPE.
The embodied picture of IPE simply would not benefit from the
commonsense acceptance established for its powerful counterpart. The
battle to keep the gendered, sexed body in analytical view would be
hard fought and long.
The bases for the battle are diverse. They include the concerns of the
young student to understand the world better and to have effective
tools to do so. They are critical in the sense that they do not take the
existing order as given but seek to question how it came to be as it is
and how it is changing. They are political in recognizing that those
involved in the everyday workings of international political economy
have different values and goals and are negotiating their conditions in
contested pursuit of these. They are personal in that this author is
female. They are optimistic in assessing that embodied perspectives on
IPE will continue to grow and contribute to the transformation of mas-
culinist constraints on theoretical and other forms of practice.
Notes
1 Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Second Pan-European
Conference in International Relations, September 13–16, 1995, Paris, and the
38th International Studies Association Annual Convention, Toronto, March
18–22, 1997. I am grateful to participants for their comments which have
contributed to this revised version.
2 See Steve Smith’s (1995: 10) critical discussion of how ‘normative reasoning’
has been framed as standing outside the dominant form of ‘technical real-
ism’ in the study of IR. See also Brown (1992).
3 One of the clearest explanations of structural influences remains Cox (1981).
4 See also, in this context, Maclean’s (1984) critical discussion of the concept
of ‘interdependence’.
5 I would note, in particular, the work of Rob Walker and Richard Ashley in
this area.
6 On this general area see, for example, Harvey (1990), Giddens (1991), Boyer
and Drache (1996), Kofman and Youngs (1996). See also Sassen (1996) and
Strange (1996).
7 For more detailed discussions of points in this section see Youngs (1999 and
forthcoming).
8 This is very much a Foucaultian point. See Foucault (1971).
9 Ibid.
10 Various aspects of Michel Foucault’s work are relevant here. See especially
Foucault (1961; 1963; 1966; 1975).
11 In relation to this point see Chris Weedon (1987) on ‘feminist poststructur-
alism’.
12 For details of the Foucault reference from which this translated material is
drawn see Foucault (1971). On discourse and IR see, in particular, Der Der-
ian and Shapiro (1989) and J. George (1994).
13 On the relationship of Foucault’s work to feminist perspectives see McNay
(1992) and Sawicki (1988).
14 AIDS has been a key issue to arouse debate in this area. See, for example,
Watney (1997).
15 Critiques of the reductionism of state-centrism are relevant here. See espe-
cially Ashley (1984) and Youngs (1999).
16 These points are explored in more detail in Youngs (forthcoming). See also
Chang and Ling (forthcoming).
17 See Peterson and Runyan’s (1993) discussion of the ‘gender lens’.
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2
Disembodiment, Embodiment and
the Construction of Hegemonic
Masculinity
Charlotte Hooper
Introduction
IPE is very much a material discipline. At its heart are questions about
the social and political distribution of resources and the fulfilment of
material needs including, at the most basic level, the physical require-
ments of the body (food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care and so
on). It is, therefore, supremely ironic that such a discipline should be
built around a depiction of humanity which appears both physically dis-
embodied and socially disembedded: namely the abstract ‘rational actor
model’. 1 Of course, the reason it has been built around this model is that
in its atomistic, individualistic, self-interested, market-oriented perspect-
ive, it represents ‘homo economicus’ (Hollis and Smith 1990), a subjectiv-
ity which is central to the ‘social epistemology’2 of capitalist modernity.
Among other criticisms of a ubiquitous model that promotes and reflects
a capitalist sensibility, it is now a commonplace observation in feminist
circles that it is both masculinist and ethnocentric (see, for example,
Tickner 1992; Peterson 1992; Nicholson 1990). The notion that a univer-
sal model of humanity can be divorced and abstracted from issues of
embodiment and social context has been shown to be false.
Having charted its inadequacies (as discussed below), it is tempting
for feminist and fellow critics to dismiss the rational actor model with-
out much further consideration and concentrate on the search for con-
ceptions of identity and subjectivity which can take account of both
social embeddedness and physical embodiment more adequately – an
urgent task in the case of critical GPE. However, the rational actor
model is not only an exclusionary masculinist abstraction. Through the
power of discourse to shape and inform material social practices, which
in turn produce particular subjectivities and forms of embodiment, it
31
has a much more concrete presence which in part underpins its popu-
larity. As well as a philosophical history rooted in (masculinist) enlight-
enment thinking, it also has a gendered social and political history
which relates to and has informed the gender identities of numerous
actual embodied men. There is a contradiction between this embodied
social history and the apparent disembodiment of the model. In order
to appreciate fully the power of the model, it is important to expose this
contradiction and uncover the hidden connections between the
abstract model and the embodied identities of bourgeois men who can
and do identify with its characterization of humanity.
It is this social history of embodiment of an apparently disembodied
model which this chapter seeks to explore, to relate the qualities
embedded in the model to the subjectivity, the experiences of selfhood
and embodiment of bourgeois men. Starting with a discussion of the
relationship between discourse and embodiment in construction of
gender identity, it will move on to discuss some of the ingredients of
both the model and the bourgeois masculine subjectivity which it is so
closely entwined with, and to consider the social conditions which nur-
ture such a subjectivity. The importance of this subjectivity to the social
epistemology of modernity and modern political economy will also be
considered. The chapter ends with reference to debates about whether
this bourgeois rational subjectivity so central to capitalist modernity is
being significantly undermined by the contemporary communications
revolution and the arrival of postmodernity.
Theorizing gender identities
Before coming to the particular relationship between the abstract

rational actor model and the embodied experiences of bourgeois men,
this section looks more generally at some recent theorizing about the
construction of gender identities, to consider how discursive construc-
tions, institutional practices and physical bodies might be brought into
play in their production.
Unlike some radical feminists, liberal and socialist feminists have long
challenged the notion that apparent gender differences are founded on
physical differences between the sexes. This led to a tendency to down-
play gender difference or ignore embodiment in favour of social and psy-
chological explanations of gender. As a consequence, it is only recently
that alternative non-essentialist conceptions of the relationship between
gender identities and physical embodiment have been fully developed.
Recent theorizing has moved towards perspectives seeing gender identi-
Disembodiment, Embodiment, Hegemonic Masculinity 33
fication as a lifelong process, which may involve the body and the psy-
che intimately but is not rooted in either of them. A broadly ‘discursive’
approach to gender argues that gender identities, however foundational
they feel, are in fact the sedimented effects of the constant repetition of
gender-producing practices which involve the body (see, for example,
the chapters by Zalewski, Parpart and Neale in this volume). Such a per-
spective is often associated with post-structuralist feminists such as
Judith Butler (1990) who put their emphasis on the language of sex and
gender and the organizing power of knowledge. For Butler (1990: 336),
gender identity is an idealized ‘fantasy’ which produces ‘the effect of an
inner core or substance, but produces this on the surface of the body’.
Butler’s analysis of discourse relies on a ‘linguistic foundationalism’,
which reduces the body to a textual surface (Bordo 1993: 291).
Although she uses the language of Foucault, her analysis suffers from a
lack of historical contextualization and her notion of discourse appears
to exclude the dimension of material institutional practices in which
the body is enmeshed. As Susan Bordo argues:
Within Foucault’s understandings of the ways in which the body is

‘produced’ through specific historical practices, ‘discourse’ is not
foundational but is, rather, one of the many interrelated modes by
which power is made manifest. Equally, if not more important for
him are the institutional and everyday practices by means of which
our experience of the body is organized.
(Bordo 1993: 291)
The gendered body is not just a straightforward product of the lin-

guistic categories which we impose upon it. The way in which everyday
practices organize our (gendered) experiences of the body is illustrated
by Bob Connell (1987: 84–5) in his description of masculinity:
The physical sense of maleness is not a simple thing. It involves size

and shape, habits of posture and movement, particular physical skills
and the lack of others, the image of one’s own body, the way it is
presented to other people and the ways they respond to it, the way it
operates at work and in sexual relations....The social definition of
men as holders of power is translated not only into mental body-
images and fantasies, but into muscle tensions, posture, feel and tex-
ture of the body.
A sophisticated view of the construction of gender identity is that it is

a multidimensional process, not dependent solely on embodiment,
institutional practices, or discourse, but rather produced through the

negotiation of all three. While particular theorists may lend more
weight to one or other of these dimensions, it is clear that none is
entirely autonomous, and that gender identification involves a com-
plex interaction among the three (Ramazanoglu and Holland 1993).
A discursive approach to gender identity opens up the possibility of
transcending notions of generic masculinity and femininity. Historical
and anthropological research backs up the idea that there is no single
‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ and that both are subject to numerous and
fairly fast-changing historical and cultural variations. 3 Gender also
intersects with other social divisions such as class, race and sexuality to
produce complex hierarchies of (gendered) identities in which the rel-
evant ingredients of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ may vary consider-
ably. Dominant or hegemonic4 forms of masculinity can then be seen
not as a fixed set of traits, but as constantly negotiated constructions
that draw on a pool of available characteristics, which may be mutually
contradictory, but which can be put together in different combinations
depending on circumstances. Thus, while the bourgeois rational sub-
jectivity discussed below constitutes one powerful model of hegemonic
masculinity, it is worth noting that it is not the only one in current cul-
tural circulation. Other overlapping archetypes which have been
handed down through history and which hegemonic forms of mascu-
linity still draw on include: a militaristic and rationalistic Greek citizen/
warrior model; a patriarchal Judaeo/Christian model predicated on the
authority of the father; and an aristocratic honour/patronage model in
which taking risks was highly valued, with the duel as the ultimate test
of masculinity (Hooper 1997).
Such a perspective on gender identities has implications for feminist
students of political economy. If embodied gender identities are histor-
ically specific and are intimately connected to the gendered institu-
tional practices of their time (including the practices which are the
subject of political economy) then it is important that their ingredients
are specified and located when exploring the gender dimensions of
political economy. In particular, general references to ‘masculinity’ and
‘masculinism’ tend to be unhelpful, and can merely reinforce the ideo-
logy of gender dualisms.
What ‘rational actors’ are made of
This section spells out the relationships between the rational actor
model, philosophical discourse, historical developments and the
embodiment of bourgeois rational masculinity. It shows how the gen-

dered dichotomies of public/private, mind/body, inside/outside and
rational/emotional not only exclude women and other subordinate
groups as subjects but also are implicated in the structuring of bourgeois
masculine subjectivity itself. It also takes note of the limits of this rela-
tionship which is by no means one of simple correspondence.
The rational actor model itself is an abstraction of a bourgeois
rational masculine subjectivity. It posits that actors have exogenously
given preferences or aims which they can rank in order of preference;
that they will then seek to optimize these aims, and that they will
weigh up the expected costs and benefits (and, in more sophisticated
versions, risks) of alternative courses of action in seeking to achieve
their goals. It assumes personal autonomy, instrumental rationality and
goal orientation. Meanwhile, bourgeois rationalist masculinity idealizes
competitive individualism, reason and self-control or self-denial, com-
bining respectability as breadwinner and head of household with calcu-
lative rationality in public life. It constructs a bounded self with an
individualist, instrumental outlook. It sustains a fantasy of disembodi-
ment and an (instru)mental relationship to the body based on control
and performance.
While not the only model of masculinity available to élite Anglo-
Saxon men, it has gradually gained ascendancy throughout the modern
period, notably over traditionally patriarchal forms. This development
is related to the rise of modernity itself, marked by such social develop-
ments as the Protestant reformation, the invention of the printing
press, the creation of the modern state and the industrial revolution
(Cocks 1989; Seidler 1988; Deibert 1996). The modern ascendancy of
competitive individualism was facilitated by the whittling away of the
spatial base of patriarchal relations based on the rule of the father
through changing economic and cultural factors related to the indus-
trial revolution and the rise of capitalism and bureaucratic power. For
example, patriarchal rights were undermined by the collapse of the
family/household system of production, large-scale urbanization and
increasing state regulation of social life. The shift of production out of
the domestic sphere caused the increasing fragmentation of the family
and undermined the patriarch’s authority at home. The absorption of
other members of the family into the workforce also undermined his
economic authority. Meanwhile, social ties of obligation and paternal-
ism in society at large were increasingly replaced by impersonal bureau-
cratic authority. The shift was facilitated by the new liberal
championing of individual freedom, the scientific disenchantment of
desire and the rise of utilitarian beliefs, but was also dependent on
structural changes (Cocks 1989).
Philosophically speaking, bourgeois rational masculinity is a subject-
ivity rooted in enlightenment thinking. In philosophical terms it is
organized around a series of gendered dualisms including public/
private, mind/body, rational/emotional and inside/outside divisions.
These dualisms serve two related purposes. Firstly, they define and loc-
ate the bourgeois rational actor in relation to feminized and marginal-
ized ‘others’ – this is the masculinist and ethnocentric aspect. Secondly,
and perhaps more pertinently to this chapter, they help structure the
embodied subjectivities of bourgeois men themselves.
Public/private and mind/body exclusions
The concept of the bourgeois rational individual is intimately tied up

with the development of liberal social contract theory which excludes
women through a public/private split. The social contract between
freedom-loving individuals takes place only in the public sphere, a
sphere which not only excludes familial relations, domestic labour and
the unequal position of women in marriage, but also depends on them
for its existence (Pateman 1988). The private sphere is a necessary
foundation for public life and as such is part of civil society but is kept
separate from politics and ‘civil’ life. A strong private sphere is essen-
tial, for example, for the development of relatively autonomous indi-
viduals capable of critical self-reflection (Benhabib 1992). However,
while men could pass back and forth between the two spheres, women
remained restricted to the private sphere (where their hidden labour
supported and nurtured the bourgeois individual). Women were not
just excluded from the original social contract, they were the subject of
it. Therefore, women represented everything that the individual was
not (Pateman 1988).
In terms of exclusion and marginalization, the mind/body and
rational/emotional splits have also served to exclude women, blacks
and so called ‘orientals’ from the enlightenment promise of reason and
what has been otherwise promoted as a universal form of selfhood.
Enlightenment promised men a new freedom of thought and expres-
sion through pure reason. No longer need men be slaves to blind pas-
sions or superstitions. Reason held out the promise of science and
progress. Abstract narratives of the mind dominated discussions of the
human subject – at least in the case of the male subject who stood in for
the universal. The female subject, where mentioned in modern political
philosophy, has usually been constructed in rather a different way, as

an opposite pole to ‘man’. If man was all mind, then woman was all
body. For example, while men were seen by Hegel as pushing forward
the dialectic of history, women were seen as incapable of the required
self-consciousness of conceptual thought. Mired as they were in the
concrete world, they would be condemned merely to repeat the cycles
of life (Coole 1993). Similarly, in a complex and racist ranking of mas-
culinities later institutionalized by British colonial rule, black Africans
and the indigenous peoples of Australasia and the Pacific were regarded
in the colonial imagination as having childlike reasoning powers
(rather like white women) but with the added disadvantage of being
seen as sexual predators saturated with monstrous lust (that is, identi-
fied with out-of-control bodily appetites). So called ‘orientals’ were
ranked in between, and were regarded as suffering from effeminate sen-
sual and sexual indulgences (Mercer and Julien 1988). As slaves to their
bodies in one way or another, all these groups were excluded from
‘reason’. Bourgeois men, whose behaviour was characterized as being
governed by pure reason, thus appeared natural colonial rulers and
inheritors of the enlightenment.
Just as the public/private split continues to confine and subject large
numbers of women, so too does the colonial ranking of masculinities
by race have a cultural legacy which still has relevance today. This can
be seen both in terms of access to political power and racial divisions of
labour in the global political economy. The yardstick of ‘rationality’ is
still routinely used in ways which are implicitly racist.
The bounded self: inside/outside
Moving on to the construction of an embodied bourgeois rational sub-

jectivity itself, there are clear links between the dualisms of abstract
philosophical discourse and the lived experiences of men on the
ground. The notion of a self-contained and self-motivated individual
crucially depends on a clear demarcation between self and other (not
self). Personal autonomy depends on being able to separate the self
clearly from the world. So with the body viewed as a container for the
self, a sort of physical adjunct to the rational mind, an inside/outside
boundary is created. What is inside is identified as self and what is out-
side is not self. That this basic notion of selfhood is not universal but
culturally specific is evidenced by cross-cultural comparisons. Clifford
Geertz (1993: 59) argues that it is ‘a rather peculiar idea within the con-
text of the world’s cultures’. For example, the Javanese self has an
inside/outside boundary but one based on inside emotions and outside

actions which are seen as autonomous from one other; the Balinese self
is seen not as internally driven but rather as an appropriate representa-
tion of a generic type; while Moroccan males are ‘contextualised per-
sons’ (Geertz 1993: 66) who have diverse selves regulated strictly
according to setting.
Even in the west, where the autonomous self has been taken for
granted, women have been routinely denied selfhood and personal
autonomy when pregnant because pregnancy disrupts the inside = self/
outside = not self boundary in ways with which liberal legal systems
cannot cope without contradiction. Neither the mother nor the fetus
can be separate autonomous selves (which is what liberal theory
depends on) at the same time (Bordo 1993). If pregnancy is the ultimate
contradiction for this model of selfhood then the involuntary leaking of
bodily fluids also violates the inside/outside boundary and threatens the
idea of autonomy and self. The completely autonomous individual has
total control over his body and its interactions with the ‘outside’ world.
The civilized post-enlightenment body has carefully controlled entran-
ces and exits. Elaborate manners or notions of shame and privacy are
attached to any activities which involve traffic through such orifices.
The less controlled such traffic, the more shame is involved. Again,
women’s extra-bodily leakages, their involuntary menstruation and
lactation which are in addition to the (already threatening and hence
taboo-laden) processes of urination and defecation, help to exclude
them from the ideal.5 Autonomy depends on self-control of one’s body,
which at the extreme requires a rigid policing of the inside/outside
boundary. For example, the ability to maintain sexual continence and
prevent spillage of his seed was seen by the Victorian imperialist as a key
indicator of his superior reason (to be contrasted with the monstrous
lust of lesser men).6 Leaky bodies are not under autonomous control –
particularly when the leaks are involuntary. Neither does the attention
they draw help sustain the fantasy of disembodiment and pure reason.
There has, however, been a softening of the stricter codes of self-
control. The code of sexual continence to which Victorian imperialists
aspired no longer applies. This is a sign that the bourgeois rational
model of masculinity has itself been diluted or modified in the inter-
vening years. The move from sexual continence to sexual indulgence
has been accompanied by a more narcissistic relationship to the male
body and recently the relaxation of social taboos about non-combative
forms of touching between males. The 20th century has seen a shift
from notions of self-control to notions of self-expression (Taylor 1989),
helped by the development of psychology and psychoanalytic theory.

This process has been accelerated since the Second World War by
changes within capitalism which include the positioning of men as
consumers, and the increasing dominance of consumer culture and
consumer identities as opposed to work culture and employment iden-
tities (Mort 1988; Evans 1993).
Disembodiment
The fantasy of disembodiment is another key feature of bourgeois

rational masculinity which derives from the mind/body split and
depends on the apparent invisibility or absence of bodies in social dis-
course, so that masculine reason could be separate from and untainted
by the body. This apparent invisibility has been assisted by a huge
investment in the general social sanitization of bodies and bodily func-
tions, particularly in public spaces. There has been a gradual loss of vul-
gar and feminine orifices and excretions since the 17th century so that
the body becomes a mere container of rationality (Rose 1993). Even
sensory perception has been altered. Take, for example, the sense of
smell. Leonard Duroche (1990) argues that with the exception of one or
two designatedly ‘masculine’ smells such as tobacco and sweat, olfact-
ory sensibilities have gradually been increasingly associated with femin-
inity or with ‘degeneration’ since the 18th century. This process has
been accompanied by the sanitization of smells from public places,
which has led to an impoverishment of perception conducive to imper-
sonal relations between men.
The fantasy of disembodiment is sustained by large-scale social and
institutional practices as much as by discursive conventions. Bourgeois
rational masculinity employs a selective biology both to possess and
repress bodies (Rose 1993). The fantasy of disembodiment is not only
produced through powerful social practices, it also sustains bourgeois
masculine privilege and makes bourgeois men appear natural leaders or
rulers. Impersonal relations are associated with objectivity and science,
and the exnominated or unauthored ‘view from nowhere’7 of modern-
ity, which appears as the disembodied ‘truth’ of power and authority.
Rational/emotional divisions
Closely coupled to the mind/body split and the fantasy of disem-

bodiment is the rational/emotional divide. Emotions and desires are
perceived as threatening to a bourgeois masculine subjectivity organized
around reason and control. Both Kantian thought and Protestant cul-
ture posit an inner freedom from emotionally-driven inclinations as
the ideal (Seidler 1987). Just as the body, with its involuntary processes
and frailties, poses a threat to masculinity and pure reason, so too do
emotions and desires. Acting only from reason and duty serves to
strengthen the autonomy of men, otherwise they are in a position of
servitude, when reason becomes a slave to the passions. Therefore, self-
control over one’s emotions has come to be one of the hallmarks of
masculinity. Feelings and emotions are seen as both imperilling mascu-
line superiority and questioning the sources of masculine identity.
Because of this, as Victor Seidler (1987: 86–90) argues, emotional and
dependency needs as well as sexual desires are transformed into issues
of performance and control. With their identity defined in opposition
to ‘feminine’ dependency, emotionality and bodily enslavement, men
have become by and large instrumentalist in thought and goal-oriented
in action (Seidler 1989: 12).
Modern masculinity, for Seidler, has become a constant battle to con-
trol one’s body and repress one’s emotions. Satisfaction (including
sexual satisfaction) is measured in terms of performance targets, and
any display of emotion or recognition of human frailty is the ultimate
‘feminine’ taboo. This type of instrumental sensibility is widely recog-
nizable and is graphically illustrated by a conversation with a white
male physicist reported by Carol Cohn (1993: 227), who told her that
while working with a group of colleagues on the modelling of ‘counter-
force attacks’:
...all of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out,

‘Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking – Only thirty million! Only
thirty million human beings killed instantly?’ Silence fell upon the
room. Nobody said a word. They didn’t even look at me. It was
awful. I felt like a woman.
Seidler’s goal is to transcend this modern masculinity which he regards

as self-punishing. Including himself critically in this rationalist tradi-
tion, he argues:
...the connections we might otherwise have developed to our

somatic experience and emotional selves have become so attenu-
ated that we can no longer experience them as a basis for grounding
our experience.
(Seidler 1989: 18)
As a result, bourgeois rational men have been locked into externalizing

and intellectualizing their experiences, and have a bias toward self-
denial and self-rejection. In his critique of bourgeois rational masculin-
ity, Seidler concentrates on the downside – the costs of embodying
‘rationalism’ for white, middle-class, heterosexual males. In this he is
fairly typical of writers from ‘men’s studies’ who have urged men to dis-
cover and develop their emotional, intuitive and nurturing (or ‘femin-
ine’) sides through therapy and consciousness-raising in men’s groups
of various kinds. Although the so-called ‘men’s movement’ is actually a
series of separate and rather disparate movements with varying rela-
tionships to feminism – from fellow travellers to downright misogyn-
ists,8 there has been a shared assumption that bourgeois men are locked
into lonely isolation and incapable of intimacy, as this quote from an
anti-sexist newsletter suggests:
As men we are very out of touch with our feelings – we have had the
language of feeling beaten out of us, often literally, during child-
hood. Those feelings we are left with have acquired connotations
which make us shun or misapply them. So – love and warmth imply
shame; joy and delight imply immaturity; anger and frustration
imply physical violence. We need to reclaim our feelings and shed
the connotations – to learn that feeling is good for us.
(Quoted in Middleton 1992: 119)
The recommended antidote is to expose and explore one’s personal

insecurities and emotional vulnerabilities with other men. Emotional
vulnerability is seen as the key to ‘authenticity’, to unravelling male
power and violence, and removing inequalities between the sexes.
Whether a display of emotion automatically undermines the connec-
tions between masculinity and power is questionable. Exposing their
insecurities and emotional vulnerabilities in private, to women they
have power over, is a classic way in which middle-class, Anglo-American
men have enlisted female support and sympathy for the status quo in
20th-century intimate relationships ( Jackson 1990). While the public
rather than private display of emotion might be seen as making men
rather more vulnerable, this is not necessarily so either. For example, US
General Schwartzkopf was seen to weep in public at a moment of power
and victory at the end of the Gulf War. Of course, after a defeat it would
have been a different matter. It is not emotional disclosure itself that
counts in terms of being exposed to risk and vulnerability, so much as
the social positions of the persons involved and the power relationships
in which they are enmeshed.
While the examples given here may reflect social change and a weak-
ening of the bourgeois rational model in its pure form, it also shows
that while the gendered dichotomies of modernity, such as the
rational/emotional, structure masculine subjectivity, there is no simple
one-to-one relationship. The picture is complicated by elements of other
legitimate models of masculinity in cultural circulation (such as the
citizen-warrior, or the honour/patronage model, for whom displays of
emotion are not taboo). Such elements compete or sometimes combine
with the bourgeois rational model in a variety of hybrids. For example,
images of patriarchal privilege, luxury status symbols, and the signs of
personal patronage (such as through ‘the old school tie’) still pervade
such business publications as The Economist, while warrior imagery,
physical fitness and battle metaphors also abound (Hooper 1998).
While it is possible to generalize about the relationship between
enlightenment dualisms and bourgeois masculine subjectivity, without
a recognition of the inevitably complex mix of discursive constructions
and institutional processes informing any particular event, it is all too
easy to diagnose simplistic cures, or merely reinforce masculinist
assumptions rather than deconstruct them.
Rational actors, social epistemology and political economy
As mentioned in the introduction, bourgeois rational masculinity and

the rational actor model form part of the ‘social epistemology’ of the
modern, capitalist era. By this is meant that there are deep qualitative
differences between each era or epoch of history, differences which
span not only social, political and economic organization, but also
philosophy, psychology and subjectivity. Not only are such arrange-
ments very different from one era to the next, but within each era there
is a dominant social epistemology, so that recurring assumptions and
patterns tend to cross all disciplinary boundaries.
In the modern era, theoretical developments in the human and natural
sciences have always been closely linked to technological and theoretical
developments in capitalism (Haraway 1991). There is a strong affinity, for
example, between modern biology and modern economics. Both employ
the language of progress, scarcity and competition. Random mutations
mirror market innovations as triggers for progress. Both apply the
rational actor model. The selfish individual and the selfish gene both
maximize their own ‘interests’ in a hostile and competitive world.
Apparently, even Darwin acknowledged his debt to Malthus. Thus, even

in biological terms, it is hard to imagine ‘what evolutionary theory would
be like in any language other than classical capitalist political economy’
(Haraway 1991: 39). It is this shared epistemology between biology and
economics which, in part, gives the rational actor model its power.
This shared epistemology extends to IR and IPE. Here, the connec-
tions between the abstract rational actor model and bourgeois rational
subjectivity are even clearer. For example, the realist image or analogy
of the modern state as a ‘rational actor’ closely mirrors bourgeois mas-
culine subjectivity (Ashley 1989; Inayatullah and Blaney 1995; Deibert
1996). Each is deemed to have a singular presence and coherent iden-
tity as an individual. Each has a ‘sovereign voice’. The government, or
head of state, is its rational control centre, which, like the rational
mind, controls the actions of the body to project its monolithic will
into the outside world. State sovereignty, like personal autonomy,
requires a clearly demarcated inside/outside boundary which is rigidly
policed. Territorial and national integrity are mirrors of bodily and per-
sonal integrity – and are similarly threatened by involuntary traffic (such
as illegal immigration, smuggling, brain drains, invasion and so on).
Given that the epistemology of the rational actor is shared between
economics, biology and realist IR, it is perhaps unsurprising that in neo-
realist IPE, where game theory predominates, there has been a recent
convergence between neoclassical theories of free-market economics
and neorealist theories of IR around super-Darwinism. The explicit
incorporation of evolutionary theory into the study of world politics
and economic growth is intended to add a dynamic dimension to ana-
lysis, to explain change. In a special edition of International Studies Quar-
terly, the ‘evolutionary analogy’ is employed because:
...in our view, biological and social systems are both subject to
evolutionary processes and for that reason share certain similarities.
They are complex systems that exhibit selection pressures, and
cooperative and synergistic features; and in their transformations
they employ innovation and thrive on innovation.
(Modelski and Poznanski 1996: 316)
Neorealism is deemed to show ‘a close affinity’ with social Darwinism,

in which innovation replaces mutation and economic and social com-
petition replaces natural selection (Modelski and Poznanski 1996: 319).
The ‘discovery’ of this close affinity is taken as an indication of the
strength of the analysis, which appears to uncover certain fundamental
‘laws of nature’ (rather than merely reuniting two disciplines which

emerged synergistically within a single culture, borrowing ideas from
one another in the first place). But it is not just the disciplinary affinities
which give academic plausibility to the rational actor model. To the
extent that the academics themselves embody bourgeois rational mas-
culinity then their own experiences of subjectivity will reinforce the
view that the rational actor model is an abstraction of human ‘nature’.
That personal experience is congruent with the model amounts to a
powerful (if unacknowledged) endorsement of its ‘truth’.
Rational actors, print culture and the telecommunications

revolution
It has been widely argued that communications technology is one fac-

tor which can help to frame the social epistemology of an era. In this
vein, Ronald Deibert (1996), for example, relates the rise of the auto-
nomous rational self (along with other aspects of modernity) to the
transition from a medieval manuscript to a modern print culture. This
change from manuscript was associated with the demise of papal power
as the main political power in Europe. Papal power was promulgated
through a transeuropean, Latin-writing clergy which occupied a single
spiritual community with a shared vision of the ‘great chain of being’ (a
clergy on which princes were forced to rely heavily). Print undercut the
papal position by removing the exclusive control of the clergy over the
written word, and facilitated the development of the scientific revolu-
tion, bureaucracy and the modern state.
But the ‘most striking shift’ associated with the development of print
culture, Deibert explains (1996: 50), was in individual subjectivity: the
creation of a distinctly modern rational autonomous individual or ‘sov-
ereign voice’ (1996: 51). In contrast to manuscript culture, where inter-
textuality and anonymous multiple authorship were taken for granted,
print culture fostered notions of individual subjectivity through private
reading which promoted solitary reflection, individual intellectual work
and personal piety, helping to create a new private sphere. This was
accompanied by a spatial reconfiguration into public/private and rigid
demarcations of political space. The individualism associated with print
culture also contributed to the development of copyright 9 and contrac-
tual relations. There were also:
...a number of innovations linked to the printed text, such as alpha-

betical ordering, sectional divisions, indexes, and standardised texts,
[which] all helped to encourage and complement an abstract, rela-

tional cognitive orientation favouring uniform spatial order and lin-
earity.
(Deibert 1996: 53)
Deibert is at pains to point out that he is not making a technologic-

ally determinist argument but is rather exploring the associations, con-
nections and context of the development of technological innovation
which is socially embedded. The implication of such an analysis is that
if the current telecommunications revolution has anything like the sig-
nificance that the print revolution had, then in the context of large-
scale social change it too will favour certain kinds of subjectivity as part
of a new social epistemology. This raises the question of whether the
days of the rational actor model, together with its social and political
counterparts, the bourgeois rational autonomous masculine self and
the autonomous sovereign state, may be numbered.
Deibert is far from alone in considering that the telecommunications
revolution may have profound effects. Certainly it is being associated
with changes in production and in capitalist political economy; with
new threats to the autonomy of the state, with new scientific revolu-
tions (such as genetics and cybernetics); and with the ‘condition of post-
modernity’, which includes changes to subjectivity if not ‘the death of
the subject’ itself (Harvey 1989; Lash and Urry 1994). At the same time,
postmodern theorizing has opened up a space for new forms of identi-
fication and selfhood for the previously excluded, such as the ‘cyborgs’
and ‘tricksters’, ‘nomads’ and ‘mobile subjectivities’ of postmodern fem-
inism (Haraway 1991; Braidotti 1994; Ferguson 1993). Cyberfeminists
such as Donna Haraway (1991; 1997) explicitly attempt to undermine
modern notions of autonomous selfhood (which they see as incorri-
gibly masculine) and replace them with transgressive and mixed forms
of subjectivity, enlisting the help of new technologies in the process:
Cyborg anthropology attempts to refigure provocatively the border

relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines.
(Haraway 1997: 52)
They aim to overturn the historic association of technology with mas-

culinity, so that technology and theorizing about technology can
become a feminist as well as masculinist resource. If new technologies
underpinned by the telecommunications revolution can be and are
being yoked to a new social epistemology, then they are actively
engaged in constructing that social epistemology as a feminist-friendly

one (Harcourt 1998).
While it is not possible to go into these debates in detail here, it is
worth noting that cyberfeminists and other postmodernists may be
overoptimistic in their assessment of the imminent demise of the bour-
geois rational masculine self and its attributes. Some attributes may be
being undermined through the telecommunications revolution, others
are being reformulated in accentuated ways. As noted above, biology is
epistemologically already closely tied to capitalist economics, and the
new information technologies have revitalized biology from a rather
moribund to the most dynamic and well-funded cutting edge science
(Haraway 1997: 117). While the development of genetic engineering
and the arrival of transgenic organisms profoundly disrupts the self/not
self boundaries of embodiment, the impact of this destabilization is con-
siderably lessened if fantasies of disembodiment can be reinforced. The
more notions of selfhood can be extracted from embodiment, the less
weight bodily integrity carries as a signifier of autonomous selfhood.
Fantasies of disembodiment are, in many ways, being reconfigured
and strengthened. For example, while the theorizing of genes as master
information molecules bent on replicating themselves problematizes
the notion of a coherent individual subject in control of himself, the
equation of genes = pure information also reduces embodied informa-
tion to entirely disembodied linear code in a database so that:
...the paradigmatic habitat for life – the program – bears no neces-

sary relationship to messy, thick organisms.
(Haraway 1997: 246)
The power of this theorizing is that it builds on an already established

fantasy of disembodiment together with the tradition of rationalism.
Meanwhile, the Internet itself is rapidly freeing identity and subjectivity
from the constraints of embodiment. Not only is this evidenced by the
high level of cross-dressing in multi-user domains (MUDs) but also by the
development of a huge market in virtual sex where sensory perceptions
are curtailed and the interaction of bodies plays no part (Stone 1996).
Conclusions
The rational actor model is not a universal model of the human self,
despite its pretensions. Nor is it simply a masculinist discursive con-
struction pertinent to liberal and realist theories of IR and IPE. It is an
abstraction of a particular enlightenment form of masculinity which, it

can be argued, constitutes the paradigmatic form of hegemonic mascu-
linity for the modern era. In considering the power of the rational actor
model, it is important to examine its relationship to embodied mascu-
linity on the ground as well as its discursive power. As this chapter has
argued, the model has strong connections with a particular kind of
embodied masculinity – that of the autonomous bourgeois rational self.
The relationship between the discursive construction of the auto-
nomous rational actor and the embodied subjectivities of bourgeois
men can be spelled out once it is recognized that gender identity is
structured through the interaction of discourse, institutional practices
and embodiment. The same gendered dualisms which underpin the
rational actor model and which exclude women and other subordinate
groups from the enlightenment promise of reason also help to structure
bourgeois masculine subjectivity. Nurtured in a strong private realm,
this subjectivity has been organized around autonomy, self-control, the
subordination of the body to the will, the policing of bodily boundar-
ies, a fantasy of disembodiment sustained in part by impoverished sens-
ibilities in a sterile and impersonal public realm, an abhorrence of
emotion, and the transformation of desire into instrumental goals and
issues of performance and control.
Although never completely sovereign over modern masculine subject-
ivities, the rational actor model and its counterpart in bourgeois mascu-
line subjectivity nonetheless lie at the heart of the social epistemology
of modernity. They are closely associated with the development of lib-
eralism, capitalism and the modern state. They are also reflected in the
natural and social sciences, including biology, economics, IR and IPE.
A classic example is the way the realist/neorealist conception of the
modern state in many ways mirrors bourgeois rational subjectivity. The
power of the rational actor model lies not only in its ‘fit’ with the social
epistemology of modernity and its explanatory usefulness, but also in
the fact that it constructs, confirms and resonates with the subjectivities
of the (mostly male and bourgeois) academics and policymakers who
deploy it.
Unpacking the relationships between the abstract models of mascu-
linity embedded in theory and the embodied identities of men on the
ground is one way of bringing embodiment back into political eco-
nomy, providing a material account of the power relations embedded
in the models. What this type of analysis reveals is that the rational
actor model does not only serve the interests of the masculine élite – it
actually helps to construct that élite through its relationship to the
embodied subjectivities of men. This relationship, like the fact that

women and other subordinate groups are excluded from the model, is
obscured by its abstraction from any kind of embodied social context,
giving it the veneer of universality. The rational actor has grown out of
and is intimately tied to a particular cultural and historical context. It
is both more vulnerable and more durable than its masculinist values
would, at first glance, suggest. Its vulnerability lies in the revelation
that it represents particular masculine interests which are historically
and culturally constrained and which cannot serve for all time. On the
other hand, its durability lies in the fact that it is not simply a propa-
ganda tool, but, through its links with bourgeois masculine subjectiv-
ity and the social epistemology of the modern era, it is involved in the
production of social reality. Therefore, it cannot easily be dismissed
without more general social, political and economic changes taking
place simultaneously.
The changes associated with the arrival of modern telecommunica-
tions might signal just such an opportunity. However, while inside/out-
side boundaries are being challenged, destabilizing modern identities at
both individual and state levels, the fantasy of disembodiment is simul-
taneously being encouraged in new forms and on an unprecedentedly
wide scale. Like much postmodern theorizing itself, which remains in
an abstract, rationalist tradition, computer culture may replace the
‘view from nowhere’ with an equally abstract ‘dream of everywhere’
(Bordo 1993: 218). This would merely re-inscribe the bourgeois rational
self and its fantasy of disembodiment in a modified form. Radical tech-
nological change notwithstanding, it seems likely that aspects of the
rational actor model will continue to resonate with the personal experi-
ences of embodiment of élite men, and fit the ‘social epistemology’ of
capitalism for some time to come.
Notes
1 While individual theorizations vary, basically rational actors are deemed to
operate as isolated atomistic individuals who instrumentally rank a number
of preferences or goals in order of priority, and, taking account of the risks
involved in pursuing different strategies to achieve these goals, act accord-
ingly. In this schema, the rational actor appears not only physically disem-
bodied but socially disembedded, and physical needs are translated into
abstract preferences.
2 See below for a discussion of this concept.
3 See, for example, Connell (1993), Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994) and Brod
and Kaufman (1994).
4 The term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is taken from Connell’s (1987) work on
hegemonic and subordinate forms of masculinity. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’
is the culturally dominant form in a hierarchy of masculinities.
5 Theweleit (1987) has shown how misogynist thinking in the pre-Nazi Ger-
man ‘Freicorps’ focused on an analogy between women’s bodily functions
and bodily fluids and the formless, amorphous masses as threatening to the
well delineated male ‘self’.
6 In the racist colonial ranking of masculinities, the notion of sexual contin-
ence played a crucial role. Sexual continence was the mark of ‘civilization’
which distinguished male British imperialists from their subjects. White
men’s imperial protective role was guaranteed by the need to guard white
women’s ‘purity’ (and their sexual continence, presumably, was assisted by
white women’s apparent absence of sexual desire).
7 Thomas Nagel quoted by Bordo (1993: 217).
8 For example, Seidler’s roots were with the Achilles Heel Collective – which,
although its analysis of gender was rather simplistic, was a pro-feminist con-
sciousness-raising group (see Metcalf and Humphries 1985). Rather more sus-
pect in feminist terms is the work of Robert Bly (1990) – see Kimmel and
Kaufman (1994) or Connell (1995) for critical discussion.
9 As Donna Haraway (1997: 72) argues, copyright represented the author as
‘proprietor of the work and of the self’.
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3
Writing the Body:
Transnational Sex
Jan Jindy Pettman 1
Introduction
This chapter pursues the missing body in IR and GPE, and particularized
representations of bodies which become visible in some kinds of inter-
national relations, including in international sex tourism. It does so by
arguing the importance of sexual servicing in the global economy, and
tracks the commodification of different types of bodies with differenti-
ated power relations in exchanges of sex for money.
The missing body in IR/GPE
International politics and global political economy impact directly and

often violently upon the bodies of actual people. The body you are in
places you, or me, on one side or the other of boundaries that mark
both power relations and entitlements. It is read to locate people on the
inside or the outside of borders that can cost them their life. But these
body politics have not been available for critique in disciplines prac-
tised as disembodied, in the absence of bodies, of the writers and their
subjects. IR and GPE grew safe from the mess, pain, pleasure and desire
of actual bodies – though at times in language which suggested pleasure
and danger were just a word away (see, for example, Cohn 1987, 1993).
Writings on power in IR and GPE are largely disembodied; although
close examination reveals particular constructions of masculinity.
Power and political space are aligned with dominant group men and
normalized masculinity. In the process, both women and minority or
stigmatized men are routinely erased. There is a paradox here, though.
On the one hand, the body is usually missing; or the body, where visibil-
ized, is assumed to be a ‘normal’ male, heterosexual body. On the other,
52
Writing the Body: Transnational Sex 53
the workings of gendered dichotomies associate (dominant group) men

with both public space and reason, and associate women with private
space, body and emotion. Other/othered men are for certain purposes
aligned with women, associated with physicality, dangerous sexuality,
emotions.
Feminist excavations are revealing bodies inscribed with differences
that matter: gendered, racialized, culturalized, classed – and sexualized.
Sex – as desire, danger, eroticized bodies, transgressions, violations –
comes through women’s experiences in identity conflicts, as boundary
markers or community possessions, as women warriors, as commodified
cheap labour on the global assembly line, as labour migrants, ‘foreign’
domestic workers and international sex workers. Here we can trace
changing power relations marked on the bodies of women.
International sex tourism
International sex tourism brings together power and sex, political eco-
nomy and culture, material relations and representations (Pettman
1996a, 1996b). The growth of military base sex, of international air
travel and tourism, stoked demand for paid hospitality, and for paid
sex. At the same time, poorer states promoted tourism as a development
strategy, seeking foreign exchange in the face of growing indebtedness,
trade liberalization and pressure from the World Bank and Interna-
tional Monetary Fund to ‘open up the economy’.
The wealth generated by international tourism lies mainly with the
rich states and first world transnational corporations. Rich states, mainly,
send tourists, including to ‘third world’ states. In the latter, develop-
ment policies, current restructuring, and often wars and state violence
too, have dislocated local economies and set many people on the move
in search of jobs. The contemporary global political economy has femin-
ized migrant labour, from rural to urban areas and export processing
zones within states, and across state borders. Young women’s labour is
commodified as cheap labour, and as docile and less troublesome in
political terms (Enloe 1992). These workers are rarely union or rights-
protected, and may be subject to forms of sexual exploitation and
abuse. Sexual vulnerability seems especially likely in occupations that
already confuse work with servicing men, including domestic labour
and hospitality work.
Thanh-Dam Truong (1990) in her ground-breaking study Sex, Money
and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia puts together a
political economy of women’s labour with issues of sexuality.
The intersection of prostitution and tourism cannot be understood

as a patchwork of discontinuous events resulting from individual
behaviour, or simply as a synchronic expression of sexism and
racism. Instead, it must be placed in the context of the operations
of relations of power and production in the field of air travel which
preceded its development. The emergence of tourism and sex-
related entertainment is an articulation of a series of unequal social
relations including North-South relations, relations between capital
and labour, male and female, production and reproduction.
(Truong 1990: 129)
Truong explores how the sexual division of labour incorporates the role
of sexual labour. Prostitutes contribute sexual services, mainly for men,
but they also contribute to the global production of the tourism indus-
try, and to the wealth of businesses, state agents and states which are
engaged in this enormous and lucrative trade. She asks, too, how differ-
ent states become integrated into the international division of labour
through the provision of leisure services, which crucially include sexual
services, in (mainly) women’s sexual labour.
Some Western European states, the US, Australia and Japan have a
reputation for sending the sex tourists; other states, notably Thailand
and the Philippines, are reputed sex tourist destinations. (Not coincid-
entally, they were also very significant sites for militarized prostitution:
Enloe 1989; Godrej 1995). In turn, sex tourist destinations are represented
in terms of culturalized and sexualized difference – as exotic, erotic. Pros-
titution thrives on provision of paid sex across racialized or other
boundaries (Shrage 1994: 142). This is seen in the importation of ‘exotic’
third world sex workers into first world brothels, in the international
trade in ‘mail-order brides’, and in sex tourism.
‘Asian women’ circulate globally, in representations which resonate
with and reproduce colonial romances and continuing domination
relations (Enloe 1989; Swain 1995). These representations are familiar
from other circumstances of sex across raced lines. Dominant group
men’s access to the bodies of subordinated, colonized or slave women
was part of the privilege of power. Those women were frequently con-
structed as sexual, available, promiscuous, or alternatively as passive, or
already abused: excusing the using men from responsibility towards the
women or their children. Those children usually followed the mother’s
status, thus keeping the (white) race pure. Any sex across the raced
boundary between white women and subordinate men, on the other
hand, betrayed the complexities of power, and threatened both racialized
hierarchies and dominant group men’s control of ‘their’ women and

their paternal lines (Stoler 1991; Jolly 1993; Pettman 1992).
Now tourist brochures, airline advertisements, and hosting states’
enticements regularly feature a new Orientalism in constructing both
tourist destination states and their women. Receiving states are femin-
ized and, along with women, aligned with nature, receptivity and
sexual allure and danger. These images collude provocatively with colo-
nial representations, though this time they may be evoked and sold by
ex-colonized or third world men and states.
Tourism offers adventure, escape, something different. Tourist sites
specialize in staged authenticity, and appeal to tourist, often presumed
male, fantasies (Sharpley 1994). In the process, particular kinds of bod-
ies are represented, constructed, circulated, sold. The Southeast Asian
woman becomes a body, not a voice; not a subject, but subjected, avail-
able for men’s gaze or purchase. She is sexualized, a pleasure machine,
and perhaps a comfort too, pliant; more skilled in pleasuring men than
the tourist’s own group women are. The latter may be seen as feminist-
infected, no longer feminine, nor prepared to please or respect men.
‘Culture’ is deployed to justify the use made of othered women’s bod-
ies, to excuse abuses or actions, including flouting any notion of age of
consent and using child prostitutes. Poverty, too, is used in a functional
explanation of the sale or purchase, helping out those who have no
other option, and whose earnings are presumed (often rightly) to be
providing a modicum of income for impoverished families. In the pro-
cess, bodies are displayed and put into performance. The bodies of the
sex tourist are not so evident, though when they are made visible, it is
often also in stereotypical form, as aging, ugly, white male predator, as
en-masse besuited Japanese businessmen, as aggro US military man.
In sex tourism, then, women’s – and children’s and young men’s –
bodies become part of the trade, as do buyers’ bodies. But, surprisingly,
tourism studies seem to have shared social sciences’, including IR/
GPE’s, reluctance to engage with the body/bodies. The Introduction to
the ‘Gender in Tourism’ special issue of the Annals of Tourism Research
notes that gender has only recently interested tourism researchers, and
argues for ‘thinking about tourism issues as gendered relationships
between individuals, groups, social categories, types of tourism, and
nations in First/Third Worlds’ (Swain 1995: 248). Articles included
‘explore gender ideology in consumption practices, gender perceptions
of tourism development, gender identity, sexuality and nationalism,
gender in the political economy of tourism, gender relations between
tourism consumers and providers, and the reframing of gender ideology
using tourism leisure practice’ (Swain 1995: 263). In the process, it

becomes clear that ‘[t]he sexed body and social sexuality are significant
dimensions of gender in tourism’ (Swain 1995: 261).
Soile Veijola and Eeva Jokinen (1994) write on the absence of the
body in sociological studies in tourism.
So far the tourist has lacked a body because the analyses have tended
to concentrate on the gaze and/or structures and dynamics of waged
labour societies. Furthermore, judged by the discursive postures given
to the writing subject of most of the analyses, the analyst himself has,
likewise, lacked a body. Only the pure mind, free from bodily and
social subjectivity, is presented as having been at work when analysing
field experiences, which has taken place from the distance required
by the so-called scientific objectivity, from the position-in-general.
(Veijola and Jokinen 1994: 149)
They rewrite several influential tourist studies, and themselves, ‘into

the duration of time and sexed body, into being and writing there, in
the temporal space of tourism’ (Veijola and Jokinen 1994: 149).
In the literature of different disciplines, we can trace the usual
absence, and in some the new presence, of the body. Explaining why
the body was absented, we return to explanations that relate to the
exclusion of women, in particular the association of male with mind,
public, political, and the female with body, private, natural. Bodies are
associated with fluids, blood, polluting, sinful or sexual; distracting and
possibly dangerous to men, including to thinking/writing men (see the
chapter by Hooper in this volume).
Materializing the body
So why has the body recently become visible in some disciplines for-
merly missing it? Theoretical and political debates around corporeality
and power in feminism and critical social theory have contributed here.
Feminism explores the ways that women’s sexed bodies are the given
explanation for discrimination, and the ways that women frequently
experience discrimination and oppression bodily. Key feminist cam-
paigns include organizing against violence against women, rape and
sexual harassment (Peterson 1990; Charlesworth 1994; Shrage 1994).
Many feminist claims concern women’s bodies, for example for bodily
autonomy or choice concerning whether or not to marry, have sex,
have children or abortion. In their campaigns, they demonstrate that
‘the body is not only a text of culture. It is also . . . a practical, direct

locus of social control’ (Bordo 1989: 13; See also Illo 1996).
Feminists also struggle to understand why women’s bodies become
emblematic of new identity, right-wing and fundamentalist politics.
Their bodies become political battlegrounds for different kinds of polit-
ical projects, especially those against the secular state, and in reactive
state-legitimizing projects (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1992; Moghadam
1994; Alexander 1994). Viewed as reproducers of the collective, both
physically and as those responsible for the upbringing of children, their
social, especially sexual, relations are often severely constrained. And as
markers of difference and of the borders of belonging, women become
possessions, or property, of their families and communities. Gendered
power materializes in particular notions of women, family and sexual-
ity, and in bodily effects that are often justified in the name of ‘culture’
or religion.
Michel Foucault’s writings, especially History of Sexuality Volume 1
(1981), have been enormously influential, and generated productive
insights and ways into body politics which have entranced or seduced
many feminists too (Ramazanoglu 1993, especially Maureen McNeil’s
‘Dancing with Foucault’). There is also a growing literature exploring
masculinities and ‘deviant’ sexualities (for example Turner 1984, 1992;
Weeks 1985; Scott and Morgan 1993; Connell and Dowsett 1992; Con-
nell 1995; Buchbinder 1994). Cultural studies and feminist film studies
have explored fashion, advertisements, objects of the gaze, body image
and projection in anorexia for example. Women’s, and some men’s,
bodies are constructed as sexual or erotic bodies, for others’ consump-
tion. Bodies circulate in different ways as ideals and as saleable items.
Writing these bodies engages a politics of sex, and not only of gender in
the sense of social relations between men and women. Such writings
identify the production of sexual identities which include the homo-
sexual and the prostitute. They help us move from the body to bodies,
to different kinds of bodies, and to sexualities. There is a double move
here: from ‘the’ body to sexual difference between men and women;
and then to sexualities, which are more than two.
Remembering sexual difference
While taking different forms within and between different disciplines,

writing the body refigures notions of materiality, corporeality, embodi-
ment, subjectivity and identity. So, for example, Rosi Braidotti (1994)
moves beyond the sex/gender distinction to the social construction of
both sexuality and the body – or, rather, different kinds of bodies. She
writes in search of a materialist theory of feminist subjectivity, that
develops the notion of corporeal materiality by emphasizing the
embodied and therefore sexually differentiated structure of the speaking
subject (Braidotti 1994: 3). Braidotti locates ‘corporal and consequently
sexed beings’, asserting the specificity of the lived, female bodily experi-
ence (Braidotti 1994: 174–5). This is an important strategic move that
makes it effectively impossible to disregard gender and sexual difference
in the way so much of IR/GPE still does. She advocates a corporeal polit-
ics of location, which assumes embodiment, and the situated nature of
subjectivity.
In the feminist framework, the primary site of location is the body.

The subject is not an abstract entity, but rather a material embodied
one. The body is not a natural thing; on the contrary, it is a cultur-
ally coded socialised entity. Far from being an essentialist notion, it
is the site of intersection between the biological, the social, and the
linguistic.
(Braidotti 1994: 238)
Writing of the mutually constituting, fluid and mobile making of bod-

ies and sexual difference, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) introduces her project:
I will deny that there is the ‘real’, material body on the one hand and
its various cultural and historical representations on the other.
. . . these representations and cultural inscriptions quite literally con-
stitute bodies and help produce them as such. The bodies are cultur-
ally, sexually, racially specific bodies, the mobile and changeable
terms of cultural production
(Grosz 1994: x–xi).
The body must be regarded as the site of social, political, cultural and
geographic inscriptions, production, or constitution. The body is not
opposed to culture, a resistant throw-back to a natural past; it is itself
cultural, the cultural, product.
(Grosz 1994: 23)
Moving beyond the sex/gender distinction, Grosz identifies the social

body. ‘As sexually specific, the body codes the meanings projected onto
it in sexually determinate ways’ (Grosz 1994: 18). The body is social and
discursive object . . .
. . . bound up in the order of desire, signification and power. That

may help explain the enormous investment in definitions of the
female body in struggles between patriarchs and feminists: what is at
stake is the activity and agency, the mobility and social space,
accorded to women. Far from being an inert, passive, noncultural
and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the
site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and
intellectual struggles.
(Grosz 1994: 18–19)
These struggles impact directly on the actual bodies of women in

nationalist, communalist and fundamentalist conflicts, seen, for
example, in the use of mass rape as a military strategy in Bosnia and
elsewhere, and in the expulsion of women from the streets of Kabul
with the victory of the Taliban in much of Afghanistan.
Grosz reminds us that ‘there is no body as such: there are only bodies’
(Grosz 1994: 23). There are different kinds of bodies, of which male or
female is one difference. Feminist insistence on the sexed body and
sexual difference disrupts male-as-norm and male bodies passing as
‘the’ body or as gender-neutral. It brings into representation sexual dif-
ference, and other/othered bodies which are treated differently in terms
of entitlements and the possibility of belonging. These differences can
be mobilized to interrogate key concepts and sites in IR/GPE, in citizen-
ship and relation to state, in nationalism and other identity politics, in
wars and other forms of boundary transgression and defence, and in the
global sexual division of labour (Pettman 1996a). Along the way, we
uncover the citizen body, and the military body, presumed to be male.
The connections between these bodies and ‘the body politic’ remain
problematic (Jones 1993; Shapiro 1996). But feminist critiques reveal
that only some kinds of bodies make good soldiers and citizens. Only
some men have what it takes to do public, political work, including
international politics. The citizen is presumed male, and heterosexual.
Certain kinds of male bodies are at home in public space and civic virtue.
Others, female bodies or gay men’s bodies or minority male bodies, dis-
rupt dominant group men’s naturalized right to enjoy and exploit polit-
ical space. These ‘others’ experience public space and political power
differently, in ways that become formative in their understandings of
their own rights, or lack of them, as subjects. This is especially so when
they are seen to be out of place, for example women or those working
along sexualized transnational circuits of exchange, as domestic or sex
workers.
Remembering sex
Bodies are troubling enough; sex is worse (though the two are closely
associated). Sex and sexuality function as a site of identity and conflict.
Sexuality has . . .
. . . a curiously unsettled and troubling status: source of pain as much

as pleasure, anxiety as much as affirmation, identity crises as much
as stability of the self. . . . [Sex] has become a moral and political
battleground.
(Weeks 1985: 3–4)
Elizabeth Grosz (1994: viii) suggests four rather different meanings of

‘sex’: as sex drive, attended in psychoanalysis; as sexual act/s; as iden-
tity, in the sexed body as male or female; and as a set of orientations,
practices, desires in seeking out pleasure. Sexuality is clearly a lot more
than being male or female, and there are many possibilities in playing it
out. Again, sex and sexuality are not natural (despite naturalizing dis-
courses to sanction some sexualities and penalize others), but cultural
and political, and fought over.
Sex ‘has long been a transmission belt for wider social anxieties, and a
focus for struggles over power, one of the prime sites in truth where
domination and subordination are defined and expressed’ (Weeks 1985:
16). Weeks identifies different positions on sex. Absolutists, including
religious fundamentalists and the new Right, see sex as danger; bodies
are polluting, women need to be kept under control. Liberals attempt to
remove state and other institutions from sex, to revert to individual
rights and private matters. Libertarians see sexual repression as a key to
social oppression. The last two positions are shared by some feminists,
who see attempts to control or deny women’s sexuality as preserving
male domination, or who comment on the irony of feminists looking
to a masculinist state to protect them against male violence or sexual
exploitation. They, in turn, are strongly contested by those feminists
who see male sexual demands and compulsory heterosexuality as key to
the continuing exploitation of women. These debates are most fiercely
contested around women’s body rights or wrongs, in sex wars waged
both against and within feminism (Segal and McIntosh 1992; Kaufmann
1993; Orford 1994; Shrage 1994). They are especially evident in bitter
arguments among feminists over prostitution.
‘Prostitution occupies a significant position in the intersection of
feminist debates about the relationship between power, sex, sexuality
and work’ (Sullivan 1995: 184). Arguments have long raged over
whether the prostitute – or the institution of prostitution – is immoral;
whether prostitution is an example, or emblematic, of women’s oppres-
sion; whether it is a form of economic exploitation, or necessity, or
opportunity; whether the state should criminalize, regulate or remove
itself from prostitution (Truong 1990; Davis 1993). These debates figure,
also, as theories about gender relations, sex and sexuality, and the
nature of women’s work, too.
Thanh-Dam Truong (1990) asks how western debates about prostitu-
tion fit in relation to third world prostitutes in informal sector work, in
the tourist industry and in work as migrant prostitutes in industrialized
countries. Her own work on prostitution as sexual labour suggests that
debates about sex tourism cannot be contained within the usual
women’s rights/human rights discourses. ‘In the process of the cam-
paign against sex tourism . . . many more complex issues have been
revealed, including racial discrimination, business ethics, economic pol-
icy, and international relations (cultural, economic, social and polit-
ical)’ (Truong 1990: 2).
Sex tourism at its most crass or romanticized is literally a classic
moment in international relations. Pleasure and danger come together
with transgressions across the borders of power – first world/third
world, rich/poor, male/female (often), old/young (often) – in ‘a peculiar
and unstable combination of sexuality, nationalism and economic
power’ (Leheny 1995: 369).
In the process, the Asian woman, Thai woman or Filipina is reduced
to particular bodies, associated with sexual availability and exoticness,
or else with passivity and victimhood. Here, there can be a strange con-
vergence between the anti-feminist, sexist representations of sex tour-
ism, and some feminist campaigns against sex tourism (Pettman 1997).
This is a reminder of the problems inherent in attempting to write a
more inclusive IR/GPE, which accounts for ‘other’ bodies.
Renaming is a signal to a changed or new political project. So the Jap-
anese Association of Women rewrote the character for the prostitute
from ‘women selling bodies’ to ‘men buying bodies’ (Barry et al. 1984:
44). But the bodies in focus are still women’s, or children’s bodies, the
bodies of sex workers, not the bodies of the buyer or user. Note, too, the
objection of sex workers who reply that they are not selling their bod-
ies, but in the short term renting them, or providing sexual services; not
so different, some argue, from other forms of bodily labour for sale.
Many sex workers believe themselves to be more or other than prosti-
tutes. Prostitution is what they do (often for reasons of poverty, lack of
other employment or a calculation of comparative returns), not what

they are, or what many imagine they will be doing in the future. Nam-
ing them as prostitutes might collude with seeing them as fallen, fatally
done, sealing their fate. But many Thai women, including very young
women and those still legally girls, construct themselves as good and
dutiful daughters, as hard workers whose sacrifice and generosity enable
choices and chances for family members, though often in difficult or
dreadful circumstances (Pettman forthcoming). The tendency of some
campaign and media literature to reduce them to ‘the prostitute’ sug-
gests that that is all they are, not what they do for money (for now).
Some sex workers also pick up on developmental and nationalist rhet-
oric, seeing themselves as working in the national interest, and welfare,
smoothing the way for foreign military men or businessmen. In these
ways they seek to subvert popular representations of them as either bad
women or hapless victims, and so to renegotiate their work, sexuality
and identity in a more positive light.
These competing representations connect with questions about dif-
ferent cultures’ constructions of sex and sex work, which require ana-
lysis of indigenous and colonial forms of prostitution (for example,
Hantrakul 1988; Baustad 1994) and of contemporary local demand for
paid sex. So, some commentators remark on the widely accepted use of
prostitutes by Thai men, and debates rage over ‘Buddhalogical’ explana-
tions concerning gender roles, women’s status, sex and Buddhist cul-
ture in Thailand (Phongpaichit 1982; Hantrakul 1988, Van Esterik 1992;
Tannenbaum 1995). But contemporary forms of sex work in Southeast
Asian states also reflect commodification of sex through militarism and
sex tourism, and the reassertion of forms of Asian masculinity which
seek comfort in the maintenance, display and sale of Asian hyperfemi-
ninity as a marker of Asian exceptionalism, against the supposed loss of
masculine certainties faced by western men at home (Moon 1997; Han
and Ling 1998).
Writing transnational sex and power
How, then, might feminists represent the bodies entangled in that form
of international relations that is sex tourism, and in sex associated with
bodies not only sexualized but nationalized, racialized and culturalized?
How can we move women and children in the sex trade from a bodily
presence to a voice/voices, in circumstances where power relations are
so often loaded against them? How should we attend to particular bod-
ies in a now-globalized sex trade?
Paying attention to the specific locations of work and the interna-

tional political economy of representations might help. What are the
specifics of bodies, and embodied experiences? What of gender, nation-
ality, age, class on both sides? What is the role of the state and its differ-
ent agents, for example in criminalizing, harassing or protecting sex
workers? Are those workers self-employed, or embedded in business and
other relations with, for example, bar, brothel or pimp?
Differences that matter include whether the sex workers are citizens in
the state they work in; if not, whether they are there legally or illegally,
with or without access to support networks and resources. Other pre-
sumed differences need interrogating. The voluntary/coerced dichotomy
is much deployed, but notions of choice or consent in unequal sexual
relations of any kind are difficult to think through. So too are gendered
power and pressure in families or relationships, and poverty or lack of
any other means to survive. The adult/child distinction is also difficult
on the ground. Transnational campaigns often focus on child prostitu-
tion, as children cannot be seen to have consented, and because it is
illegal in the sending states. The use of child prostitutes extends well
beyond self-identified paedophiles, and AIDS seems to have prompted a
macabre search for younger and newer sex. Local or national cultures
concerning the legal and other statuses of children compound the prob-
lems. In some states, child marriages are also an issue. At the same time,
millions of children labour in hard, exploited and dangerous work in
other sectors; and, for some, sex is the cost of keeping the job. The child
or young woman worker may be the family’s only earner.
It is necessary, then, to look at family, local, national and transna-
tional configurations of power. What difference does it make that one
Australian man goes to Bangkok for sex, and another goes to a brothel
in Sydney and uses a Thai sex worker imported for ‘exotic’ sex work?
What difference does it make if the sex purchased is by men from
young men or boys? What if the buyer is female and the bought male?
This shifts the focus and terms of cross-raced sex, and of national loca-
tion. So in ‘economies of pleasure’ in Bali, for example, or in Barbados,
white women seek boyfriends in an inversion of the gender but not the
race, or often the class and age, politics of sex tourism encounters
(Shrage 1994: 92). The woman buying defies or confuses the usual artic-
ulations of international sex-power. Young Japanese women who seek
sex with western men, for money or adventure, are labelled ‘yellow
cabs’, while some Japanese schoolgirls participate in ‘financially sup-
ported dating’ to fund the purchase of consumer goods (Kelsky 1994;
Moon 1997). The range of experiences in sex work suggested in these
different examples cautions us to attend to the range of experiences

obscured by generalizations across race, nation, place, age and class.
Sexual panics and liberal/libertarian resistances, feminist and other-
wise, have been played out on international stages for more than a cen-
tury, including over white slavery, sexual trafficking and the reputed
promiscuity of and threatened pollution by ‘other’ bodies (Reanda
1991; Stienstra 1996). Contemporary moral panics which have claimed
international attention include child prostitution and pornography,
international trafficking of women into prostitution, international sex
tourism and AIDS. Each comes in representations of racialized differ-
ence and sexual danger. Globalizing discourses around sexuality and
danger connect with other kinds of global flows of people/bodies
(Appadurai 1990; Pettman 1996b) in, for example, labour migrations,
transnational foreign troops and military bases, and sex tourism, and in
images, knowledges, campaigns, funds.
There is currently considerable political debate about and mobiliza-
tion against sex tourism transnationally and in international fora, evid-
ent, for example, at the 1993 Vienna Human Rights Conference and the
1995 Women’s Conference in Beijing. Sex tourism and women’s vul-
nerability as labour migrants were particular concerns, especially for
delegates from regional and state women’s NGOs in Southeast Asia.
Specific transnational campaigns and alliances, involving groups like
Empower and ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism), publi-
cize and oppose the forced trade of women and girls across state borders
into prostitution. For example, the Asia Watch report A Modern Form of
Slavery (1993) documents the trafficking of Burmese women and girls
into prostitution in Thailand. The accompanying violence, rape, intim-
idation and virtual imprisonment are compounded by the women’s and
girls’ illegal migration status, and the illegality of the brothels in which
they work. It is compounded, too, by the high level of official involve-
ment in the traffic, at the border, and in transportation, organization,
and ‘protection’. The border functions not to keep people out, but to
exploit and control those who enter or are trafficked illegally.
An international political economy is evident in the forces propel-
ling this trade, including civil war, state repression and violence
against minorities in Burma, poverty and lack of employment oppor-
tunities, and the low status of girls, seen often as a burden on their
families and/or with obligations to do whatever is necessary to provide
money for them. Agents pay the relinquishing family member a sum
which forms the basis of a debt which the women and girls must work
off. The debt climbs steeply with each transaction, in border crossing,
transport, re-selling of girls, and to cover their own ‘expenses’. Most

have no idea what the debt is, or how far they have progressed in pay-
ing it off. Police crackdowns often see them arrested, fined and handed
back to agents with the fines added to the debt. Alternatively, forced
repatriation on grounds of illegal entry dispatches them to largely
unknown fates.
The international campaign against trafficking utilizes UN conven-
tions and international NGO linkages. It focuses, in particular, on child
prostitution and on the slavery-like conditions in which trafficked
women work, but often calls on governments to act against other forms
of prostitution as well. It also connects with campaigns against interna-
tional sex tourism, and pressure on sending-state governments to act
against their citizens’ involvement in this trade, especially where child
prostitution is concerned. The World Congress against the Commercial
Exploitation of Children was held in Stockholm in 1996 attended by
delegates from 126 states. It documented this extensive trade, and
called on states, NGOs and the international community to act against
those who had sex with children, whether those who paid were local or
foreign. Some states, including Australia, Sweden and Germany, have
legislated to enable prosecution of their nationals on their return from
using children sexually while overseas.
Some feminist researchers and organized sex worker groups have
mobilized against the anti-trafficking and anti-sex tourism campaigns.
They challenge the campaigns’ representations of ‘Asian’ sex workers as
mainly poor, young, uneducated, coerced, responsible for family
dependants, and probably HIV positive. So the Australian group PROS
(Prostitute Rights Organization for Sex Workers) fault the ‘moral out-
rage’ of groups like ECPAT (Murray and Robinson 1995). They rightly
point out that most of the sex industry in Thailand involves local trade.
They challenge popular distinctions between free and coerced prostitu-
tion, arguing that Asian sex workers are motivated, as Australian sex
workers are, by rational choices and the possibility of earning consider-
ably more than in other occupations. They suggest that a racist contrast
is drawn in the campaigns between presumed free choosing and com-
petent Australian sex workers and passive victim Asian sex workers.
Almost all Australian sex workers now insist on condom use, and
there is evidence that Asian, mainly Thai, sex workers are currently used
to cater for men who refuse condom use (Brockett and Murray 1993:
90). They form an underclass, aggravated by their uncertain or illegal
immigration status (often coming in on temporary visitors’ visas), and
by the large debt of A$20,000 to A$30,000 which they incur as part of
their work contract. In these situations, while it is clear that the women
come in the hope and promise of large financial rewards once they have
worked off the debt, they are vulnerable to exploitation and unlikely to
have access to support from other women. Australian sex worker groups
call for decriminalizing all sex work, and treating sex work as a job like
any other. They assert that the anti-trafficking campaigns perpetuate
stereotypes of the Asian prostitute, and invite racism against them,
while also further stigmatizing all sex workers and encouraging harass-
ment and intimidation more generally. In these situations, it is harder
to provide support and health services to illegal workers in particular.
They argue that child prostitution is better dealt with in terms of viola-
tions against labour laws and child rights, and not in terms of prostitu-
tion (PROS 1995).
[I]t is important for western and Asian sex workers to form links in
order to lobby for social change and move away from the sterile dis-
tinction between free and forced prostitution which is used by anti-
pornography feminists to stereotype Asian sex workers as victims.
Their focus on sex tourism and ‘trafficking’ is reinforcing stigma
towards all prostitutes and a distorted view of sex industries and
their power dynamics.
(Murray and Robinson 1995: 21)
They ask – in a world of globalizing business, entertainment and com-

munications – why Thai women should not come to Australia on work
permits to do sex work, and why Australians should not go across state
borders for sex.
These critiques are a reminder of the politics at stake, and the differ-
ent investments in sex and the sex industry, including among women.
In international forms, whether the sex worker or the client, or both,
are ‘abroad’, we need to disentangle particular constructions of gender
relations, alongside and infusing national and racialized identities and
boundaries. Sexual images and the exotic/erotic are packaged and pur-
chased in the international sex trade, and racialized gender images are
generated and utilized in international anti-sex tourism and anti-
trafficking campaigns, too.
Transnational sex shopping
Racialized, sexualized images of ‘Asian women’ now replay instantan-

eously and vividly via new globalizing technologies, especially through
the Internet. ‘Foreign’ sexed bodies are displayed, for sale from home,
in a trade that confuses and defies older notions of sovereignty, space
and border transgressions. Men can shop for women in cyberspace, and
purchase access to sites, and to women, through a credit card transac-
tion (Cunneen and Stubbs 1997).
Sites advertising ‘mail order brides’ reproduce the racialized sexual pol-
itics of sex tourism. They commodify Asian women’s supposed femininity
and sexuality, as perfect wives and sexual partners. A recent study of the
disproportionately high rate of spousal murder of Filipinas married to
Australian men argues that both the migration marriage and murder
patterns must be located within a framework of both unequal gender
power and first world/third world inequalities. It explores the racialized
and sexualized construction of Filipinas, ‘mobilised to justify and
authorise first world men’s access to and power over third world
women on the basis of mythical “natural” characteristics’ (Cunneen
and Stubbs 1997: 121).
These characteristics mimic those commodified in international sex
tourism. But marriage permits the overlay of a rescue romance, saving
the ‘bride’ from her sisters’ sex worker fate, or from poverty. As a result,
the bride is expected to feel, and display, gratitude. Should she fail to do
so, or demonstrate those ‘western feminist’ attributes of independence
or complaint, she places herself beyond the bounds of protection. No
longer pliant, faithful, hardworking and uncomplaining – attributes
presumed in her purchase – she can be blamed for abuse or even for her
own violent death. She becomes a gold-digger, using the (usually older)
man to jump the immigration queue. This construction reveals familiar
Australian ambivalence about ‘Asia’, as well as many men’s ambival-
ence about women, and sex (Robinson 1996).
These politics of representation return us to the difficulties of writing
transnational sex, and to the challenge to recognize choices and strat-
egies, alongside structural inequalities and exploitation, and the dan-
gers and violence that many women do experience. Attempting to find
an appropriate language can become a way of working which in turn
uncovers both the complexities of power and embodied subjectivities.
Tracking the politics and power relations that infuse international sex
tourism and international marriage markets reveals a transnational
sexual political economy, and intimate relations marked by gender,
nation, state, race, culture, class and age. We cannot make sense of the
lucrative business and volatile politics of sex tourism and related cross-
border trades in women without interrogating both gender power and
inter-national power. And we cannot make sense of IR and political
economy unless we admit sexed bodies and interrogate gender power.

Then we can ‘unearth the real bodies that the nation-state and tradi-
tional IR have buried’. 2
Notes
1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Pettman (1997). My thanks to
Tasha Sudan, Helen Meekosha and Gillian Youngs for their critical contribu-
tions to this revised chapter.
2 Tasha Sudan, personal communication.
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Part II
Technologies, Symbolism and
Representation
4
Globalization, Technology and
Consumption
Gillian Youngs
Introduction
Technology has been too much a missing link in the analysis of GPE.
This chapter explores it as one of the conceptual paths to developing
our understanding of power, including through the association of pro-
duction and consumption. It is identified as part of the path toward
embodied understanding, particularly in helping to close the production-
consumption circle. The chapter explains how technology is usefully
integrated into both an historical analysis of developments leading to
globalization, and examination of the changing qualities of US hege-
mony in this context. I argue that technological factors are key to explor-
ing transnational linkages, especially as they are articulated through
crossborder corporate networks and the activities of the most powerful
transnational corporations (TNCs). I also illustrate how technology is an
embedded dimension of discourses of globalization, such as Fukuyama’s
(1992) ‘end of history’ thesis, and thus crucial to critical thinking about
such discourses (see also Youngs 1996). Drawing in particular on the
work of Susan Strange (1994 and 1996), the chapter goes on to discuss
technology as an element of structural power in the global economy.
The analysis emphasizes the continuing dominance of the US–Europe–
Japan triad in global technology flows and the importance of information
and communication technologies (ICTs) in this picture. ICTs contribute
to the need for an expanded consideration of materiality, recognizing its
intangible as well as its tangible aspects. This need is associated with the
development of service orientations, notably in the triad economies, and
the expanding range of intangible forms of production and consumption
generated by them. Marketing is assessed as an integrated element of
symbolic consumption, especially in the contemporary conditions of
75
increasing product differentiation. I undertake a critical discussion of

consumption as a social complex, including its gendered qualities. The
final part of the chapter considers the entertainment and tourism sec-
tors as characteristic of transnational symbolic consumption, and
assesses, in particular, enduring US cultural influence in these areas. The
Disney theme park is examined as a motif of the organized leisure era.
History and globalization
Globalizaton is a contemporary development of the internationaliza-

tion of the world economy which has characterized the 20th century
and reaches back to earlier processes of colonization and imperialism
(Darby 1997). The historical continuities and discontinuities relevant to
assessments of globalization are thus highly complex. They indicate
that any notion of globalization as entirely new is at best unhelpful and at
worst extremely misleading. Internationalization and globalization have
been and remain intensely material, involving the movement of people
(including as slaves and various forms of migrant workers), goods, and
money for capital and financial investment and foreign exchange.
The First and Second World Wars were key historical moments result-
ing from political and economic breakdowns in international relations
and causing devastation in human and material terms, but also contribut-
ing directly to restructuring and intensification in internationalization
(Olson and Groom 1991; Clark 1997). They were the periods during
which was asserted the growing role of the US – taking over the status of
leading creditor nation from Britain by the end of the First World War
and ending the Second World War in a hegemonic position of power mil-
itarily, politically and economically (Kindleberger 1987; Van der Wee
1987; Gilpin 1987; Kennedy 1989; Strange 1994). The rise of American
power has characterized the 20th century to the extent of it being labelled
‘The American Century’ (Slater and Taylor 1999). The Pax Americana has
been applied as a term to describe the hegemonic nature of this power in
supporting the international institutional framework for the spread of
economic liberalism and its free trade principles. This construction views
the US as having taken over the role played by the British under a Pax Bri-
tannica of the previous century.1 The extent of the institutionalization of
this role through, in particular, US influence in the UN system, including
the Bretton Woods financial and trade structure, the International Mon-
etary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT), has been an expression of American hegemony ‘as a fit
between power, ideas and institutions’ (Cox 1981: 140).
Globalization, Technology and Consumption 77
The delinking of the dollar from the gold standard in the early 1970s
and the arrival of the era of floating exchange rates led to claims of the
collapse of the Bretton Woods system and an extensive debate about the
associated destabilization of US hegemony (Van der Wee 1987: 421–512;
Keohane 1984; Gilpin 1987).2 The postwar recovery and rise of Western
Europe and Japan led to a triadic perspective on power in the world eco-
nomy. Robert Cox (1994: 52) has described the triad as ‘three macro-
regions’, which in contemporary times have been redefining themselves:
. . . a Europe centred on the EC [European Community, now usually

referred to as European Union (EU)], an East Asian sphere centred on
Japan, and a North American sphere centred on the United States
and looking to embrace Latin America . . . Macro-regionalism is one
facet of globalization, one aspect of how a globalizing world is being
restructured.
Since the late 1980s, fresh interpretations of American hegemony

have been inspired by post-cold war conditions in which the absence of
the bipolar structure of international relations and its oppositional east/
west, communist/capitalist definitions focused new attention on the
US-led western capitalist system and its apparently ever-expanding geo-
graphical, societal and cultural influence. Francis Fukuyama’s (1992)
‘end of history’ thesis remains one of the most well-known global
reframings of IR in these western-centred terms (see also Youngs 1997a).
The so-called new world order opened the way for global incorporation-
ist visions of liberal hegemony of renewed strength. Embedded in Fuku-
yama’s detailed theoretical arguments as well as his ‘end of history’
motif is a sense of the inevitability of such visions coming to fruition.
Part of the power of these arguments is the way in which they bind
temporal and spatial considerations, capturing the spread of the capital-
ist system across the globe in a historically-definitive framework, with
an oppositional view of insiders and outsiders described as those who
have reached the goal of the end of history and those who are ‘stuck in
history’. The level of philosophical closure about human destiny and its
range of alternative possibilities is among the areas of his thesis which
demand most critical attention. As I have argued elsewhere:
According to Fukuyama, we know what we need to know about

where we are going and the main difference exists between those
who have arrived and those who have yet to do so. Or, as he defines
it, the main global division of interest is between the ‘post-historical’
part of the world and ‘a part that is still stuck in history’, broadly
speaking between the ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ worlds.
(Youngs 1997a: 32. See also Fukuyama 1992: 276, 385)
One of the distinctive elements of the Fukuyama thesis is the explora-

tion of political economy, or, to be more precise, liberal political eco-
nomy. His arguments aim to convince of ‘the combined role of liberal
economics and politics in meeting human needs, material and non-
material’ (Youngs 1997a: 31). The ‘end of history’ thesis also addresses
the area of culture in a highly delineated way, presenting a notion of
‘global culture’ tied to a technologically-driven, liberal political eco-
nomy and thus depicting what I describe as ‘the transnational triumph
of the technological imperative’ (ibid. See also Youngs 1996).
Technology and power
Technology has been a major concern in some of the most interesting

work on contemporary issues of change and the world political eco-
nomy in general (see especially Talalay, Farrands and Tooze 1997) and
the current nature of US hegemonic influence in particular (Strange
1994 and 1996). There has been growing awareness of the importance
of building technology into our understanding of power in the global
political economy and thus into our understanding of the bases for
inequalities. Susan Strange’s (1994: 26–9) seminal ‘four-sided’ approach
to structural power included the knowledge structure alongside security,
production and financial structures, recognizing them all as ‘interact-
ing’. Her definition of the knowledge structure is broad, incorporating
ideas and processes and thus all aspects of technology. According to
Strange (1994: 121), ‘a knowledge structure determines what knowledge
is discovered, how it is stored, and who communicates it by what
means to whom and on what terms’. Strange’s analysis is interesting
not least because it is at one and the same time a general approach to
power in the global economy and an explanation of what she assesses
as the enduring terms of American hegemony.
In tracing the change in knowledge structure from dominance by the
Church to dominance by ‘the scientific state’, she sets out fundamental
aspects of her understanding of US global influence, including, import-
antly, through the activities and wealth of its TNCs, and the scale and
wealth of its internal market (Strange 1994: 123–33). With clear
emphasis on the diverse ways in which knowledge infuses the three
other structures of security, production and finance, she concludes that
‘technological changes have led to a greater concentration of power in

one state’ (Strange 1994: 133). In her more recent work on ‘the retreat
of the state’, Strange (1996: 31–65) concentrates on the market side of
the hegemonic equation, describing a move of authority away from
states, particularly in the financial and production structures, to mar-
kets. Thus, she notes the growing power of TNCs and argues that they
should increasingly be viewed as ‘political players’. 3
Transnational corporate activity characterizes the triad and the substan-
tial links that bind each of its elements. The 1997 World Investment Report
(WIR) (UNCTAD 1997: xviii–xix) calculated that the triad was home to 87
per cent of the top 100 TNCs and accounted for 88 per cent of their foreign
assets; the US was by far both the largest recipient of foreign direct invest-
ment (FDI) and the biggest investor abroad. It absorbed one out of every
four dollars spent on FDI in the world in 1996 and its outstanding lead in
the scale of global investors was followed by the UK, Germany, France and
Japan; the EU remained the largest host and home region, accounting for
half of FDI inflows to developed countries (UNCTAD 1997: 4).
Mergers, acquisitions and crossborder inter-firm agreements have
been a major and growing source of this transnational corporate trend,
particularly within the triad. Technological factors are influential.
Demands on research and development for technological innovation
and the associated capital costs and knowledge-based requirements are
among the most important (UNCTAD 1997: 13). Technology flows
have been a substantial and growing element of transnational corporate
linkages. As the WIR explains:
Global payments of fees and royalties for technology quadrupled to

an estimated $48 billion between 1983 and 1995. If data for the
United States and Germany are indicative, some four-fifths of these
payments take place between parent firms and their foreign affiliates.
This phenomenon underscores the close relationship between FDI
and intangible [my emphasis] technology flows, as well as the strong
proprietary asset base of FDI.
But technology flows also take place independently of FDI. This is
reflected in the payments for intellectual property rights and related
specialized services and the growing strategic partnerships between
unaffiliated firms. Thus, although much of the trade in technology
takes place between affiliated companies in different countries, there
has also been a significant increase in technology flows and linkages
between unaffiliated firms.
(UNCTAD 1997: 20)
These technology flows are concentrated among the key players of

the triad, with US firms accounting for an estimated 56 per cent of
total global receipts in royalties and licence fees (UNCTAD 1997: 21.
See also Sharp 1997). Technology is central to our understanding of
both globalization and the terms of power relevant to it. Technocratic
characteristics of the operation of the global economy and power
within it have intensified as evidenced by the nature and concentra-
tions of FDI and technology flows and the institutional forms appro-
priate to them. One of the most graphic developments in this context
is the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the area of trade-
related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) (Hoekman and Kostecki
1995). From the more obviously tangible preoccupations of the GATT
with manufactured goods, we see a new focus on the intangible techno-
logical flows associated with TRIPS. The intangible and complex nature
of technology thus presents one of the major challenges for analysts
of contemporary global economy. The problem is that technology
has tended to be too much overlooked as a social scientific issue in
IR and IPE, and taken too much as a delineated, material, ‘given’
and largely ‘exogenous’ factor in society (Talalay, Tooze and Farrands
1997: 2), in being tied principally to the dominant knowledge struc-
ture of science.
I apply the concept of ‘the technological imperative’ to indicate how
the rationalistic scientific approaches to technology underpinning such
assumed perspectives on it have become embedded in notions of mod-
ernization and development and thus in theories of globalization such as
the Fukuyama ‘end of history’ thesis. A significant part of the problem
here is the degree to which technology is increasingly explicit in shap-
ing the global economy and the nature of power within it, yet still
implicit in too many (particularly dominant) perspectives on it. This
implicit quality does not facilitate critical questions about the nature
and contested social meanings of technology; on the contrary, it tends
to indicate that these are, in the main, unnecessary. It is also worth
stressing that the tendency to assume technology has also led to lim-
ited efforts, or even, it could be argued, limited awareness, of the vari-
ous kinds of importance the explicit trends associated with it may have:
hence the seminal nature of Strange’s work in locating technology
firmly within her analysis of structural power in IPE. Such an approach
helps both to stimulate analytical interest in these trends and to pro-
vide a basis for exploring them further. It also helps to prompt exam-
ination of the concept of technology and overtly challenge its assumed
and implicit status.4
Technology and materiality
In addressing technology ‘as endogenous to political economy’ (Tala-

lay, Tooze and Farrands 1997: 4–5), we confront its relationship to our
understanding of materiality. In so doing, we are bringing our concep-
tual negotiation of technology into direct touch with its explicit trans-
national characteristics. One straightforward point can be made at this
juncture: technology is both a substantial material element of trans-
national exchange, interest and activity and the means by which such
transnational phenomena are expressed (see, for example, Deibert 1997).
Both dimensions are clearly influential in defining the diverse meanings
of technology in the global economy. Technologically-intensive indus-
tries (petroleum and mining, electronics, automotive, and chemical and
pharmaceutical) dominated the top 100 TNC and top 50 developing
country TNC lists for 1995 in terms of foreign assets and sales (UNCTAD
1997: 35). The top 100 list, ranked by foreign assets, also featured
giants in telecommunications, such as AT&T Corp (US) and Cable and
Wireless plc (UK), and in computers, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard
Company (US). Rupert Murdoch’s Australian-based media conglomer-
ate, News Corporation Ltd, was ranked 41 and the Canadian-based
publishing and printing interest, Thomson Corporation, 64 (UNCTAD
1997: 29–31).
Communications industries are central to the contemporary dynamics
of globalization, providing the infrastructures and technologies through
which other forms of transnational developments are enabled (Moham-
madi 1997). The traditional identification of national telecommunica-
tions carriers is rapidly being delinked from home territories as, through
privatization, deregulation and competition, a global structure develops
for the industry. Communications have been fundamental to the
growth and globalization of financial markets which now feature as one
of the most integrated elements of the global economy in terms of both
time and space. It can be argued that technological factors are essential
to our understanding of the ways in which power has intensified within
this area of world economic activity. Phil Cerny (1995: 617) has argued,
for example:
Probably the most important consequence of the globalization of

financial markets is their increasing structural hegemony in wider
economic and political structures and processes. In a more open
world, financial balances and flows increasingly are dominant – with
the volume of financial transactions variously estimated as totaling
twenty to forty times the value of merchandise trade. This gap is

growing rapidly as private international capital markets expand.
Exchange rates and interest rates, as essential to business decision
making as to public policymaking, increasingly are determined by
world market conditions.
The materiality of political economy is transforming in conditions of

globalization. We still clearly need a strong sense of the traditional
material forms of industrialized economic activity as top 100 TNC
details outlined above indicate. But, additionally, we need to be
expanding awareness and understanding of the less tangible elements of
the world economy which are growing in importance.
The virtual nature of the computerized spaces within which global
financial transactions take place is one graphic and particularly influen-
tial element of this trend. It is characterized by an increasingly complex
system of knowledge-based infrastructures and linkages which substan-
tially define what tends to be known as the service economy. The ser-
vice economy reflects a move away from manufacturing as the main
driving force in economic change and expansion and, importantly,
wealth generation. Thus, it is most closely associated with the triad as
well as the Asian tiger economy of Hong Kong which has played a cent-
ral role in servicing modernization processes within China, the country
attracting the lion’s share of more recent FDI to developing countries.5
Global restructuring has, for example, transferred large-scale areas of
manufacturing and mining out of the most developed economies to
more competitive locations. The developed economy focus has been
increasingly placed on the knowledge-based areas, notably of financial,
business and insurance services,6 as well as the communications and
technological sectors facilitating their provision and expanding markets
for them. The products of the service era, including those associated
with tourism and leisure (see the chapter by Weber in this volume),7 are
characteristically intangible, prompting the need for new thinking
about both production and consumption. It is not that we live in a
post-material age, far from it. Take as proof, for example, the car as the
icon of the mass manufacturing era and the product of one of the most
effectively globalized industries in terms of production and sales (Dicken
1992).8 It is rather that, as well as the more obviously material products
of mass consumer times, an increasing number of less tangible products
and services are being produced, marketed and consumed.
One area usefully noted in this context is what might be called the
internal markets of the transnational corporations themselves, which
are heavily reliant on computerized information and global commun-

ications systems. The managerial and operational sophistication of TNCs
and their heavy dependence on new technologies to achieve commercial
goals is at issue here. As Phil Cerny (1995: 616) has stressed, these have
supply and demand sides with ‘flexibilization of production, firm struc-
ture, and monitoring’ on the former and increased differentiation and
specialization in products on the latter (see also Ohmae 1991). The
demand side of the market is also thus characterized by its growing
sophistication and complexity, emphasizing the importance of ‘market
segmentation’ featuring ‘a wider range of variations on a particular
product or set of products, with each variation targeted to a particular
subset of consumers’ (Cerny 1995: 616). Whereas in the early days of
mass consumption it was a case of having a car, a washing machine, a
television, now it is much more a case of which car, which washing
machine and so on. Thus, the role of the sphere of marketing is intensi-
fied and made more complex.
Marketing and consumption
Marketing is a key and expanding dimension of the service era which

both impacts on our understanding of consumption in different ways
and illustrates, importantly, how the material and intangible elements
of the contemporary economy are bound together. Marketing is the
means by which producers communicate and consumers access the
information on the distinctions between different products. Marketing is
a crucial facet of the information infrastuctures of the service era and its
intangible qualities. Marketing can be imagined as a commercial
informational arena in which specific interests compete, utilizing creat-
ive and symbolic devices. It is the arena in which the intangible selling
power of tangible products of all kinds, from cars to ice-creams, make-
up to computers, is generated. This illustrates that the service era, far
from being divorced from the manufacturing era, is integrated with its
most recent developments and directly instrumental in generating
increasingly differentiated consumption of tangible and intangible
products.
Consumption is an area that has gained too little attention in main-
stream IPE and it is fundamental to embodied approaches (see the chap-
ters by Williams and Weber in this volume; see also UNDP 1998). 9
Traditional emphasis on what is produced, as reflected in the articula-
tions of power in the global economy outlined above and in assess-
ments of national economic power through constructions such as gross
national product, is clearly an important part of the picture. But it is

only part of it, and in the service era, where consumption of intangibles
is of growing significance, this is being increasingly recognized. Focus
on consumption closes the circle, as it were, in the analysis of IPE, and,
crucially, expands our understanding of power within it. It offers a
more penetrating perspective on power by following through the prod-
ucts to explore how and why they are consumed. It investigates the
social meanings of products, meanings that are vital to understanding
the precise fashion in which these products become objects in demand.
There are various facets of the consumption framework. There is an
overarching ideology of consumption10 embedded in the consumer drive
of modernized economies. I use the term ideology for a number of rea-
sons. I use it firstly to indicate a series of associated ideas and principles
rather than one single element, thus a social complex. I use it secondly
because it clearly has tremendous power, deriving at least in part from
‘the technological imperative’ which facilitates and contributes directly
to the legitimation of a notion of idealized expansion as part of an
ideology of progress in dominant perspectives on development (Youngs
1997a). Expanding consumption is the other side of the expanding pro-
duction coin and hence an embedded characteristic of modern eco-
nomic ‘common sense’ (Murphy and Tooze 1991). This ‘common sense’
is socially pervasive, operating at policy and corporate levels as well as
in the dominant lifestyle and homemaking patterns of modern societies.
As Paul Ekins (1998: 23) has argued:
It is doubtful whether many people would subscribe openly and

explicitly to the economist’s notion that human happiness derives
exclusively, or even mainly, from the consumption of goods and
services, or that the only, or even main, way of increasing that hap-
piness is to increase consumption. So it is surprising that this notion
has come to exercise a near-dictatorial power over public policy, and
thence over the way societies are run and over the directions in
which they are constrained to develop.
Thirdly, therefore, the ideology of consumption is a political, economic

and cultural complex. Marketing is a crucial part of the glue that binds
the political-economic and cultural elements of the complex together.
It represents one of the most creative dimensions because of its sym-
bolic power to locate products in direct relation to both social structures
such as the family and the home and the gendered identities associated
with them.
Mass communications and television in particular have been central

to the consumption process. The symbolic function of the television
as a central social point of focus in the home signified a new mass
link between family life and the larger world. Advertising not only
informs consumers about available products but locates them in life-
style narratives which communicate snapshots of gendered identities
and roles. Many of these relate directly to ‘the home’ and the con-
trasting product-oriented activities of mothers, fathers and children.
Even in the 1990s predominant images of women as domestic work-
ers, child-rearers and carers persist.
Products are targeted on a gender basis but also reproduce and mul-
tiply gendered images in the process. Cars have traditionally been a
male-oriented product, not least because of cost, and marketing strat-
egies which associate women as objects of desire to the desirability of
ownership of the product have been commonplace.
(Youngs 1998a)
Communications technologies which enable the production of

images as well as the transmission and reception of them are key aspects
of our understanding of the symbolic power of the ideology of con-
sumption, not least because they themselves and the products
associated with them have been, in recent times, a booming area of
consumption and product differentiation. The television remains per-
haps the most graphic example of the depth of social meanings that can
be attached to forms of communication, as I indicate in the quote
above. Television is a technology at the heart of understandings of mass
communication and mass media and it is a medium which empha-
sizes the multiplicity and interconnection of symbolic messages. For
example, advertising narratives do not stand alone but are spatially and
temporally organized within the context of other mass media narratives
such as soap operas and comedy programmes, and questions of the con-
nections and mutual reinforcement of such messages across such narrat-
ives is an influential element of their symbolic power, not forgetting,
of course, the import of their wider social linkages. 11 The symbolic reach
of media discourses has expanded in an era of globalization with the
rise of ‘global media’ over traditional ‘national media’ and the major
expansion of media markets in part due to new satellite and cable tech-
nologies (Herman and McChesney 1997. See also Negrine 1997). The
television remains central to this new global media era, providing,
according to certain commentators, ‘the basis for an integrated global
commercial media market’ (Herman and McChesney 1997: 2).
Transnational symbolic consumption
This market is also one of the means for thinking through the character
of US hegemonic influence in the contemporary global political eco-
nomy. We are concerned here about the input of cultural and symbolic
production and consumption to the hegemonic equation. Richard Bar-
net and John Cavanagh (1994) have suggested that we think in terms of
‘global dreams’ and ‘imperial corporations’ to capture the symbolic
‘webs’ woven by the strategies and activities of TNCs in the major
spheres of consumption. In identifying a concept of the ‘Global Cul-
tural Bazaar’ they stress its capacities to reach a global audience and that
its most widely distributed products ‘bear the stamp “Made in the
USA”’ (Barnet and Cavanagh 1994: 15).12 The term ‘bazaar’ keeps a firm
focus on the market and the sellers and buyers within it, but this is a
market where ideas and imaginings, cultural constructions and life-
styles, are being promoted and consumed. The definition of consump-
tion is not restricted to the realm of purchase; just visiting the bazaar
and viewing its wares enables participation in the dreams and fantasies
they spin. The iconography of the Hollywood movie-world, Disney,
popular music and television and the megastars that populate them
emphasize the complex role of representation in symbolic production
and consumption. 13
The weight of US influence in the global cultural bazaar is one of the
factors contributing to understandings of globalization as Americaniza-
tion/westernization – a sense that the growing global marketplace is prin-
cipally an expansion of ‘America’s mass consumer culture’ (Ritzer 1998:
87). This influence can be understood as both cultural and corporate, as
in the case of the giant media conglomerate Time Warner (Herman and
McChesney 1997: 77–81), but it must also be recognized that there is
not always a direct co-relation between the two, thanks to globalizing
investment patterns in the business. 14 A prominent illustration is the
corporate (rather than cultural) location of top American entertainers of
the 20th century, such as Michael Jackson, under the Sony of Japan
umbrella. As Barnet and Cavanagh (1994: 26) point out: ‘It is now obvi-
ous that you do not have to be American to sell American culture.’
George Ritzer (1998) cites the export of fast food restaurants (‘Mc-
Donaldization’) and credit cards as significant examples in such a context.
Fast food restaurants and credit cards are better seen as means of con-
sumption than as consumer products: they can be used as means to
consume anything and everything. They are more important than
products that preceded them into the international marketplace

such as Coca-Cola and Levis since they are not merely altering what
is consumed in other cultures, but also the way in which they and
many other things are consumed. In that sense, their impact is far
greater and far more pervasive.
(Ritzer 1998: 87)
In different ways, fast food restaurants and credit cards indicate the
importance of manipulations of time and space in the ideology of con-
sumption. While the former are stressing speed of food production and
consumption in standardized formats, the latter offer a means of ensur-
ing immediate gratification and delaying payment to a flexible future
date. Hence, Ritzer (1998: 112) identifies them as ‘part of the rational-
ization process’. Credit card technology is also indicative of virtual con-
sumption facilitated by complex computerized systems which help to
manage the terms of individual credit (debt) through means such as
credit limits, minimum payment levels and payment deadlines. This
technology is instrumental in facilitating transnational consumption.
The credit card as the passport to carefree consumer movement is a
motif of the importance of unbounded consumption in the global
marketplace.
Travelling to consume has become one of the characteristics of late
20th century affluence, with tourism accounting for a substantial
amount of symbolic consumption (Lash and Urry 1994). The Disney
theme park captures perfectly the essential elements of packaging,
organization and inter-product association which make it an ideal type in
this respect (Ritzer 1998: 135–6. See also the chapter by Weber in this
volume). It is a space specifically created for diverse forms of consump-
tion, including of culture and food, offering choices of forms of enter-
tainment and products to purchase to continue the cultural experience
after departure. The notion of choice is, importantly, a constructed one.
Choice is available among a designated range of services and products
which have been provided to inter-relate with one another. The sym-
bolic messages consumed as part of the process of visiting such a facility
are thus also inter-related. Disney is a quintessential cultural architecture
manifested significantly through the creation of theme parks as places
(rather than shops or malls) that are visited and where the time of the
visitor is carefully managed by means of the menu of available activities
and the navigation of that menu on the basis of different segments of
the Disney experience. This experience is absolutely reflective of the
20th-century mass lifestyle where work and leisure are organized and the
identifiable timed slots of and within those two areas are prominent
dimensions of them. The rationalization of the assembly line of produc-
tion is matched by the rationalization of the consumption process
(Ritzer 1998: 136; Lash and Urry 1994: 261). It is helpful to think of it as
a process because it elaborates further the recognition of consumption as
an ordered rather than random activity. The suggestion here is that the
random elements should not detract from deeper consideration of the
ordering processes. The growth of ‘organized tourism’ (Lash and Urry:
260) reflects the increasing complexity of the market outlined above,
where differentiation of products counts more and more. Gone are the
days of the standard package tour; now the question is which type of
package tour and what specialist demands: adventure holiday, city
break, safari, two-resort, fly-drive and so on. Thinking about tourism as
consumption is another area that draws our attention to the intercon-
nections between tangible and intangible products and services.
The tourist is paying to spend his or her time in a specific manner,
usually travelling by one or more means of transport (for example, air-
craft, cruise ship, train, car, bicycle), visiting a place or places where he
or she will stay in different forms of accommodation (hotel, motel, bed
and breakfast, tent, houseboat, villa, to name but a few) and probably
use a range of available services, including restaurants, pubs or bars and
clubs. Tourism involves a series of consumer choices from available
menus of destinations, timings, means of travel, entertainment facilities.
And part of product differentiation in recent times relates to the extent
to which the tourist wants an organized or go-as-you-please holiday,
and which elements are tailored to meet such needs. A visit to a Disney
theme park can cater to all the basic needs of the tourist plus many
more in a created homogeneous environment – hence its ideal type sta-
tus (Barnet and Cavanagh 1994: 32–5). The promise for the visitor is a
guaranteed experience, that is an experience the nature of which is
known in advance, in fairly detailed terms, and will actually happen
basically as expected. An important element of ‘organized tourism’ is
the known nature of the main product (the trip or package) and the reli-
ability of the experience in that context (Ritzer 1998: 138). This is all part
of its rationality. Marketing is fundamental to the communication of the
necessary information to promote such secure knowledge. The market-
ing associated with organized tourism packages time and places, repres-
enting them in terms of leisure (as opposed to work) and associating
them with, for example, specific activities, interests and experiences.
Many destinations are in the ‘South’ or so-named developing world and
are packaged in exotic terms as an opposition to (escape from) the rigours
of modern life in the ‘North’. The consumption of holiday advertising

is an integral part of the consumption of the product, as with other
more obviously tangible products. Indeed, the symbolic touristscapes
constructed in such advertising are often consumed as objects of fant-
asy in their own right just as fashion advertising might be: an aid to
imagining oneself in a different place rather than imagining oneself
with a different look.
The entertainment and tourist sectors are technologically intensive,
the former, in particular, drawing increasingly on computer-generated
material and techniques to create and market its products. The techno-
logies through which these are consumed are also expanding constantly;
the Internet is the new major marketing space which is also opening up
opportunities for fresh forms of access and experience. The tourist busi-
ness is all about travel and the packaging of its different forms has given
a valued predictability to travel operators as much as tourists, as wit-
nessed, for example, in charter flights. The entertainment and tourist
areas overtly integrate highly complex areas of technology, including
those associated with information and communication technologies,
for both the production and consumption of their wares.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, technology (as the chapters by Hooper, Williams, Weber

and Zalewski in this volume also point out in different ways) will
become a growing focus in the study of the global economy. I have
illustrated here how consideration of technology is fundamental to an
approach to power and change within the global economy which is
sensitive to a number of important connections. The production and
consumption connection is noteworthy because of the degree to which
consumption has been overlooked in disembodied approaches to IPE.
I have argued that technological factors are integral to both production
and consumption, as well as our understanding of their transnational
characteristics. Further, I have argued that attention to such factors ena-
bles awareness of the growing role of symbolic consumption, particularly
in the service preoccupations of the major economies and the globaliz-
ing trends in these service markets. The attention to symbolic consump-
tion and the key role of US cultural influence in this area is deliberate in
relation to technology. In disciplines such as IR and IPE this would gen-
erally be regarded as a soft area compared with the hard domains of
warfare and nuclear technology, for example. In failing to touch on
these areas in any detail, this chapter is not seeking to detract from their
importance (see Youngs 1997a and Youngs 1999). However, it is hoped

that the nature of the discussion undertaken does emphasize the per-
vasive qualities of ‘the technological imperative’ and the need for crit-
ical investigation of it across even the symbolic domains of experience.
It is commonplace to remark that technology is affecting our lives
more and more and is thus increasingly a basis for assessing global
inequalities, but it is less commonplace to remark in detail on the gaps
in our conceptual toolkit essential to the task. The technological imper-
ative, the complexities of technologies, and their strong association
with the dominant rationalities of the scientific world, contribute to
engendering the silences which persist about the changing social mean-
ings of technology in general and individual technological developments
in particular.15 We are only beginning to break those silences.
Notes
1 For a detailed assessment see Gilpin (1987). See also Robert Cox’s (1981)
Gramscian approach to hegemony.
2 The oil crises and the challenge from the Oil Producing and Exporting
Countries (OPEC) were also major events in this regard. See Odell (1986).
3 On TNCs see also Dunning (1993).
4 See my detailed discussion of the dangers of the universalizing qualities of
globalization discourses, including in relation to the Fukuyama thesis, in
Youngs (1996). See also the discussion of globalization and homogeneity and
heterogeneity in Featherstone, Lash and Robertson (1995), and the contrast-
ing points in Talalay, Tooze and Farrands (1997) on Cox (1987), Rosenau
(1990) and Skolnikoff (1993).
5 For further discussion on Hong Kong and China see: Berger and Lester
(1997); Enright, Scott and Dodwell (1997); Youngs (1997b). On FDI and
China see also UNDP (1997).
6 Of interest is Strange’s (1996: 135–46) discussion of the ‘big six’ accountants.
7 See Dicken (1992: 349–82) on the internationalization of services.
8 General Motors (US) and Volkswagen AG (Germany) ranked 5 and 6 respect-
ively by foreign assets in the 1995 list of the top 100 TNCs. Toyota Motor
Corporation ( Japan) ranked 8. See UNCTAD (1997: 29).
9 Extensive discussion of the politics of consumption in global contexts is fea-
tured in Development 41 (1).
10 For a detailed critical discussion of this area, see in particular Baudrillard
(1998).
11 On these areas see, for example, Zoonen (1994) and Sreberny and Zoonen
(1999). See also Baudrillard (1998: 125–8) on advertisers as ‘mythic operators’.
12 See the further discussion of Barnet and Cavanagh’s analysis in Youngs
(1999). See also Ritzer (1998).
13 On ‘the birth of the cinematic society’, see Denzin (1995: 13–41).
14 See Herman and McChesney (1997: 70–105) on ‘the most fully integrated
global media giants’ including Time Warner, Disney and Viacom. They
examine Murdoch’s News Corporation as the ‘archetype’ for the 21st
century global media firm. Ownership patterns within the media sector
reflect globalization with, for example, News Corporation’s purchase of
Twentieth Century Fox in the 1980s and Japanese investment in Hollywood
studios. Barnet and Cavanagh (1994: 112–36) explain that most of the pop
music majors are non-American companies.
15 The growing debate about the Internet is interesting in this regard. See, for
example, Shields (1996) and Harcourt (1998) including Youngs (1998b) in
that volume.
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5
Imagineering Value: Good
Neighbourliness in an Era of Disney
Cynthia Weber1
Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genu-

ineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
(Anderson 1991: 6)
It’s not a theme park, it’s a real town.

(Wilson 1995)
Introduction
Five miles south of Disney World lies Celebration, Florida – the real
town imagineered by the Disney Company.2 Celebration is billed as a
hybrid of Walt Disney’s futuristic, high-tech experimental prototype
community of tomorrow (EPCOT) and a pre-Second World War Amer-
ican small town. As a promotional sign reads: ‘Imagine how great it
would have been . . . to live fifty years ago with all the neat gear you have
today’ (Flower 1996: 33–6). Imagineering – Disney’s unique brand of
combining high-tech ‘neat gear’ with magical imagination – creates
social/cultural/historical spaces as either fantasy (Disneyland) or reality
(Celebration). For example, while the hypermodern neat gear in Celeb-
ration includes total interactive linkages between residences, healthcare
facilities, schools, community facilities and retail establishments, it is a
nostalgia for the recent past – for an imagineered sense of history – that
sells Celebration. 3 The aim of Celebration is ‘to recreate the kind of
small towns middle-aged Americans remember’ (Katz 1996). ‘This is a
return to our childhood, to the neighborhoods we remember,’ one
Celebration resident remarked. This is consistent with a Celebration
promotional video which locates Celebration in ‘a time of innocence,
94
Good Neighbourliness in an Era of Disney 95
where the biggest decision is whether to play Kick the Can or King of
the Hill’.
While nostalgia conjures up a sense of tradition in which social and
cultural values go without saying, it also locates us in ‘the inflicted ter-
ritory where claims for authenticity . . . are staged’ (Bennett 1996: 7).
Celebration is such a territory. On the one hand, it is a real town inhab-
ited by real people. In this sense, Celebration ‘rationaliz[es] nostalgia by
providing it with “real” content’ – newly-built, old-fashioned neigh-
bourhoods and seemingly everyday Americans who live there (Bennett
1996: 10). In so doing, Celebration provides ‘a simple and stable past as
a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present’ (Lowenthal 1985: 21).
On the other hand, Celebration is owned and operated by The Disney
Company and temporally caught between a past that never was (an
idealized pre-Second World War vision of America) and a present parallel
to the seemingly dysfunctional moral time of the world beyond Disney.
In this sense, Celebration is more than ‘real’ – it is ‘the hallucination of
the real in its ideal and simplified version’. Celebration is ‘a vast “reality
show” where reality itself becomes a spectacle, where the real becomes a
theme park’, where ordinary citizens become Disney cast members
(Baudrillard 1996).4
Among the most treasured relics of the recent past that Disney
attempts to preserve through recreation in Celebration is the neigh-
bourhood and the sense of close-knit community and commonly-held
social values which accompanied it. In Celebration, it is an imagineered
neighbourhood – a neighbourhood inventively engineered as fantasy
come to life – which organizes the reality show. Like any American
small town of yesteryear, Celebration is sectioned into neighbourhoods
which – through their mixing of architectural styles and economic
value – are designed to conjure ‘up lots of non-specific memories’ (Dun-
lop 1996: 67).5 These memories are organizationally fostered by the lay-
out of neighbourhoods. Homes are placed in close proximity to one
another – each with a front porch looking on to the neighbourhood
street lined with wide sidewalks. In this way, families living near one
another are encouraged to get to know one another. The design of the
neighbourhood is also transferred to the local school which is organized
not by classroom but by neighbourhood.6 Good neighbourliness, then,
captures the re-animated spirit of Celebration.
What is interesting about the example of good neighbourliness found
in Celebration is not just its nostalgia for ‘traditional’ values but how
attempts are made to produce (while seeming to revive) collective/
community value(s) in an era so overburdened by (re)animated values
that the value of these values is itself in question. ‘Real’ values and ‘real’
social bodies are nowhere to be found, thus turning the question of
value (the meaning and worth of values) on to itself. Put differently,
value in an era of Disney is imagineered – whether it attempts to stand
in for the real or for the imaginary. And because imagineering blurs the
boundary between fantasy and reality, what is real and what is imagin-
ary in this Disney-scape are indistinguishable. While theme parks like
Disneyland are sold as imaginary landscapes which make us believe
that everything beyond the Magic Kingdom is real, places like Celebra-
tion, Florida, make no distinction between the real and the imaginary
(Baudrillard 1983: 25). Celebration is a real town. But it is also a hyper-
real – more real than real – town. The Celebration Company, a subsidi-
ary of the Disney Company, which promotes and manages Celebration,
seems well aware of this, for its advertised phone number is (407) 939-
TOWN. In this way and others, Celebration is also very much a theme
park saturated with old-fashioned small town values/value/meaning.
The neighbourhood, as it is used in Celebration, becomes both the con-
trived social body and the environment in which the collapse of the
real with the imaginary is staged.
Disney has produced neighbourhoods before, albeit with a different
relationship between the real and the imaginary. What is occurring loc-
ally in Celebration, Florida, harks back to a not-so-distant time in US
foreign policy toward Latin America in which the same socially con-
structed collective body – the neighbourhood – was posited as the
environment in which better hemispheric relations might take place.
This was done explicitly through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Good Neighbour Policy introduced in 1933. By the early 1940s, Walt
Disney was hired ‘as the first Hollywood producer of motion pictures spe-
cifically intended to carry a message of democracy and friendship below
the Rio Grande’ (Woll 1980: 55). John Hay Whitney, head of the Motion
Picture Section of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,
‘claimed that Disney “would show the truth about the American Way”
in a series of “direct propaganda films couched in the simplicity of the
animation medium”’ (Burton 1992: 26).
In her analysis of Disney’s ‘packaging of Latin America’, Julianne Bur-
ton argues that the central product of Walt Disney’s ‘three trips south of
the border in search of the “raw materials” for this Good Neighbor initi-
ative’ are ‘a trilogy of films which convey a totalizing account of this
cross-cultural journey: South of the Border with Disney (1941), Saludos
Amigos (1943), and, in particular, The Three Caballeros (1945)’. Burton
argues that ‘[a]s a composite, these films move progressively away from
the literal to the figurative and from the experiential to the imaginary’
(Burton 1992: 26). For example, in the final film of the trilogy, ‘distinc-
tions between animate and inanimate, flora and fauna, human and
non-human are set aside’ (Burton 1992: 27).
While what Burton describes in Disney’s films might be seen as busi-
ness as usual for Disney, in that Disney offers bigger and better escapes
into the imaginary in each of its productions, Celebration does not fit
this pattern. For with Celebration, Disney detours into the real, into
what we generally take for reality rather than fantasy. Certainly, Dis-
ney’s early involvement with the Good Neighbor series of propaganda
films is based on real US diplomatic policies, but, as Burton points out,
each film moves further and further into the realm of the imaginary. It
is this type of movement which is responsible for the blurring of
boundaries between the real and the imaginary. With Celebration, it is
Disney’s move from the imaginary to the real that is responsible for this
blurring of boundaries.
Disney’s step from imagineering the imaginary to imagineering the
real is hardly extraordinary. As one commentator noted about Celeb-
ration: ‘The notion of building communities that resemble theme
parks is an old idea, so I guess it’s reached its culmination with a theme
park manufacturer building such a community’ (quoted in Wilson
1995).7 Indeed, the circle is even fuller than this, for Celebration is the
real town/theme park built by the theme park manufacturer who
based his theme parks on the ‘vernacular of the American small town
as an image of social harmony’ (Zukin 1991: 221–2). Celebration,
then, is an ‘original’ small town which is based on a copy which is
based on an original. But of course, Celebration is not an original
small town. It is a copy twice removed from what passes as an original –
Disney’s imagining of a small town. This is consistent with the circu-
lation of value in an era of Disney. Because the traditional category of
‘production’ has no real meaning in the magical world of Disney,
since all production is imagineered, the exchange of reproduced/imag-
ineered value/meaning supersedes the value/meaning of production.
What is valued, therefore, is not some original but copies of the ori-
ginal. ‘[T]he ostensible purpose of the reproduction, to make one want
the original, has been supplanted by the feeling that the original is no
longer necessary. The copy is considered just as good and, in some cases,
better’ (quoted in Shenk 1995: 80–4).8 In an era of Disney, we find our-
selves in ‘an environment in which the boundaries of the genuine and
the illusory are collapsed, defined, and erased all over again’ (Shenk
1995: 80–4).
It is not just the Disney Company that imagineers value. So, too, do
US presidents. For example, central to Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour
Policy is the issue of nonintervention. Good neighbours, it seems, keep
to themselves. Since the Roosevelt administration’s explicit endorse-
ment of a hemispheric policy of nonintervention, US presidents have
subsequently claimed to be good neighbours to Latin American coun-
tries. Yet the record of US involvement in Latin America – especially in
the Caribbean – does not seem to support their claims. The US regularly
intervenes in Latin America, and just as regularly it claims to uphold a
policy of nonintervention. It makes one wonder whether the claim to
nonintervention is so overvalued – so saturated with meanings – as to
have no value – no meaning – in the current age of US interventionism.
What is strikingly similar about Celebration, Florida, and US foreign
policy toward the Caribbean is how value (understood as meaning) is
circulated through the concept of the neighbourhood. In both cases,
the collective body of the neighbourhood becomes the environment in
which value is circulated. The neighbourhood – whether coded as local
or regional – is ‘the inflicted territory where claims to authenticity (and
thus a displacement of the articulation of power) are staged’ (Bennett
1996: 7). 9 But in the symbolic cultural economy of the neighbour-
hood – in the culture and language which are (re)produced and
exchanged about the neighbourhood – no ‘real’ value/meaning is
exchanged. There is nothing to guarantee claims to good neighbourliness
or to nonintervention, for example, except Disney-built communities
and empty US foreign policy promises. Without such guarantees, value/
meaning exchanges for nothing but itself, thus bringing the entire
system of symbolic exchange (understood as the exchange of meaning)
into question (Baudrillard 1983; Weber 1995).
This blurring of production and exchange in US foreign policy is strik-
ingly apparent when viewed in historical perspective. I will, therefore,
trace the various cultural codings of good neighbourliness in US foreign
policy toward the Caribbean since the Roosevelt administration. First,
I will read how Roosevelt’s inaugural address articulates a system of sym-
bolic exchange which, read through the concepts of the family and the
neighbourhood, revalues notions of production and exchange. Second,
I will examine how this revaluation of good neighbourliness was
applied to US foreign policy toward Latin America by the Roosevelt
administration, focusing specifically on the policy of nonintervention.
Taking examples from the Reagan and Clinton administrations, I will
analyse how recent US foreign policies toward the Caribbean have rein-
scribed the Good Neighbour Policy in ways which make it consistent
with Disney value(s). Like claims to good neighbourliness in Celebration,

US claims to nonintervention now exchange only for themselves.
Finally, I will assess the circulation and exchange of the value/meaning
of the collective bodies of the neighbourhood and the family as well as
the use value of history in an era of Disney.
Won’t you be my neighbour?
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy
of the good neighbor – the neighbor who resolutely respects himself
and, because he does so, respects the rights of others – the neighbor
who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agree-
ments in and with a world of neighbors.
(Roosevelt 1933: 14)
These were the words President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in his

inaugural address in 1933 to formally launch the Good Neighbour Pol-
icy, a policy which his administration followed throughout his four-
term presidency.10 Roosevelt reflected on the Good Neighbour Policy,
arguing that
I began to visualize a wholly new attitude toward other American

Republics based on an honest and sincere desire, first, to remove
from their minds all fear of American aggression – territorial or fin-
ancial – and, second, to take them into a kind of hemispheric part-
nership in which no Republic would take undue advantage.
(Quoted in Woll 1980: 55)
Roosevelt’s own rosy reflection on his policy aside, the policy has been
criticized for having more to do with ‘the commercial exploitation of
Latin lands and peoples of the Americas in the wake of a war-torn Eur-
ope’ and establishing a system of ‘Latin dependency bureaucratically
centered in Washington’ than promoting hemispheric benefits for all
(Piedra 1994: 148–9). My interest in Roosevelt’s policy is not so much
with what he or others say about its motivations, its intentions or even
its policy effects. Rather, I am interested in how the policy was rhetoric-
ally constructed and with how this construction utilizes notions of tem-
porality to recode the circulation of value/meaning within a particular
space: the neighbourhood.
Roosevelt’s speech contextualizes his Good Neighbour Policy in a pol-
itics of temporality which ultimately offers two spatial configurations,
two social bodies – the family and the neighbourhood – as refuges from
past and present distresses. Threatened internally by an economic
depression and externally by the (pending) war in Europe, the America
which Roosevelt addresses needs some type of security. To position
himself as capable of offering America a brighter future, Roosevelt first
acknowledges the bleakness of the present – ‘Only a foolish optimist
can deny the dark realities of the moment’ – as well as the ‘evils of the
older order’ which financially devastated the country (Roosevelt 1933:
11 and 13). America’s future – if approached pragmatically – can be a
better one, for, as Roosevelt argues, America’s ‘distress comes from no
failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared
with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed
and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for’ (Roosevelt
1933: 11). America’s historical tradition, then, reaches beyond the
recent troubled past, and so must America’s hope. The fault for Amer-
ica’s current economic hardships lies not with nature or with America’s
longstanding pioneering tradition but with mismanagement of the cur-
rent system of economic exchange.
Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the

very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the
exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stub-
bornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure,
and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers
stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts
and minds of men.
(Roosevelt 1933: 11–12)
In an evangelical, new testament move, Roosevelt rhetorically takes

on the role of a new Jesus in the form of ‘the present instrument of their
[Americans’] wishes’ who enters into the temple and turns the tables on
the moneychangers (Roosevelt 1933: 16).11
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of
our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient
truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we
apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Primary among those social values which Roosevelt reclaims is the

value of work.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy
of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral
stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of
evanescent profits.
In revaluing production – the joy of work for its own sake rather than
for the sake of profit – Roosevelt also revalues exchange. Valued
exchange relations are not those which seek merely to increase indi-
vidual riches. Roosevelt recognizes that Americans are concerned with
financially ‘putting our national house in order’ (Roosevelt 1933: 13). It
is the collective/communal body – America symbolized as a family –
which must be put right in order for individual American families and
their confidence in the future to thrive. But how can a capitalist society
radically revalue exchange? Roosevelt’s solution is to model exchange
value on some idealized notion of how exchange works within families.
Idealized notions of familial space do not just allow but require a
revaluing of production and exchange. The family
. . . is a world in which the ordinary laws of the economy are sus-

pended, a place of trusting and giving – as opposed to the market
and its exchanges of equivalent values – or, to use Aristotle’s term,
philia, a word that is often translated as ‘friendship’ but which in fact
designates the refusal to calculate; a place where interest, in the nar-
row sense of the pursuit of equivalence in exchanges, is suspended.
(Bourdieu 1996: 20)
Thus, when Roosevelt claims that American confidence in the future

‘thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations,
on faithful protection, on unselfish performances; without them it can-
not live’, he is embracing a system of exchange for America based upon
an idealized notion of exchange within a family (Roosevelt 1933: 12).
‘We now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence
on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well’
(Roosevelt 1933: 14).
What Roosevelt’s revalued environment of exchange does is mine
America’s traditional past for old social values that can be offered up ‘as
a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present’ (Lowenthal 1985:
14). These social values are firmly anchored in a traditional American
temporality in which the obstacles of the present seem surmountable
compared with past obstacles which ‘our forefathers’ overcame. But

Roosevelt’s speech goes beyond this. It incorporates a recognition that
this temporality must itself be secured. Certainly, Roosevelt’s speech
locates it within America, but America is too vast a geographical, social
and psychological space for such temporal ideals to gain popular appeal.
By spatially locating these social values within the family, Roosevelt’s
speech simultaneously makes them accessible both publicly and privately,
both abstractly in America symbolized/made meaningful as a family
and more concretely in individual families.
It is not surprising, then, that the strategy of revaluing the environ-
ment of economic exchange and symbolic exchange (the exchange of
meanings/values) employed by Roosevelt for domestic affairs is the
basis for his revaluation of international affairs as well. This is among
the core aspects of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy. For what is a
neighbourhood in the American imagining but a community of famil-
ies living tranquilly side by side. This familial aspect of the neighbour-
hood finds expression, beginning with Roosevelt’s first major speech on
the Good Neighbour Policy.
Addressing the Governing Board of the Pan-American Union in
1933, Roosevelt argued that ‘the common ideals of mutual helpfulness,
sympathetic understanding and spiritual solidarity’ among the nations
of America were ‘based upon the policy of fraternal cooperation’ (Roose-
velt 1933: 129 and 130). ‘Friendship among Nations’, Roosevelt argued,
‘ . . . involves mutual obligations and responsibilities, for it is only by
sympathetic respect for the rights of others and a scrupulous fulfilment
of the corresponding obligations by each member of the community
that a true fraternity can be maintained’ (Roosevelt 1933: 130). ‘[C]on-
fidence, friendship and good-will are the cornerstones’ of pan-Amer-
ican good neighbourliness (Roosevelt 1933: 130). The neighbourhood,
based upon a collection of national families tied to one another in
common brotherhood, is the environment in which exchange in the
American hemisphere should occur. Within the environment of a
hemispheric neighbourhood conceived as a family of American
nations, a number of ‘traditional values’ could be revived in the con-
text of current foreign policy. Doing unto others as you would have
them do unto you – ‘It [the Good Neighbour Policy] is a policy which
can never be merely unilateral. In stressing it the American Republics
appreciate . . . that it is bilateral, a multilateral policy, and the fair
dealing which it implies must be reciprocated’ (Roosevelt 1938: 142).
Harmonious living in community – ‘We are against war and have
agreed among ourselves quietly to discuss difficulties in such a way
that the possibility of war has become remote’ (Roosevelt 1938: 412).
And mutual (economic) benefit – ‘[O]nly through vigorous and mutu-
ally beneficial international economic relations can each of us have
adequate access to materials and opportunities necessary to a rising
level of economic well-being for all our peoples’ (Roosevelt 1940: 160–1).
Each of these values was achievable by seemingly suspending capitalist
rules of exchange within ‘the American family of nations’ and the
hemispheric neighbourhood. 12
Central to Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy was his evolving
notion of nonintervention. While this was not explicitly declared in his
inaugural address or in his address to the Governing Board of the Pan-
American Union some six weeks later, by December 1933 Roosevelt
stated his administration’s position in no uncertain terms. ‘ . . . [T]he
definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to
armed intervention’ (Roosevelt quoted in Smith 1994: 121). Consistent
with Roosevelt’s inaugural declaration, in which he stated that ‘the
only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ (Roosevelt 1933: 11), his Good
Neighbour Policy and the clarification of its policy of nonintervention
was a way of lessening fear among American nations. ‘Peace reigns
today in the Western Hemisphere because our nations have liberated
themselves from fear’ (Roosevelt 1940: 160). ‘We in all the Americas are
coming to the realization that we can retain our respective nationalities
without, at the same time, threatening the national existence of our
neighbors’ (Roosevelt 1940: 1–2). In this spirit, Roosevelt inscribed what
it meant to be a good neighbour.
Peace reigns among us today because we have agreed, as neighbors

should, to mind our own business. We have renounced, each and all
of us, any right to interfere in each other’s domestic affairs, recogniz-
ing that free and independent nations must shape their own destin-
ies and find their own ways of life.
The good neighbour is ‘ . . . the neighbor who knew how to mind his
own business, but was always willing to lend a friendly hand to a
friendly nation which sought it, the neighbor who was willing to dis-
cuss in all friendship the problems which will always arise between
neighbors’ (Roosevelt 1940: 465).
The Roosevelt administration put into practice this definition of a
good neighbour. Espousing the successes of the policy, Roosevelt
wrote:
We entered into Pan-American conventions embodying the princi-

ples of non-intervention. We abandoned the Platt amendment
which gave us the right to intervene in the international affairs of
the Republic of Cuba. We withdrew the American marines who had
been stationed for many years in Haiti. We signed a new treaty with
Panama upon a mutually satisfactory basis. We engaged in several
Inter-American conferences productive of many agreements of
mutual advantage. We entered into many trade agreements with
other American countries to our mutual commercial profit. At the
request of neighboring republics, we helped to settle various bound-
ary disputes between American nations. As result of these and many
other instances of similar nature, each member of the American fam-
ily of nations has come to look upon the United States as its own
good neighbor.
(Roosevelt 1939: xxiii)
From casseroles to magazines
Charming 3 BDR, 2 BA Victorian with FPL, LR, DR, walk-in

closet and a neighbor who’ll bring a casserole over when you
move in.
(Sign at the Celebration Preview Center (Stark 1995))
. . . neighbours have a clear, ongoing responsibility to act in

ways consistent with each other’s legitimate security concerns.
(Deputy Secretary of State Dam, November 3, 1983 (American
Foreign Policy Current Documents [AFPCD] 1983: 1424–5))
What it means to be a good neighbour is always a matter of interpreta-

tion. To the Roosevelt administration, the Good Neighbour Policy meant
conducting US foreign policy toward Latin America in an environment
of familial exchange which translated specifically to a policy of non-
intervention. By the 1980s, the definition of a good neighbour in US
foreign policy had changed from someone who minded his own busi-
ness to someone who, like the resident of Celebration who welcomes a
new neighbour with a casserole, actively interfered in the affairs of their
neighbours. During the Reagan administration, symbolic exchange was
still said to occur within the dual contexts of the neighbourhood and
the family. As Secretary of State George Shultz put it: ‘The Caribbean is
in our neighborhood, too, so we have a very legitimate affinity for those
people’ (AFPCD 1983: 1405). Neighbours, the administration argued,

have a right to be involved in what happens in their neighbourhoods,
in part because the Caribbean is a very close-knit neighbourhood. It is
‘one region’ and the people of Caribbean are ‘kith and kin’ – family –
to all members of the region (Institute of Caribbean Studies 1983: 32).13
But by the 1980s, the US demonstrated its good neighbourliness not
by offering a casserole to a neighbour but by bringing over a magazine –
and the US magazine was always loaded. What in another context
might have been seen as invasion, the Reagan administration argued,
was in the Caribbean neighbourhood/family something altogether
different. Speaking of the US-led intervention in Grenada, President
Reagan told the press: ‘I know your frequent use of the word, invasion,
this was a rescue mission . . . ’ (Reagan 1983a: 1420).
The tale of the US rescue of Grenada was later mythologized through
Reagan’s retelling of the story to the Grenadan people through one of
their own folk tales.
There is a story, perhaps it’s a legend, that in 1933 a group of young

boys were in a swimming race across your harbor. And in the midst
of the race, according to the story, to the horror of the crowd that
watched, a shark appeared and surfaced directly under one young
swimmer. For a few terrorizing minutes, the boy was carried on the
back of the shark until the shark hit a wharf, and the boy was
knocked to safety and pulled out of the water by his friends and
neighbors. Well, dear people of Grenada, for a time it appeared that
you were like that boy riding on the back of a shark. Your friends
held their breath hoping and praying for you. And it was our honor
to help you get off the shark.
(Reagan 1986: 238)
As Grenada’s friends watched and prayed, Grenada’s good neighbour –

the US – came to its rescue. This was as true in 1933 – the year that
Roosevelt formally launched the Good Neighbour Policy – as it was in
1983 – the year of the US-led intervention in Grenada.
The Reagan administration went even further than mythologizing
good neighbourliness in terms of rescuing its Caribbean neighbours
from continuing strife. With its Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), a pack-
age of economic policies designed to promote regional free trade as well
as to help Caribbean nations resist the lure of communist economic
options, good neighbourliness was coded as a sort of pre-emptive eco-
nomic security. Reagan described the CBI as:
. . . a security shield for the area. The security shield is very much like
a Neighborhood Watch. The Neighborhood Watch is where neigh-
bors keep an eye on each other’s homes so outside troublemakers
and bullies will think twice. Well, our policy in Central America is
like a Neighborhood Watch. But this watch doesn’t protect some-
one’s silverware: it protects something more valuable – freedom.
(Reagan 1983b: 1177)14
But, of course, neighbours on Neighbourhood Watch tend to watch one

another at least as much as they watch one another’s property.
Like Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy, Reagan’s Neighbourhood
Watch presumably offered Caribbean states freedom from fear – of
unwanted interventions in Roosevelt’s case and of Soviet influences in
the hemisphere in Reagan’s. Yet here we confront something of a para-
dox which is best expressed in the 1994 US near-invasion of Haiti. The
Clinton administration claimed that its diplomatic team of former pres-
ident Jimmy Carter, former chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen-
eral Colin Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn – the team sent by the US to
Haiti to talk the Cedras government out of power – ‘rescued’ Haiti from
pending military devastation. But the military operation the US ‘res-
cued’ the Haitians from was itself led by the US. What the US diplo-
matic team did was help to turn back US bombers sent to attack Haiti. 15
The question so unavoidably posed by the Haiti invasion is this: What
does it mean to be a good neighbour when the good neighbour is also
the neighbourhood bully?
In a sense, this is the question the US Good Neighbour Policy has
been begging since its inception in 1933. It has been a policy designed
to diminish the threat to Latin America of intervention, but this threat
has always been defined as a US threat of invasion. How President
Roosevelt went about lessening this threat – abandoning the Platt
amendment, removing US troops from Haiti, signing a treaty with Pan-
ama and so on – and how the Clinton administration lessened it –
through its strategy of brinkmanship toward Haiti – could not be more
different. Yet it has always been the case that the threat of US interven-
tion is what makes the US Good Neighbour Policy of nonintervention
credible. In this sense, US foreign policy has long been conducted under
the sign of simulated symbolic exchange in which it is impossible to
distinguish genuine meanings/truths from disingenuous ones (lies). In
the case of US foreign policy toward the Caribbean, the difference
between promises and threats – casseroles and magazines – cannot be
maintained.
Time, value, and collective bodies
In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an

origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous
within the collection’s world.
(Stewart 1994: 254)
We now live in a world of simulacra: Perfect copies of originals

that never existed.
(Hewison 1991: 173)
In Celebration and in US/Latin American relations, the neighbourhood

is the contrived social body – the perfect simulacrum – which encapsul-
ates space, time and value. Spatially, it is used ‘to construct a boundary
between America/“Americans” and the rest of the world and its citizenry,
even within the United States’ (Schaffer 1996: 4). It clearly distinguishes
between neighbours – mostly white, middle to upper-class Americans in
Celebration and citizens of the western hemisphere in US/Latin Amer-
ican relations – and strangers. But in seeking to demarcate its members
from the rest of the local or global world, it simultaneously estranges
the very ‘communities’ it attempts to construct. For in setting them-
selves off from the rest of the world, these collections of neighbours
simulating a social body also set themselves off from a temporality of
the present. In Disney time, there is only a past and a future – a glorious
tradition of American values to be recovered and relived and a high-
tech future which promises the ‘neat gear’ to make such a traditional
past easier to live. The present in an era of Disney is ‘lived’ only as a col-
lection, as ‘a museum of living facts’ (Sorkin 1992: 206).
Take, for example, the neighbourhoods of Celebration in which col-
lective bodies in this retro/future-temporality resemble museums.
Museums are a locus of dislocated fragments, displayed in-coincid-

entally with the motives of their production, revalued along other
lines of exchange or schemes of competition, and not necessarily
secondarily.
(Boon 1991: 256)
Like museum pieces, the residents of Celebration are collected from all
across America to revive the lifestyle and values of the American neigh-
bourhood. Because Celebration is a re-animation of the neighbourhood
in the form of an ‘authentic’ historic park, Celebration’s citizens

resemble not so much ordinary Americans as they do ‘re-enactors’,
people hired by historical preservation societies who attempt ‘to con-
vince themselves or others of the reality of the past’ and, just as import-
antly, to live this mythical past in the present (Lowenthal 1985: 295).
Celebration does not restore pre-Second World War temporality in a
lived environment; rather, it reminds us of the impossibility of such res-
torations because there is no original upon which they can be re-enacted.
In an era of Disney, it is these types of exchange relations which are
valued – copies which do not replace originals as much as remind us of
the nonexistence of the ‘original’.
Value/meaning in an era of Disney is not something that can be
reclaimed or revived. In the temporal space of the simulated neighbour-
hood, ‘real’ values (of good neighbourliness or nonintervention) and
‘real’ social bodies (‘authentic’ neighbourhoods) are nowhere to be
found. In these settings, nostalgic longings for the past become product-
ive of collective bodies as collections of bodies which attempt to pre-
serve the traditional past in a moral temporality of the future re-enacted
in the present.
What is true of the neighbourhood in an era of Disney is also true
of the family. If the neighbourhood is ‘the inflicted territory where
claims to authenticity . . . are staged’, it is the ‘displacement of the
articulation of power’ relations within the family which gives good
neighbourliness its appeal (Bennett 1996: 7). For what is a neighbour-
hood but a collection of families? And while it is an idealized notion of
familial exchange which fuels the rhetoric of Celebration’s advertise-
ments and US foreign policy rhetoric, such an appeal to ‘family values’
holds up only so long as the internal gendered structures within the
family – of ‘patriarchy’, for example – remain unexplored. The family as
the basis for neighbourly relations as it is used in Celebration and in US
foreign policy not only revalues relations of production and exchange;
it also lends historical continuity and neutrality to the engendered rela-
tions which occur within neighbourhoods. In this sense, neighbour-
hoods appear as but collections of families which are themselves
museum pieces – as the way American families never were but are often
thought to be – and it is the reimagined ‘past [which] lends authenticity
to the collection’ (Stewart 1994: 254). The neighbourhood takes on the
nostalgic best of the family, which suggests both that the internal rela-
tions within families are tranquil and that the benevolent reach of the
family need not be resisted, even when this means magazines rather
than casseroles are on offer.
In this way, US foreign policy toward Latin America is legitimated.

The US side-steps accusations to intervention by veiling paternalistic
attitudes toward Latin America within a discourse of the neighbourhood
and the family. With this strategy, the US gives up nothing in terms of
colonial or neocolonial reach in the region. What it does, instead, is
treat the environment of Latin America as man might treat a wife or
child or as a collector would treat a museum, by ‘declar[ing] its essential
emptiness by filling it’, thereby ensuring that ‘the environment . . .
[is] . . . an extension of the self’ (Stewart 1994: 256). How this ‘filling in’
has occurred from 1933 to 1994 has changed in parallel to the strategies
of the Disney Company. ‘[B]oundaries of the genuine and the illusory
are collapsed, defined, and erased all over again’, but by more and more
detours into the real rather than into the imaginary (Shenk 1995: 80–4).
The paradox of Celebration and of US foreign policy toward Latin
America is that the neighbourhood and values of good neighbourliness
seem all the more imaginary with each attempt to realize them. And,
increasingly with each new US intervention in Latin America performed
within a rhetoric of good neighbourliness, the neighbourhood of the
western hemisphere looks more and more like a theme park.
Notes
1 Thanks to Francois Debrix, Steve Hobden, Vivienne Jabri, Tim Luke, Gillian
Youngs, Marysia Zalewski for their helpful comments on this chapter.
2 The Disney Company refers to its engineers as imagineers.
3 Other ‘neat gear’ – all provided by AT&T in cooperation with the Celebra-
tion Company, a subsidiary of the Disney Company – includes home secur-
ity linking each resident to a central monitoring point, home energy
management allowing residents to manage energy and water usage, even
meter reading, interactive banking, voting from home, virtual offices allow-
ing residents with technical jobs to perform complex tasks, and high-speed
Internet access. (‘AT&T and Disney to build high tech community of the
future,’ News Release, AT&T, July 26, 1995; http://www.att.com/press/0795/
950726.soa.html)
4 All Disney employees in Disney theme parks are referred to by the Disney
Company as cast members.
5 Economically, properties range from apartments rented for $650 per month
to houses sold for $750,000. Stylistically, housing designs prevalent in the
pre-Second World War American south are offered – Victorian, Classical,
Colonial, Revival, Mediterranean, French and Coastal.
6 ‘Each neighbourhood will feature a “hearth zone,” a central area where all
children in that neighbourhood, or team, can gather for common activities.’
See Natale (1996: 30).
7 Quoting Evan McKenzie of the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of

Privatopia: Home Owners Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Gov-
ernment.
8 Quote of Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Review of Books.
9 Parentheses in original.
10 I am not concerned here with the debate about which administration initi-
ated the notion of the US as a good neighbour toward Latin America, the
Coolidge, Hoover or Roosevelt administration. Instead, I limit my analysis
to the explicit policy declarations of the Roosevelt administration.
11 For an analysis of the use of theological metaphors in a very different con-
text, see Weber (1990).
12 Roosevelt increasingly used the term ‘the American family of nations’ in
speeches on good neighbourliness. See, for example, Roosevelt (1939: xxiii).
13 Prime Minister Eugenia Charles of Dominica, the chairperson of the Organ-
ization of Eastern Caribbean States, press conference.
14 For a geographical gendered reading of the CBI, see Weber (1994).
15 The US also claimed to ‘rescue’ the Haitian people from the government of
General Raul Cedras and its record of human rights abuses. Yet, in the after-
math of the invasion, the US allowed the Cedras government to remain in
power until President Aristide was returned to power. During this time,
there were numerous reports of new human rights abuses. Here, as well, the
term ‘rescue’ is a misnomer.
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6
Missing Mother? Reproductive
Technologies into the 21st Century
Marysia Zalewski
We don’t want anyone to look inside us, since it’s not a pretty
sight in there
(Wittgenstein, quoted in Brod and Kaufmann 1994: vii)1
Introduction
Twentieth-century reproductive technologies2 appear to have revolu-

tionized pregnancy in the western world. What was once a mysterious
event unfolding unseen within a woman’s body is now largely a med-
ical event subject to much scrutiny and surveillance. The cover of Life
magazine on April 30, 1965 (Stabile 1994: 76) featured, in the caption’s
words, a ‘living 18-week-old fetus inside its amniotic sac’. This kind of
image, which must have been astounding at this time, is relatively com-
monplace in the late 1990s. But what do we see? A recognizable human
baby/fetus – sex unclear – eyes closed – arms huddled up to its chest –
seemingly perfectly formed – fitting snugly in the amniotic sac, its head
and feet stretching the outer walls of the sac but firmly attached to it via
the twirling umbilical cord. What is missing? Where is the mother?
A more recent illustration shows a 1990s imagination of potential
‘motherhood’, this time a ‘fictional’ one – but one that is perhaps not far
removed from 21st century scientific and technological possibility.
A poster for the film Junior, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (of the Ter-
minator films) shows him heavily ‘pregnant’ and flanked on either side
by co-stars Emma Thompson and Danny de Vito. In the film, Schwarze-
negger and De Vito are scientists attempting to win US Food and Drug
Administration approval for a new drug to sustain pregnancies in
women who have frequent miscarriages. However, the drug cannot be
112
Reproductive Technologies into the 21st Century 113
approved without ethically unacceptable testing on pregnant women.

So they decide to test it on Arnold – which means he has to get preg-
nant. When Arnie is pumped full of female hormones, the insemina-
tion is carried out by De Vito, who, using ultrasound technology,
locates a ‘space’ in Arnie’s abdomen in which to place the fertilized
egg – which (of course) belongs to Emma Thompson. The picture
shows Thompson, De Vito and Schwarzenegger. Who is the mother? What
have reproductive technologies done to the body and subject of mother
in the context of pregnancy and reproduction in the late 1990s?
In this chapter, I want to look at feminist readings of some reproduct-
ive technologies and the impact they have on the reproductive body.
Additionally, I want to think about these readings in the context of the
wider political economy. Feminist interpretations span a wide spectrum
on these issues. For example, many think the new knowledges generated
by prenatal screening technologies improve women’s agency and choices.
Conceptive technologies can be seen as empowering for those who are
infertile. But other feminists fear that such technologies represent a
material and ideological patriarchal violence and capitalist exploitation
of women. For those who claim the latter, the growth in many of these
technologies is evidence of political and economic systems which
exploit women’s bodies on a global scale. As a resource or commodity,
like any other, women’s bodies are subject to excavation, infiltration,
surveillance and exploitation in order to gain maximum use of them.
This exploitation can take place at numerous sites, including the mater-
ial, ideological and psychological.
Such talk about women’s bodies does not mesh well with contempor-
ary Anglo-American populist feminist rhetoric. Positioning a pregnant
women as a cross between a Stepford wife and Forrest Gump 3 jars grat-
ingly with Spice Girl notions of ‘girl-power’ or contemporary versions of
‘power-feminism’. I am not interested in portraying women as passive
victims of a global patriarchal/capitalist conspiracy but I think it is
important to look at some of the ways women’s bodies and the subject of
mother are impacted on by the use of reproductive technologies. I have
chosen three categories through which to carry out this analysis – inva-
sion, erasure and alienation. At first sight these might appear gloomy and
negative categorizations. This is not necessarily the case. These categories
are suggested to me partly because of the visual economies they imply.
Images have value and the production and exchange of images particip-
ate in the construction of value. It matters what is seen and what is not
seen and how things are made ‘unseen’. In each of the three categories a
visual metaphor is implicit and is manifested in explicit ways. In the first
section I discuss how the pregnant body can be construed as invaded, in

large part by a process of surveillance, monitoring and intervention. This
can be read as leading to the erasure of the pregnant body by rendering it
functionally invisible. Such invasions and erasures can produce an alien-
ated body which cannot see itself for what it ‘really’ is, and is therefore
potentially turned into something other than itself. All of these seem to
have the potential to reduce women’s agency within the reproductive
process – and, indeed, this is what many feminists would argue is the
case. I will return to this question of agency in the conclusion.
Invasion
A woman who is pregnant immediately knows that her body is

no longer her own. She has a tenant with a nine-month lease;
and should he spend every night kicking or hiccuping . . . there
is nothing she can do. Sharing one’s body with a small being is
so thoroughly wondrous . . . the real problem is sharing one’s
pregnant body with the rest of the world.
(Kaplan 1989: 155)
Pregnant women often feel as if their bodies have been invaded, not
only by the baby from within but by society from without. Many
people and groups claim an interest in the pregnant woman’s body –
from the paternalistic pattings of ‘the pregnant stomach’ (sometimes by
complete strangers) to the full-scale invasion of interest from fathers,
potential grandparents, the media, and medical and legislative bodies.
The scale of this was evidenced by a recent case in Scotland in which a
woman, estranged from her husband, was seeking an abortion. The hus-
band was using the courts to contest his wife’s right to have an abor-
tion. This generated a huge media and public invasion – from huge
photographs of the woman and masses of print in the press, to phone-
in programmes on national radio stations about the ‘rights and wrongs’
of the case (The Guardian, May 23, 1997: 1). Once a woman is pregnant,
the boundaries of what is considered private changes, turning what
would normally be seen as an invasion of privacy and bodily integrity
into something acceptable.
Has an invasion taken place in the image from the 1965 edition of
Life magazine? There has surely been an invasion of photographic rays,
largely overtaken by soundwaves in the 1990s with the use of ultra-
sound, but both of which allow invasion by the gaze of the outside
world. What effect might this visual invasion have? One answer is that
it provides knowledge about what is happening inside the uterus and to

the developing fetus. The latest ultrasound technology can measure the
rate of blood flow in the veins of the fetus but is most often used (along
with other technologies such as alphafetoprotein testing, chorionic vil-
lus sampling and amniocentesis) to ascertain the health or ‘normality’
of the fetus. This kind of detailed information was not available prior to
the 1960s. Before then, the only way of ‘seeing inside’ the uterus was
with X-rays which were potentially damaging to the fetus and, there-
fore, used sparingly. But surely imaging the fetus with ultrasound is
hardly a hostile invasion? Indeed, in medical terminology it is known
as a noninvasive procedure. This information surely empowers the
mother by giving her more knowledge about the fetus inside her.
But what is the information primarily used for and why have such
technologies been developed? One assertive claim is that these techno-
logies are sexist, racist and fascist, and they have been developed ‘not
because women need them, but because capital and science need women
for the continuation of their model of growth and progress’ (Mies in
Mies and Shiva 1993: 174–5, emphasis in original).
This argument stems from the belief that the development of such
technologies reflects dominant social relations, and in the west this
means racism, sexism and fascism, as all are bound up with ‘the colo-
nial expansion of Europe and the rise of modern science’ (Mies and
Shiva 1993: 178). A particular concern is with the kind of reproductive
technologies, such as prenatal screening, that encourage eugenic4 ideo-
logies and practices and that are being used on a world scale to facilitate
the eugenic principles of selection and elimination (Mies and Shiva
1993: 180–9). The claim is that those dominant social relations that
have been spawned by capitalism and patriarchy have bred profoundly
unempathetic societies which encourage the elimination of ‘bad’ babies
while at the same time encouraging women to be ‘good’ mothers by ful-
filling their eugenic ‘duty’ for the state. What value is gleaned by the
state by eliminating ‘bad’ babies?
Simply, making profits. The commercialization of reproductive tech-
nologies encourages their use and production in the name of economic
expediency and professional self-interest (Koval 1987: 9–19). The
eugenic ideology manifested with the commercialization of prenatal
screening technologies is an ideology which preaches that elimination
of the poor is the answer to poverty. Additionally, the
. . . elimination of people with disabilities is the answer to a pro-

foundly unempathetic society. As the early socialists fought against
the private ownership and control of production, so must we now

examine the ownership and control of reproduction, in order to
avoid a future we might otherwise regret.
(Koval 1987: 19)
The future we might otherwise regret can be Orwellian in feel. The

state’s need for grade-A humans fuels a constant struggle to improve
the product by further sophistication of technology (Greer 1984: 6).
The product here is the ‘productive adult’ rather than children them-
selves (Greer 1984: 6) and the state is fully implicated in this ‘cost-
cutting’ mentality (see also Katz Rothman 1988).
For many feminists, the ‘limited use’ to capitalism of handicapped
fetuses and the cost to the state of handicapped people has fuelled an
ethics which interprets the selective abortion of abnormal fetuses, instig-
ated by prenatal screening practices, as ‘progress’. We would surely be
horrified if a scientist offered to develop a test to diagnose skin colour
prenatally to allow racially mixed people to have light-skinned children
on the grounds that it is difficult to grow up black in the US (Hubbard
1990: 179). Yet ‘we see nothing wrong, and indeed hail as progress, tests
that enable us to try to avoid having children who have disabilities or
are said to have a tendency to acquire a specific disease or disability later
in life’ (Hubbard 1990: 179). The former case would presumably be
deemed unethical as it is racist; but what of discrimination against
people with disabilities? Is it unethical to foster a fear of disability? Is it
doubly unethical to argue that the fear of disability is ‘natural’?
On this reading, the invasion facilitated by the use of reproductive
technologies is not a benign one. Patriarchal and capitalist systems –
here represented by medicine and economics manifested through the
practices of prenatal screening techniques – constrain and mould
women’s choices, coercing women to fulfil their economic duty to the
state by carrying out the eugenic needs of the state. Much of the ethical
debate surrounding prenatal screening is defined by an economic value
system which sets the limits, both of what tests are possible (profitable)
and of what positive results therefore imply, namely abortion of
‘deformed’ fetuses. All of this is structured by an ideology of technolo-
gical ‘progress’ and ‘informed choice’, but one can argue that the driv-
ing force is a narrow economic justification.
This invasion burdens women with the responsibility for making the
decisions to abort, which in the context of liberal democracies appears
to be the appropriate course of action. This economic justification has
been a major driving force behind the spread of prenatal screening and
is commonly used as a central criterion for deciding on an extension of

its practice. In short, it is profitable for society to proceed with prenatal
screening, but only as long as women make the ‘right’ choice (‘good’
mothers) and abort defective fetuses.
The technologies . . . have afforded women some new options but in

our individualistic society often have led to sanctioning the abdica-
tion of responsibility on the part of individuals and society at large,
and so have resulted in saddling women with responsibility that is
out of proportion to their new control.
(Whitbeck 1991: 58)
Society’s need for ‘useful’ resources, in other words ‘able-bodied

humans’, does not always lead to overtly coercive demands on women
to make choices to abort their fetuses selectively. But in societies where
women are relatively powerless, ‘the “right to choose” means little . . .
where “illegitimacy” is stigmatized or where female infants are devalued,
women may resort to abortion or infanticide with impunity; but that
option clearly grows out of female subordination’ (Petchesky 1986: 11).
As such, some feminists claim that the choice to abort defective fetuses
is structured by society. Put differently, ‘women’s so-called demand for
selective termination of pregnancy is not a primordial expression of
individual need but a socially constructed response’ (Overall 1993: 51).
The consent needed to practise prenatal screening and to make the
subsequent choice selectively to abort is both socially engineered and
fundamentally unethical according to many feminist readings. From her
survey on amniocentesis, Wendy Farrant (1985) concluded that many
women felt they had ‘no choice’ but to enter screening programmes.
When women were asked whether they were given a choice about hav-
ing amniocentesis, a number of women replied in such terms as:
I had a choice in that no one would have forced me to have it, but
psychologically I did not have any choice in that if I hadn’t had it
I couldn’t have gone through with the pregnancy.
They put me in such a position that if I’d said no [to amnio-
centesis] I’d have spent the rest of the pregnancy worrying about it.
(Farrant 1985: 111)
There is a real concern here about the increasingly coercive nature of

the use of reproductive technologies such as prenatal screening. The
suggestion that they provide more choice is asinine when women have
little control of social, economic and political spheres (Corea 1990:

145). The proposition that women have more choices also raises the
question of whether women have the option of not using them (see also
Farrant 1985).
An example of this increasing coercion is the growing surveillance
power of the state with regard to the behaviours of pregnant women.
The ideologies which spawn an ethics of ‘quality-controlled’ babies can
impact on the mother in various ways, for example to ensure that she
has sufficient prenatal testing to eradicate ‘bad’ babies, and to practise
‘healthy living’ to ensure ‘good’ babies. Both Jennifer Terry and Ramona
Koval document how this surveillance works. Koval (1990) suggests that
the behaviours deemed to be unhealthy include poor nutrition, alcohol
consumption, drug abuse and smoking. But she claims that these kinds
of behaviours are directly related to socio-economic status and, thus,
are largely out of the control of the women involved (Koval 1990: 124).
Additionally, she argues that all these behaviours are supported by large
industries with obvious interests in perpetuating them. As such it can
be argued that the class structure is buttressed by prenatal screening
technology. Jennifer Terry (1989: 15) discusses how the new prenatal
screening technologies are being used to erode women’s self-determina-
tion and suggests that prenatal screening policies are being selectively
applied along racial and class lines, ‘as a kind of genetic screening to
determine who is fit to reproduce in society’.
On these readings, the body of the woman is simply being used as a
raw material which has the potential to produce good and bad prod-
ucts. In order to ensure a good product the site must be invaded to
monitor those products. Because of the nature of the raw material – a
sentient human female – steps have to be taken to ensure that the
‘right’ decisions are taken. This is clearly more effective if overt coercion
is unnecessary and women take on the burden and responsibility of the
decisionmaking themselves under the guise of individual responsibility.
In answer to the question ‘where is the mother?’, she is there but her
agency seems to be in jeopardy and the conditions of her motherhood
are framed by the needs of the political economy of the state. In answer
to ‘who is the mother?’, the mother is the one who is under surveillance,
invaded, abused and manipulated.
Erasure
What happens when men can make babies?

(Dworkin 1983: 173)
But still, where is the mother? In the 1965 Life magazine image, the
fetus looks as if it is in its own little space capsule – floating in space
like a miniature extra-terrestrial. This view is enhanced by the dark
space and ‘star like’ background to the picture. Clearly, as with astro-
nauts, the fetus is dependent for its survival (up to viability) on its ‘life
support system’, which would include the placenta, amniotic fluid, in
other words the mother’s uterus. One might imagine this makes the
mother indispensable. But the Junior poster indicates that the mother
might be dispensable, that is if we regard the mother as the biological
woman who conceives, gestates and gives birth to the baby. One fem-
inist reading of the poster is that this is the inevitable outcome of
masculinist driven science and technology. Men have frequently gone
to great lengths to appropriate the power of birth from women and
have used the development of reproductive technologies to assist in
this project. This has resulted in the gradual erasure of women’s visual
presence and importance in the reproductive process to the extent
that women may eventually become redundant except for the ‘spare
parts’ that their bodies supply. A dismal picture indeed. How might
this work?
If women’s reproductive bodies are seen as a resource, a commodity,
then it is not surprising that they would be mined for the most useful
parts. This entails a fragmentation and dismemberment of the female
body, physically and visually, which many feminists claim is currently
happening with the increasing use of reproductive technologies. This
implies a threat to the integrity and sovereignty of women. The issue of
surrogate motherhood, for example, once medicalized and subjected to
legislative scrutiny, further removes control of pregnancy and birth
from women. Women become ‘unseen’ as whole sovereign individuals
and, instead, are construed as body parts. A lucrative trade can quickly
develop: ‘while sexual prostitutes sell vagina, rectum and mouth, repro-
ductive prostitutes would sell other body parts: womb, ovaries and eggs’
(Corea 1985: 275). The control of female bodies is fundamental to the
development of many reproductive technologies:
. . . reproductive technology concerns itself with the control and

manipulation of women’s bodies; it is based on an ideological
assumption that woman equals inefficient nature and that male
medicine can do it better. It constantly fragments and dismembers
women during this process and it uses women as experimental
subjects without obtaining their educated consent.
(Rowland 1992: 215)
So, instead of women being seen as indispensable in the reproductive

process, they are rapidly being construed as incidental.
In the film Junior, what ‘women are’ is represented as a mixture of
‘hormones, spaces and emotionality’. They are a veritable caricature of
femininity. The intricate and exquisite uterus is transposed into another
‘female hole’ which De Vito discovers to place the fertilized egg. The
female hormones with which Schwarzenegger is injected in order to turn
him into a ‘woman’ do just that. The pinnacle of Arnie’s ‘womanhood’
is reached in a scene in which De Vito tells Arnie that he is going out
tonight. ‘The convention is tonight?’ Arnie asks plaintively. ‘Yes, I told
you,’ replies De Vito. ‘Oh take me with you. I’m pregnant and so isolated
here. Please take me with you. I promise I’ll be no trouble,’ whimpers
Arnie. De Vito looks frustrated but eventually gives in. ‘OK, you can
come,’ he says. ‘I can come?’ says Arnie, looking very happy, and pro-
ceeds to rush up the stairs with the comment: ‘But what will I wear?’
This Hollywood version of ‘male femininity’ has, of course, absurd
comedic proportions (try watching Terminator 2 and Junior on the same
day). But the prospect of the usurpation by men of that seemingly most
‘woman defining’ activity – pregnancy and birth – is a nightmare scen-
ario for many feminists. Such, typically radical, feminists are fearful for
the future. ‘Sitting at my typewriter night after night, I see my writing on
the new reproductive technologies as a scream of warning to other
women’ (Corea, quoted in Barr 1988: 48). Mary Daly, in 1979, predicted
that ‘the adequate androcratic invasion of the gynocentric realm can only
be replaced by male femininity’ (Daly 1979: 87). The prospect of men giv-
ing birth is still in the realm of science fiction and the Hollywood ima-
gination. But the erasure of woman from the scene of pregnancy may be
enhanced from a different source: the fetus – the newest of ‘consumers’.
Who is primarily visible on the cover of Life magazine? – the fetus/
baby. This visible image of what is inside the uterus has arguably
encouraged the development of ‘fetal rights’. Mother and fetus were
once imagined as part of the same body. With ultrasound technology,
medical practice now tends to see two separate patients.
By promoting the medical treatment of two separate patients, tech-

nologies such as ultrasound help create separate and potentially con-
flicting interests for women and their fetuses. When this happens,
women’s wishes may be overlooked or dismissed by doctors and
others (e.g. the courts) when those wishes are deemed potentially
dangerous to the fetus.
(Gregg 1995: 25)
These visual technologies which isolate the embryo as quasi-astronaut,

extraterrestrial, or aquatic entity can have enormous repressive rever-
berations in the legal and medical management of women’s bodies (Sta-
bile 1994: 72).
Take the example of Angela Carder, a 28-year-old white woman, 26
weeks pregnant, who had received a terminal prognosis for bone cancer
and was ordered by the Washington court to undergo a caesarean sec-
tion. Against Carder’s explicit wishes, against the opinion of her attend-
ing physician, against the protests of her husband and parents, the
doctors refused to prescribe chemotherapy because of its potential
effects on the fetus. A caesarean section was performed and ‘Carder
barely lived long enough to hear that the fetus extracted from her
uterus had died, if indeed it could be said to have lived at all’ (Stabile
1994: 72).
Such surveillance of women’s bodies and the growth of fetal rights
can be described as a civil war within female bodies themselves (Stabile
1994: 72). The dichotomy between the pregnant woman as maternal
environment and the fetus as a person in its own right has emerged in
both popular culture and medical-legal discourse. Pregnancy has
become the site for a number of mapping and surveillance systems such
as ultrasound, emphasizing the increasing control of pregnancy by sci-
ence and technology. With the advent of reproductive technologies,
doctors no longer have to rely on information from the woman about
her pregnancy. For those feminists concerned with the effects on
women’s bodies, the erasure of the woman and the increasing visibility
of the fetus diverts attention from material bodies. Ultrasound techno-
logy images the fetus as living in a ‘nowhere land . . . in an environment
somehow immune to racism, sexism and economic violence’ (Stabile
1994: 91). Some fear that the New Right have used this new ‘subjectivity’
of the fetus to ‘override and dismiss the material needs of the female
bodies that house these cosmonauts, as well as the needs of children and
their families. While the fetus needs protection (a thinly disguised alibi
for controlling women), it doesn’t demand money’ (Stabile 1994: 91).
These feminist readings of the erased pregnant body place visual tech-
nologies, such as ultrasound, centrally within a relationship of mascu-
linist and capitalist antagonism. This means that, in the first instance,
the ‘visual gaze’ of these technologies engenders the object of the gaze
as feminine and the ‘voyeuristic position of the viewer as masculine’
(Farquhar 1996: 162). Thus, a first antagonism is between the active
masculinized viewer and the passive feminized object. ‘The abstract,
intellectual voice of the invisible father wins out over the material,
sensuous, [partially] visible body of the mother’ (Farquhar 1996 162,

my addition in brackets). No longer is knowledge of a woman’s preg-
nancy assured by missed menstruation or fetal movements, or other
bodily changes, but by medical and scientific approbation. A second
antagonism is that forced upon the maternal-fetal relationship. What
was once an unbounded relationship, has become a bifurcated and
oppositional one. This has the effect of exposing the pregnant body for
all to see – but only the inside of that body.
Obstetrical technologies of visualization . . . disrupt the very defini-

tion as traditionally understood, of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ a woman’s
body, of pregnancy as an ‘interior’ experience.
(Petchesky 1986: 65)
Government concern with fiscal policies and lack of concern with the
rights of women to bodily autonomy have encouraged a greedy target-
ing of this new area of management and regulation. The erasure of
women from the scene of pregnancy has reproduced them as ‘mere
maternal environments’ liable to criminal or civil sanctions after the
birth of a sick or disabled child (Farquhar 1996: 170). This is an expedi-
ent way for the state to displace its responsibility for systematic socio-
economic problems of unemployment and poverty on to the bodies of
women and additionally to ‘take control of those bodies because
women lack “self-control”’ (Epstein 1995: 124).
Where is the mother? As with the invaded pregnant body, her onto-
logy is assured but her visual erasure has resulted in the diminishing of
her autonomy and presumably agency in favour of the authority of
patriarchal medical science and legislation and the inflated autonomy
of the fetus. Who is the mother? She is a ‘maternal fetal environment’
subject to the controls and whims of the economic desires of the state.
In contemporary western societies, the fusion of patriarchy, techno-
logy and capitalism has constructed the woman as a vehicle for the
baby, fostering an ideology of women as ‘fetal containers’ (Gregg 1995:
25) and mothers as the ‘major threat to unborn babies’ (Pollitt 1990).
The ‘scream of warning’ about the future issued by Gena Corea is
fleshed out by Barbara Katz Rothman (1988: 163) with her vision of
the future if the battle between fetal rights and ‘maternal environ-
ment’ continues. Her scenario is meant to happen in the year 2014. In
what follows, Mrs M is a diabetic who is reluctant to take the drugs pre-
scribed to prevent miscarriage in diabetic women (as well as being gen-
erally ‘unco-operative’):
Mrs. M., suspecting pregnancy, engages the services of an attorney

who specializes in family law, especially prenatal agreements. On her
initial visit to the fetologist, Mrs. M. and her attorney will be
informed of the conditions to which she must adhere throughout
the pregnancy, and a second attorney will be appointed as fetal
guardian. Violations of the prenatal contract will result in the state
gaining custody of the fetus: either forcibly removing it to an artifi-
cial womb, or putting Mrs. M. in one of the new high-security wings
of the maternity hospital for the duration of her pregnancy.
Alienation
The ultimate technological fantasy . . . is the creation without

mother.
(Huyssen 1986: 70)
Who is the mother in the first image referred to this chapter in which the
fetus is shown dangling in its amniotic sac? The image of physical sep-
aration facilitated by visualizing techniques reifies the boundary
between mother and fetus, compounding a separation between the two.
Does this alienate the mother from the product of production? Does it
also alienate the mother from her own creative part in the process? For
many radical and socialist feminists, who have consistently claimed that
the female (reproductive) body is a primary site for abuse by the institu-
tions of patriarchy and capitalism, the answer to these questions would
probably be yes. Reproductive technologies have provided an ideal
opportunity to ‘exercise power relations on the flesh of the female body’
(Balsamo 1996: 82). But there is more to the body than flesh. In the
western imagination, the body has been paraded as so fundamentally
one’s own, in mind and flesh, within the context of demands for indi-
vidual integrity and autonomy. But has the mother’s body ever been her
‘own’? Has the product of her (re)productive body ever been her ‘own’?
Have power relations always been so exercised upon it that the mother is
whoever the institutions of patriarchy and capitalism decide? Has this
body always been one mired in the practices of alienation?
Since the early 20th century, the economic needs of states such as
Britain led to a rationalization of the labour force aimed at maximum
efficiency by fragmenting the work process. The worker’s body was
treated as a machine, the labour process broken into its smallest possible
units, the assembly line used to enforce a uniform, external schedule
and constant surveillance carried out (Squier 1995: 117). Similarly, the
economic (and other) needs of the state have consistently dictated

when, where and how the labouring (re)productive body produces. The
economics of cost cutting and profit making have figured largely here,
but so too have economic models of labour-saving devices and proce-
dures. Why not automate the process to save labour and cut costs?
The machine is measuring, measuring the contractions . . . they

decide to do this to her. Lay her out and strap her up and pump a
synthetic drug into her blood . . . her breath comes . . . and she isn’t
ready, she isn’t in control. The contraction seizes her, a giant hand
descending and grabbing round the middle and crushing the life out;
she like a rubber doll, helpless.
(Baines 1983: 67–8, quoted in Barr 1988: 167)
The image here of Zelda Harris, the ‘woman’ in this narrative, is of

someone attached to a machine that controls her body rather than one
transformed into a machine. This is science fiction, yet feminist science
fiction, particularly that to do with reproductive technologies, often
reflects contemporary practices (Barr 1988: 167). The use of monitoring
machinery in the management of labour has been increasingly intro-
duced for women giving birth in western hospitals throughout the 20th
century (Adams 1994: 51).
In 1955 a machine called a ‘partograph’ was developed which
allowed obstetricians to determine whether the progress of a woman’s
labour conformed to an ideal curve. Labours that lagged behind the
ideal could be made to follow the prescribed curve with the use of oxy-
tocic drugs. The National Maternity Hospital in Dublin took up these
principles of active labour management wholesale.
Since the 1960s . . . over eight thousand women per year have deliv-
ered babies at the National Maternity Hospital. O’Driscoll has
developed a simple and rigidly applied system of monitoring and
intervention for women in labor.
(Adams 1994: 51)
The rigid way in which this system can be applied and the way in
which the monitoring and intervention is managed seemingly turns
the labouring woman’s body into an ‘organ functioning with machine-
like precision. When it breaks down it can be corrected’ (Adams 1994:
52). Active management of labour involves a reconceptualization, and
ultimately a functional redesign, of mothers’ bodies according to a single
narrow standard. The individual body is demanded to behave in precise

synchrony with other bodies of its class (Adams 1994: 53).
Each of the over eight thousand women who deliver yearly at the
National Maternity Hospital is expected not only to dilate at a con-
stant rate, but to refrain from indulging in ‘degrading scenes’ and to
keep constantly in mind her responsibilities for her own well-being,
her child’s, and the staff’s. The ‘Dublin Experience’ is a very success-
ful experiment in standardized health care delivery; it also attempts
to standardize mothers’ bodies and minds.
(Adams 1994: 53)
Zelda, the science fiction character, does not refrain from indulging in
‘degrading scenes’. But in so doing she is represented as something of a
‘caricature of femininity’.
In Junior, Arnie is also represented as something of a caricature of
femininity: dependent, frivolous and emotional. In the quotation at the
beginning of this chapter – ‘we don’t want anyone to look inside us,
since it’s not a pretty sight in there’ – Wittgenstein was making a com-
ment about men. But Arnie – hormonally reconstructed as a woman –
seems no longer afraid to let anyone look inside him. By using this
second image I suggested that some feminists believe that men intend
to usurp the power of pregnancy from women and literally become
pregnant and give birth themselves. In the film this might make some
sense, especially as the primary motive is economic. But would the
demands of western hegemonic masculinity countenance such a slide
into the ‘femininity’ of pregnancy and child-bearing, with the invasion
of the ‘inside’ that is implied? The welcoming of an ‘alien invasion’
from either the fetus or the institutions of patriarchy and capitalism
seems unlikely. The comedic feminine representation of this mega-
bodied male instead serves to highlight the absurdities of the demands
of femininity in the scene of reproduction.
Some feminists fear the ultimate alienation of the fetus from the
mother – and the loss of ‘maternal power’ that this implies – by the pro-
spect of the ‘pregnant man’. But it is the alienation of the self – the ‘real’
self, the ‘true’ self – that has been a primary concern for many femin-
ists. Juliet Mitchell (1974) and Nancy Chodorow (1978) are key writers
on how women are psychologically constructed to ensure they learn to
accept the indignities of motherhood. Chodorow’s central question was:
why do women continue to mother? Her answer was: the imposition of
a different character structure to boy’s. Subjecting oneself, or allowing
oneself to be subjected, to the monitoring and surveillance, the invasions

and erasures that many reproductive technologies imply, can be traced
back to the mother’s ‘need’ to satisfy the needs of others before her own.
Mitchell, resurrecting Freud for feminists, combined Marxist analyses of
the economy with psychoanalysis to arrive at a synthesized explanation
for women’s psychological construction which satisfied the needs of
the state rather than herself. Two caricatures of femininity indeed.
A third feminine caricature might be included here: that of the
Foucaultian docile mother’s body. The pregnant woman lies on her
back while an ultrasound scan is performed and the invasion of sound
waves allows the mother to ‘see’ the fetus on screen rather than feel the
baby within her. This presumed non-invasive technology is perhaps all
the more invasive because the invasion is presented as benign. But what
results is the growing visibility of the ever-demanding fetus. In a sense,
there is a double invasion, from outside (sound waves, ‘interested’
others) and inside (the fetus). As such, a dual invasion is masquerading
as a non-invasion. Added to the docile material body is an image of a
docile subjectivity. Women often have little choice other than to sub-
mit to scanning and testing throughout pregnancy. To refuse scanning
and testing, especially if one is deemed ‘at risk’, is to court accusations
of being unconcerned for the welfare of the fetus. In this way, pregnant
women’s identities as both potential ‘hostile uterine environments’ and
‘altruistic mothers’ are constructed by such technologies; at the same
time, women effectively police themselves and other pregnant women.
For Foucaultians, such reproductive technologies work ‘by creating
desires, attaching individuals to specific identities and establishing
norms against which individuals and their behaviours and bodies are
judged and against which they police themselves’ (Sawicki 1991: 68). As
such, this is not an alienation from some essential self but is, instead, a
re-negotiation of subjectivity.
For Zelda in Baines’s science fiction story this renegotiation is a severe
struggle.
The machinery of induction threatens Zelda’s ability to renegotiate

subjectivity through labor and birth; the machine/physician has
entered her by way of needles and monitors, recreating her in his
image. But, like Frankenstein’s monster, Zelda offends her creators.
She screams and shits on them in a semiotic fury.
(Adams 1994: 57)
But what is the struggle for? The story of alienation in this scene of
reproduction can be read in two seemingly opposed ways. The entering
of the machine/physician – a metaphor for many similar practices in

the realm of reproduction – which renders Zelda a screaming, shitting,
horror of femininity, can be read as a brutal invasion of this woman,
threatening her agency and ability to dictate her own subjectivity. But
this creation of patriarchy is offensive to its creator. Does this imply
that her alien(ated) status can paradoxically become a source of ‘libera-
tion’? In the science fiction story, Zelda escapes from the chains of pat-
riarchy. As she goes back through the names they have given her
(Irigaray 1985: 205) – ‘bad veins, bad placenta, inadequate mother who
must be strapped to a machine’ (Adams 1994: 58) – as the drugs of med-
ical and patriarchal practices begin to wear off, she ‘steals’ her medical
chart, steals a nurse’s cloak, ‘steals’ her son and runs.
What can we make of the story of Zelda here in the context of the
practices and metaphors of alienation? How can we interpret her
‘escape’? At first glance it seems difficult to accept a story other than the
one which represents her as constrained and oppressed, despite her ulti-
mate escape. Where can she run to? But the other story relies on an
imaginative leap which resists the dogma of boundaries. Theories of ali-
enation seem to depend on some notion of an essential and repressed
self, ever vulnerable to invasion and/or erasure at fleshly and psycholo-
gical levels. What seems to matter is whether the individual has control
over these encounters and what effects they ultimately have. But, again,
the image of some essential self is conjured up here, something ontolo-
gically prior which can be impacted upon by things like reproductive
technologies. If we abandon our ideas about essential selves and neces-
sary boundaries, this may allow a thinking of the body as a negotiated
form. The fusion of technology with this form will not necessarily
repress it because it is a form/subject which is in a constant state of
negotiation, rather than an object to be repressed.
Donna Haraway’s question ‘why should the body end at the skin?’
can be helpful in the process of imagining boundaries as fluid. Her
refusal of boundaries is evidenced by her work which meshes our
understandings of humans, animals and machines (Haraway 1991;
1992; 1997). Her introduction of the cyborg as ‘the self that feminists
must code’ (1991: 163) is a manifestation of these blurrings. Can we
imagine Zelda as a kind of cyborg?
Mother may not be missing after all
A central promise of Enlightenment and western modernity is that con-

flicts between knowledge and power can be settled by the use of reason.
This – the promise implied – would give us ‘innocent’ knowledge (Flax

1992: 447). Many feminists relied on this promise and used it to try to
prove that women are fully and importantly human, deserving of rights
of agency and control over their bodies and minds. A woman’s body is
her own. Her mind is her own. Reason, it was hoped, could prove all
this. Ironically, all that was ‘proved’ by this recourse to humanist ideo-
logy, was that it is very difficult to ground truths about the ‘female’
body using ‘masculinist’ reason. The machinations of patriarchy and
capitalism have still been able to imagine the product of reproduction
as a resource by calling into service one of the dualisms of modernism:
ablebodied/disabled. It has still been possible to represent the mother as
a reproducing unit – ever vulnerable to invasive surveillance, manipula-
tion and visual and physical erasure and fragmentation as required by
global industrialization, ‘as monitored industrial producer, as co-opted
passive consumer’ (Squier 1995: 127). Reproductive technologies, them-
selves an outcome of masculinist science, have facilitated the brutal
opening up of the inside of the pregnant body for all to see – but all we
can see is the (‘normal’) fetus; mother seems to be missing.
But who is the mother?
Egg mother, birth mother, name mother, surrogate mother, terry-

cloth mother, gene mother, bio-mother, biomom, adoptive mother,
legal mother, foster mother, mother of rearing, property mother, lab
mother, blood mother, organ mother, tissue mother, nurturant
mother, earth mother and den mother.
(Treichler 1990: 130)
This plethora of mothers that Treichler suggests are all evident in the
late 20th century is not necessarily a cause for feminist fear, though
economic exploitation is always a reality, especially for those with lim-
ited material resources (Treichler 1990: 130). This abundant and grow-
ing list reminds us that relying on the truth of a singular, easily
interpreted definition (man, woman, mother, human) is not necessarily
a source of greater agency than an evasive or slippery definition.
A mother demanding rights on the grounds of her ultimate human-ness
can be caught in the trap of the competing rights of fetuses and fathers.
But a mother who confounds the ‘names that are given her’, perhaps by
‘becoming’ a cyborg – a hybrid creature of a post-gender world – might
intimidate her creators more thoroughly than the resort to the creator’s
own language.
If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men

have been doing for centuries, as we have been taught to speak, we’ll
miss each other . . . we’ll become spoken machines, speaking
machines.
(Irigaray 1985: 205)
The technologies of reproduction – in the service of patriarchy and cap-

italism – can surely invade, erase and alienate the mother. But if the
mother is not – is not there to be invaded, erased and alienated – the
prospect of mothermachines does not have to mean the final triumph
of patriarchy. This is not so much about whether the mother is present,
absent or repressed, but that technological discourse fails to capture her.
As I said in the introduction, many feminists fear the erosion of
women’s agency with the increasing use of reproductive technologies
world-wide and, indeed, one can tell a convincing story about how
pregnant women’s bodies can be invaded, erased and alienated on a
global scale. But women have always resisted and often evaded capture
by practices that attempt to constrain and control them. As we hurtle
towards the new millennium perhaps we should begin asking what it
might mean for a cyborg to be the ‘self that feminists must code’.
Maybe it is in the guise of the cyborg that 21st century woman contin-
ues to evade capture. Perhaps Zelda did escape after all.
Notes
1 Thanks to Nik Dennis for drawing my attention to this quotation.
2 The term reproductive technologies covers a multitude of things from the
most basic and ancient contraceptive device to the most recent cloning and
genetic manipulative techniques. Michelle Stanworth suggests a useful four-
fold categorization of these technologies: (i) those concerned with fertility
control; (ii) those concerned with the management of labour and childbirth;
(iii) those concerned with monitoring pregnancy; (iv) those concerned with
assisting conception (1987: 10–11). I will be using the term reproductive
technologies relatively loosely in this chapter but I am particularly interested
in the pregnant body and Stanworth’s third category, which generally covers
prenatal screening technologies, especially ultrasound and amniocentesis.
However, I will also be referring more generally to the reproductive body and
technologies.
3 Both of these film characters, in one way or another, carry out the needs of a he-
gemonic body – that might be a patriarchal husband or a patriarchal/capitalist
state – through a body or bodies that seem to have little ‘authentic’ or reflect-
ive agency.
4 Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) championed the ‘science of the improvement

of the human species’ by proposing the improvement of physical and mental
characteristics by selective parenthood. It was the basis of the compulsory
sterilization laws passed in many countries in the early 20th century and the
Nazi ‘racial hygiene’ programme. A distinction is sometimes made between
negative and positive eugenics. Negative eugenics implies decreasing the pro-
pagation of the ‘handicapped’ or ‘defective’. The term is used today to
describe selective abortion of fetuses. Positive eugenics implies increasing the
propagation of ‘desirable’ human types. In medical science, it denotes an
approach whereby genetic disorders can be remedied or averted (for example,
gene therapy). Selective pronatalism is a form of positive eugenics.
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Part III
Embodied Identities
7
The Political Economy of Meat:
Food, Culture and Identity
Marc Williams 1
Introduction
Anthropologists have long explored the relationship between culture,

food and eating. Recent work in sociology has also addressed these
themes. Research into food in political economy, on the other hand,
remains located in discussions revolving around the production of com-
modities. When consumption is investigated, it is rarely from a per-
spective which includes cultural factors. This chapter is an excursion
into the linkages between food, culture and identity through a discus-
sion of the political economy of meat. It explores the history of think-
ing about meat, paying particular attention to shifts in ways of thinking
about meat over time, and to contemporary conflicts over meat and
meat products. Perceptions of the importance of meat are not restricted
to its nutritional value but extend to non-food issues. Representations,
and consumption, of meat (and blood) encode cultural messages about
selfhood and group identity.
Conventional economics analyses changes in the meat market in terms
of two key variables: income and price. Demand for meat, as a whole, is
perceived to be a function of rising incomes. In other words, meat is a
superior good and as our incomes rise we demand more meat, substitut-
ing this improved form of protein for more inferior sources. And the
shift in demand between one type of meat and another is analysed in
terms of relative prices. That is, consumers shift from one meat source to
another type of meat largely in response to movements in prices so that
the type of meat with a competitive (price) advantage will increase its
market share. However, the market conditions of supply and demand
are not the only factors which determine production and consumption.
Extraneous, that is non-price, factors do influence consumption and
135
production. Recently, economists and meat industry analysts have

become cognizant of the influence of non-price and non-income (that
is, non-economic) factors in production and consumption (Burton and
Young 1990; Spitters 1994). In noting the marked changes in the meat
industry over the last 30 years, some neoclassical economists have wid-
ened the scope of their analysis to examine changes in consumers’
tastes or preferences. Non-economic factors such as values, lifestyle,
social class and personality are increasingly recognized as important in
determining the demand for meat. The impact of variables such as con-
sumer attitude and taste factors, consumer lifestyle and structural
changes, industry marketing and promotional activities, and supply fac-
tors on the meat market is, however, held to be less significant than
economic factors (Bansback 1994).
Nevertheless, the ‘comparative advantage’ held by meat over other
sources of protein is taken for granted. It is excluded from analysis as a
subject unfit for human deliberation. In other words, standard eco-
nomic analysis accepts uncritically the ‘good taste of meat’, and the
desirability of meat as a source of protein. And yet, of all the foods we
eat, meat is probably the most controversial. In some respects, meat
may hold a dominant position in the ‘food chain’ of most societies, but
it has attached to it more taboos than any other food source. It is not
the intention of this chapter to declare redundant the analyses of con-
ventional economics or to dispute the findings of nutritional science.
Rather, it is to introduce in a preliminary fashion a set of considerations
absent from standard analyses of the production, distribution and con-
sumption of meat, and, in so doing, to uncover and expose a set of
assumptions inherent in conventional economic analyses. While eco-
nomic analyses of the meat industry are common, little attempt has
been made to link this analysis with the cultural reasons behind meat-
eating. Unlike the standard economic argument, this chapter does not
consider these non-economic factors to be external to production and
consumption.
The starting point of the chapter is an attempt to uncover and expose
the sets of assumptions inherent in conventional economic analyses. It
examines the linkages between food, culture and identity through a dis-
cussion of the political economy of meat. How people think and feel
about their bodies influences how and what they consume and eat. Eat-
ing is not only a nutritional act, it is also a social act (Mennell, Murcott
and Van Otterloo 1992). What we eat is not so much a ‘given’ as a social
category, with different meanings composed, imposed and developed
by individuals and groups. I have chosen to concentrate on meat
The Political Economy of Meat 137
because of the historical dominance of meat in so many cultures and

societies. Moreover, if we are what we eat, then an analysis of food is an
important topic for students of political economy and the body. Key
questions posed for the analysis are generated by the relationship
between culture and food. How does culture shape our eating habits?
What forms of competence has culture invested in our diet?
One starting point for this analysis is an awareness that the body/
subject is constructed in relation to food, itself contextualized in a
world of multiple meanings. The practices constitutive of the political
economy of meat are embedded in a wider discursive terrain.
Thus, within the context of a political economy of the body, this
study of the production and consumption of meat raises certain issues
hidden from view in standard IPE analyses. First, the chapter suggests
the need to integrate cultural issues into the study of the production and
consumption of commodities. Second, the chapter implicitly criticizes
the assumption made in a number of studies of globalization that the
construction of a global culture means the shrinking of difference. On
the contrary, the arguments presented here demonstrate that in the con-
temporary world, images of the body and attention to image is heavily
conditioned by access to material resources. Economic inequalities
between the North and the South are reproduced in the agri-food sys-
tem with resultant implications for health and the body.
Four main themes articulated in the project to bring the body into
IPE are explored in this chapter. First, we are centrally concerned with
the construction of value, that is, how value is formed. In contempor-
ary global culture (and conventional economic analysis) the value
attached to meat has been abstracted from its historical origins. The sec-
tion ‘The dominant meat culture’ is an attempt to remedy this defect
through an historical reconstruction of the development of the modern
meat industry. Moreover, we show in the section ‘Challenges to the cul-
ture of meat’ that the value attached to the production and consumption
of meat is open to dispute. Second, the chapter explores time and space
relations particularly through its attempt to situate the production and
consumption of meat within the framework of a changing interna-
tional division of labour. Both neoclassical economics and mainstream
IPE base their analyses on abstract notions of state and market. It is pre-
cisely an attachment to fixed notions of time and space which restricts
analysis to standard conceptual schemes and admits so-called non-
economic factors to the explanation as, at best, second-order considera-
tions. The fact that the units of analysis and the relations among the
units may have been changed by historical forces cannot be incorporated
into orthodox viewpoints when fixed notions of political processes and

economic processes provide the starting point of analysis. Third, the
chapter provides an introduction to the body in IPE through its focus
on the construction of the self. In exploring the links between food,
culture and identity, the chapter addresses how the consumption of
meat is implicated in individual and societal selfconceptions. The actu-
alization of self through the practice of eating is, of course, relevant to
considerations of power and the gendered nature of social discourse.
Finally, in the context of the political economy of the body, the chapter
is explicitly concerned with the issue of human agency, that is, the
transformative capacity of human action. The ability of humans to res-
ist dominant structures is highlighted in the discussion of vegetarian-
ism as resistance to the dominant ideology of meat.
The chapter begins by providing a brief overview of recent develop-
ments in the production, international trade in, and consumption of
meat. In so doing, the intention is not to provide a comprehensive ana-
lysis of recent trends in global meat production and consumption but a
brief overview of selected developments. The section on the changing
structure of meat production supplements an examination of statistical
evidence with a broad framework indebted to writers who stress the
development of a global agro-food system. The production, distribution
and consumption of meat is affected by developments in technology,
the policies of national governments (for example, regulation, subsid-
ies) (North 1993), and bilateral and multilateral policies (for example,
tariff reductions) (OECD 1988; WTO 1995b). Hence, the supply and
demand for meat will be influenced by the application of cost-efficient
methods of production, changes in transport, governmental regulation,
trade liberalization and a number of other factors.
The second section of the chapter explores the dominant meat cul-
ture. First, it provides a brief introduction to the increased consumption
of animal protein in the western diet. Secondly, attention is focused on
cultural meanings attached to meat.
The third section of the chapter discusses challenges to the dominant
ideology. Modern vegetarianism developed simultaneously with the
increased availability of meat. Meat is not only subject to restriction
and taboo, its production and consumption is also contested. The dom-
inance of meat is asserted not on the basis of the existence of a global
culture, although the globalization of production and consumption
provides a material basis for such an argument. It is not possible in a
chapter of this length to discuss the wide range of practices which
exist (and have existed) across diverse cultures. We are aware that the
arguments in this chapter can be developed in a fashion which gives

greater attention to the specificities of diverse cultural practices. While
accepting that the specific societal context will determine how the
interrelationships between food and identity develop, the importance
attached to meat has been widespread in human history and certain
similarities in the manner in which meat is perceived are apparent
across a number of societies.
The changing structure of meat production
The production, distribution and consumption of meat and meat prod-

ucts have become increasingly global since the Second World War. The
production of meat is part of an agro-food production system in which
agriculture has been severed from its local origins. The internatio-
nalization of production in the agro-food sector has affected both the
quantity and type of meat produced. Friedman (1993: 34) argues that
profits in this sector ‘depended on larger restructuring of the post-war
economy towards mass consumption, especially increased consump-
tion of animal products and high value-added manufactured foods . . . ’
Although the subject under scrutiny may appear obvious, it is per-
haps helpful to define meat before proceeding further. Meat includes
the trade in live animals, fresh, chilled and frozen meat, and manufac-
tured meat products. Four main types of meat can be identified – beef,
poultry, pig meat and sheep meat. In 1994, the three major sources of
global meat production were pig meat (40 per cent), beef (28 per cent)
and poultry (26 per cent) (Henry and Rothwell 1995: 22). And total world
meat production stood at 191.7 million tons, representing an increase of
1.8 per cent over 1993 levels. (WTO 1995a: 8) The main sources of
growth in the past 25 to 30 years have been in pig meat and poultry.
And between 1984 and 1994, 84 per cent of the increase in world meat
production was the result of increases in pig and poultry production
(see Table 7.1).
Table 7.1 World meat production annual growth (percentages)
Year Beef Pig meat Poultry Sheep/goat Meat total
1970–80 1.6 4.0 5.6 0.7 3.1

1980–90 1.6 3.0 4.7 2.8 2.8
1990–94 −1.0 1.8 4.6 0.3 1.5
Source: Henry and Rothwell 1995: 22

The development of what Sanderson (1986) calls the ‘world steer’ rep-
resents a new phase in the internationalization of production. Key fea-
tures of this phase are the development of contract farming and the
input of new technologies. Changing land-use patterns have resulted in
the integration of traditional peasant farmers into the cattle complex
(Raynolds et al. 1993: 1106). The international cattle market has also be-
come increasingly standardized. Global restructuring is based on spe-
cialized feedstuffs, medical technology and innovations in refrigeration
and transport (McMichael 1992). The world steer is a product of the
foodgrain-feedgrain-livestock complex, where land is brought out of
cultivation as foodgrain and turned over to feedgrain for consumption
by cattle. The result of cattle ranching is grain deficits. Hence beef, a
product for those with higher incomes, displaces grain consumed by
the world’s poor.
Changes in the poultry meat sector provide a microcosm of the devel-
opments in the global meat industry in the past 30 years. Poultry (meat
from broilers, turkeys, chickens, ducks and geese) has been one of the
fastest growing sources of meat production. In 1988 world poultry pro-
duction accounted for 22 per cent (Bishop 1990: 6) of total meat pro-
duction, but in 1994 this had risen to 26 per cent (Henry and Rothwell
1995: 22). World poultry meat production tripled between 1968 and
1988. The expansion in world poultry production shows little sign of
slowing down. In 1994, production increased by four per cent over
1993 and reached 49 million tons (WTO 1995a: 50). Most poultry pro-
duction is confined to the local market, with only some nine per cent of
total production (seven per cent when intra-European Union (EU) trade
is excluded) entering international trade. In 1988, the advanced indus-
trial countries’ share of the market was 54 per cent of total global pro-
duction, but this had increased to approximately 60 per cent in 1994
(Henry and Rothwell 1995: 23; Bishop 1990: 7). The growth in poultry
production has been stimulated by growing demand in the advanced
industrial countries (AICs) as consumers shifted down the food chain,
and also by higher incomes in the developing world. The US is the largest
poultry producer in the world, with a 27 per cent share of global output
in 1994 (Henry and Rothwell 1995: 24). Apart from the US, other key
producers are the EU, Japan, Canada, Brazil, China and Russia. Tech-
nical advances in poultry production gathered pace during the 1960s.
Production technology allowed companies to reduce feed required per
pound of weight gain. In 1988, two pounds of feed were required to
produce one pound of weight gain, whereas in 1940 it required four
pounds of feed in order to produce the same weight gain. Moreover, the
time required to ‘grow out’ a broiler has declined from 14 weeks in 1940
to 6–7 weeks in 1988 (Bishop 1990: 9). This more efficient grain to meat
conversion has enabled poultry producers to maintain profit levels,
even though selling broilers at declining prices in relation to other
meats. The costs of production of poultry has been dramatically
reduced. Developments in technology have made it possible to con-
struct modern, efficient poultry production complexes anywhere in the
world. Costs of production are not uniform across the world. For
example, in 1988 the US cost of production was 29.9 cents per pound
whereas in Taiwan it was 62 cents per pound. (Bishop 1990: 10)
The transnational corporation has dominated the changes in the meat
complex (Heffernan and Constance 1994). Flexible corporate strategies
have led to increasing rationalization, concentration and centralization
of firms. For example, in the US the number of firms producing chick-
ens declined by nearly one-third between 1959 and 1988 (Bishop 1990:
8). The organization of the modern cattle, pig meat or poultry industry
is radically different from that at the end of the Second World War. Pro-
duction has shifted to vertically-integrated firms in which production
and marketing decisions are centralized and production complexes are
either owned directly or controlled through contracts. This integrated
production structure covers all stages of operation, although it can be
argued that no single corporate strategy exists since there are multiple
strategies that companies can use in order to become global players. But
one notable development has been the creation of large food conglom-
erates, for example ConAgra, hence meat becomes one component in
the value-added processed foods market (Gouveia 1994: 131).
The global pattern of meat consumption
The global pattern of meat consumption is intricately linked with pro-

duction. An overview of consumption patterns reveals two major
changes in the post-Second World War period: an increase in total meat
consumption and the changing sectoral composition of consumption.
Consumption parallels production; thus the share of beef, veal, mutton
and lamb has declined and that of poultry and pig meat has increased.
These trends are especially noticeable in the US and the EU (FAO 1989).
Table 7.2 shows the changes in meat consumption between 1981 and
1993 in the major consuming countries. This reveals some variation in
national markets but (apart from Japan) confirms the gains made by
poultry consumption at the expense of beef.
Table 7.2 World meat consumption trends: percentage changes, 1981–93
Country/area Beef and veal Pig meat Poultry meat Sheep meat
Canada −17.9 −8.6 39.6 15.7

US −10.4 −5.0 55.5 −4.3
EU −10.8 13.2 32.1 17.6
Australia −24.5 18.8 42.9 3.2
Japan 78.6 17.7 31.7 −46.7
Argentina −21.3 −28.1 28.2 −31.3
Source: WTO 1995a: 13
Since the end of the Second World War, total protein intake, and
animal protein as a proportion of this total, has increased in both
developed and developing countries. Meat remains the main source of
animal protein in developed and developing countries but there are
wide variations between countries and regions. The developed world
consumes roughly two-thirds of world meat production, whereas the
developing world with three-quarters of the world’s population con-
sumes only one-third of total meat production. Meat provides the main
source of animal protein in all developed countries with the notable
exception of Japan, where fish remains dominant. In 1991, per capita
consumption of meat in the EU was 70 per cent higher than in 1960
(Bansback 1994).
The long-term trend is one of rising global meat consumption,
although this general trend masks a decline worrying top producers and
retailers. Per capita meat consumption has risen in the past 50 years but
the rate of increase has been decreasing in the past 30 years. The slow-
down in consumption has been most marked in the developed coun-
tries. Within the overall increase since the Second World War, a major
shift has taken place in the structure of demand in favour of poultry,
and products derived from the pig. This increase in demand for poultry
and pig meat has been at the expense of beef and veal. Economists have
explained this changing demand – the shift from red meat to white
meat – in terms of income and price. The overall demand for meat is a
function of income and the shift between different types of meat is seen
as a response to relative prices. In the past two decades, the retail price
of beef has been higher than chicken in most countries (WTO 1995a:
13). But pig meat is the most important type of meat consumed in both
developed and developing countries. Beef ranks second for both groups,
with poultry in third place.
Marked growth in consumption has taken place in the developing

countries. Increases in consumption have been significantly below aver-
age in the more developed countries. In the past 20 years, total con-
sumption of meat has increased faster in developing countries but the
absolute consumption per capita still remains far below that in the
developed world (FAO 1989: 18). Indeed, during this period the gap in
consumption between the North and the South has grown despite the
rising trend in the developing world. Average meat consumption in the
developing world is less than a fifth of the pattern in the developed
world. In the period 1980–82, for example, per capita meat consump-
tion in the developing world stood at 13.5 kg but for the developed
world the figure was 75.5 kg (FAO 1989: 3).
The increased consumption of meat in the post-war period can be
explained by growth in average income per person. Historically, as
people have become more affluent the demand for meat has risen. The
regular consumption of meat was both a symbol of increased wealth
and a source of nutrition (Spitters 1994). Economic growth in the Third
World and the concomitant urbanization creates an expanding but dif-
fuse urban use for meat and meat products. High income elasticities of
demand for meat in the South accounts for the growth in demand and
consumption. On the other hand, in the 1980s, the demand for meat in
a number of AICs has been stagnant. At higher levels of income and
consumption the income elasticity of demand tends to decline as the
market approaches saturation levels. The shift away from beef towards
poultry and pig meat can also be explained in terms of changing price
elasticities of demand, since the decline in the consumption of beef has
been most marked in the US, the most efficient producer of poultry and
pig meat in the world. As I hope to show later, the decline in meat con-
sumption in North America and the increased share of poultry meat is
to some extent a consequence of affluence in that region.
This discussion of the production and consumption of meat has,
I hope, served three purposes. First, in providing a clear overview of
recent changes in the global meat industry. The two key developments
have been increased meat production and consumption (although con-
sumption patterns have been declining in the advanced capitalist coun-
tries), and a shift from beef to poultry. I will argue below that both the
decline in consumption in the North and the decline in red meat con-
sumption, the preference for white meat and for lean meat, is linked to
issues of power (reflecting class and status considerations, and resist-
ance to meat-eating) and changing images of the body (changing stand-
ards of health and beauty).
Secondly, in documenting the developments within the production

structure. The role of technology and changes in the production structure
are crucial determinants of the political economy of meat which must
be understood in an historical context as the next section demonstrates.
Thirdly, in raising the issue of inequality. In the context of interna-
tional production and consumption this theme has been mentioned in
relation to differences between the developed world and the developing
countries. The centrality of inequality to the political economy of the
body will be explored below. The subject of inequality cannot be con-
fined to the statist dimensions of North–South relations since inequal-
ities arise at the national and international levels, between men and
women, and between humans and animals.
The dominant meat culture
If meat-eating is related to affluence, why is it that consumption is fall-

ing in the most affluent countries? Not only is consumption falling in
the richer countries but the fall, especially in red meat consumption, is
more marked among the wealthy and better educated social classes (a
neat parallel with cigarette smoking). The standard economic explana-
tion for this is (as I have noted above) in terms of the elasticity of
demand. But recourse to the income elasticity of demand is limited
since it merely describes what is happening rather than providing an
explanation. Elasticity of demand is a positivistic, asocial concept
unable to take account of historical, political, social and cultural factors.
The standard economic approach is based on an assumption which is
subject to question. If meat is highly prized and valued, this is a natural
result not of some inherent qualities attached to the substance but
rather of the meanings attached to the consumption of meat within
society. The eating of meat is cultural and investigation of demand and
supply needs to be placed in a cultural context. Economic analysis is
not redundant but whereas it can, perhaps, explain exchange value and
use value it cannot explain how value is derived. Economic analysis, for
example, cannot explain prohibitions on eating meat, either particular
types of meat or meat in general. These so-called extra-economic factors
are not only present when humans decide not to consume but also
affect choices over what to consume. In other words, it is necessary to
ask why certain foods are esteemed (Fiddes 1991: 173).
How does culture shape our eating habits? What forms of competence
has culture invested in our diet? Is the shift to eating meat the result
of superior protein or the superior position meat has held in many
cultures? This dominance of meat is partly related to the fact that for a
long time meat was relatively expensive, and also to the fact that meat
is associated with a number of myths. Meat’s contemporary dominance
has been historically constructed. It is the result of developments in the
19th century, and age-old myths about meat. In the first part of this sec-
tion I will examine the impact of industrialization on the western diet.
Next, I will turn my attention to the ideology of meat.
Industrialization and meat for all

Meat has long held a dominant position among foodstuffs in most cul-
tures. The majority of consumers value meat and meat products as a
desirable and healthy part of their daily food intake. The importance of
meat arises from its use as a source of nutrition, especially protein
(Jensen 1994). In the modern world, it is the prime source of animal
protein in both rich and poor countries (FAO 1989: 1). And, meat is
often the prime item in a meal in contemporary western homes. Meat’s
dominant position is intricately linked with the fact that, for most of
recorded history, meat has been a very expensive item to produce. Meat
is an expensive source of protein. From the 14th century until the mid-
19th century the European diet was 90 per cent grain (Cockburn 1996).
It is only with increasing real wages that it becomes possible for the
majority of the population to consume meat on a regular basis. The
modern consumption of meat is a result of socio-economic and techno-
logical changes attendant on industrialization,. For example, consump-
tion of livestock products in Europe fell in the 16th century and was
restored to 15th-century levels only in the mid-19th century. Moreover,
until the end of the 19th century, livestock products rarely provided
more than 15 per cent of total calorific intake (Grigg 1995: 247–8). Grigg
provides some examples of the changes in European consumption pat-
terns from the early 19th century to the early 1960s. For example, Ger-
man per capita consumption of meat per annum rose from 16 kg in
1816 to 51 kg by 1907, and 67kg in the 1960s. Belgian per capita con-
sumption of meat per annum rose from 15kg in 1880 to 60 kg in 1960
(Grigg 1995: 254).
Nineteenth century developments in the meat industry were part of
what Goody (1982) refers to as the creation of ‘industrial food’. Goody
(1982: 154) argues that four factors – preserving, mechanization, retailing
(and wholesaling) and transport – were responsible for the development
of an industrial cuisine in the west. Modern food preservation was initi-
ated by Nicholas Appert’s successful demonstration of bottling in 1804.
The subsequent development of canning in the 1820s was important in
preserving perishable foods. These developments in preservation were

complemented by technological advances in mechanization and trans-
port. Technological advances brought the steam locomotive, steam
ships and, later, the combustion engine. These inventions facilitated
the growth of a transport system that could deliver enormous quantities
of food over vast distances in a relatively short time. Technological
advance succeeded in shortening both time and distance. Moreover, the
mechanization of food production helped to reduce costs. Increasing
industrialization with the concomitant rise in working class incomes cre-
ated both the necessity for a link between the rural area and city, and the
purchasing power to demand new products. There is general agreement
in the literature that the role of agriculture in the expansion of industrial
capitalism was to ‘relieve downward pressure on the rate of profit by fur-
nishing staple foodstuffs or “wage goods” at low real wages to the urban
industrial sector’ (Goodman and Redclift 1991: 87). This gave rise to
changes in retail and wholesaling, with grocery moving from a minor
food trade to a pre-eminent position in retailing (Goody 1982: 170).
Goody’s analysis of the rise of what he terms ‘industrial food’ is sup-
ported by studies of the development of the meat industry in the US in
the 19th century. The disassembly line developed in Cincinnati pio-
neered mechanization. The disassembly line division of labour ensured
that pigs were processed for various body parts separately, and byprod-
ucts such as lard, candles, glue and soap were made efficiently (Walsh
1982: 81–2; Cronon 1991: 228–9). In her study of the mid-western meat
packing industry in the US, Margaret Walsh (1982: 39–54) has demon-
strated the importance of improvements in the transportation network
in the creation of a permanent industry. And Cronon (1991: 212) argues
that the creation of the stockyard not only transformed Chicago’s role in
the meat trade, it also remade ‘international meat markets with new
technologies for selling and distributing cattle and hogs’. Moreover, it
. . . established intricate new connections among grain farmers, stock

raisers and butchers, thereby creating a new corporate network that
gradually seized responsibility for moving and processing animal
flesh in all parts of North America. One long-term result of this new
network was basic change in the American diet, and in that of people
in other parts of the world as well.
(Cronon 1991: 212)
The rise in refrigeration from the middle of the century was important
in the growth of the meat-packing industry. Walsh (1982: 85) claims
that ice packing and curing was the ‘most important innovation in the
process of modernising the meat-packing industry’ in the decade after
the end of the American Civil War. The creation of the refrigerated rail-
road car in the late 1870s led to beef outstripping pork (Cronon 1991:
234), and the transport of frozen meat from Australia and Argentina to
Europe led to a fall in the demand for canned and salted meat (Goody
1982: 162–3). The marketing of meat was transformed in the light of
these developments. Advertising played a critical role in promoting the
availability of meat and overcoming customer reluctance. Customers had
previously bought recently killed meat directly from the butcher. Now,
they were buying a product that had been killed some time previously.
Meatology: the ideology of meat

Before analysing how meat or any food fits into the diet of a particular
nation or group it is useful to inquire into the meanings attached to
that food source. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams (1990: 14)
argues that ‘the texts of meat which we assimilate into our bodies
include the expectation that people should eat animals and that meat is
good for you’. She rejects the naturalization of meat and situates meat-
eating within a cultural context. Adams’ central aim is to expose what
she terms the patriarchal texts of meat. In so doing, she traces links
between meat-eating, male violence and war. For Adams:
. . . meat’s recognisable message includes association with the male

role; its meaning recurs within a fixed gender system; the coherence
it achieves as a meaningful item of food arises from patriarchal atti-
tudes including the idea that the end justifies the means, that the
objectification of other beings is a necessary part of life, and that
violence can and should be masked.
(Adams 1990: 14)
My concern is not with the ‘truth’ or persuasiveness of Adams’ argu-

ment but with the insight she provides into the beginnings of a cultural
approach to meat-eating. A noted anthropologist has stated that ‘each
meal is a structured social event which structures others in its own
image’ (Douglas 1975: 261). This is a useful starting point from which
to recognize that the production and consumption of meat is a social
event. Douglas’ analysis of forbidden meats leads her to the conclusion
that ‘whenever a people are aware of encroachment and danger, dietary
rules controlling what goes into the body would serve as a vivid analogy
of the corpus of their cultural categories at risk’ (Douglas 1975: 272).
This resonates with one approach to the body in anthropological the-

ory – the issue of pollution.
A number of reasons, which do not rest on nutritional arguments,
can be suggested to explain meat’s status as the most highly prized of
foods. First, within the dominant culture, the eating of meat is equated
with the possession of power. The ingestion of animals gives to humans
some of the power of the animal killed and eaten. To eat meat is to seize
the strength, aggression and potency of the animal.
‘Belief in human dominion does not merely legitimate meat eating –
the reverse is also true: meat reinforces that presumption. Killing, cook-
ing, and eating other animals’ flesh provides perhaps the ultimate
authentication of human superiority over the rest of nature, with the
spilling of blood a vibrant motif.’ (Fiddes 1991: 65)
Meat as a symbol of power, of potency, is deeply ingrained within west-
ern culture. The image of strength through meat is intimately connected
with what Adams calls the patriarchal texts of meat. Meat is frequently
represented as masculine, as a symbol of virility. The consumption of
meat, particularly red meat, is traditionally a vital ingredient in the diet
of sportsmen and soldiers. Thus, restricting meat (or types of meat) for
women or invalids is commonplace, but within the male diet meat is
held constant (Adams 1990: 26–9; Twigg 1983: 24–5). This symbolic
value even had resonance for Gandhi, who once remarked: ‘It began to
grow on me that meat-eating was good, that it would make me strong
and daring, and that, if the whole country took to meat-eating, the Eng-
lish would be overcome.’ (Quoted in Fiddes 1991: 67)
In meat-eating cultures, meat is linked with human power. From the
image of the hunter, suggesting skill, daring and bravado, to the prepara-
tion and cooking of meat, a distinction is reinforced between humans
and non-human animals. The symbolic significance of blood is particu-
larly important in this context. The importance attached to blood in
human thought is central to its role in the ideology of meat. Twigg
(1983: 22–3) has identified three central motifs, deeply embedded in
human thought, underlying the widespread attachment to blood.
Blood is the carrier of life itself. And life ends when too much blood is
spilled. Significant loss of blood leads to the loss of life. The terror held
by blood can cause us to faint. Moreover, blood plays a role in our col-
lective sense of belonging. It is blood which is used to signify race and
kinship. Related to this is the special bond created when individuals
cement their friendship through the ritual mingling of blood. Blood is
also used as a trope of the passions. When we call someone hot-blooded,
the term is used to signify vigour, impulsiveness, spiritedness. On the
other hand, to designate an individual as cold-blooded is to label that

person mean, cruel and lacking in warmth and affection. In other
words, hot-blooded is vital, a sign of the life-force, whereas cold-blooded
designates inhumanity and the absence of emotions. It is not surprising
that in the meat chain red meat stands at the apex.
The power of meat is also discernible through cooking. Cooking, as
Lévi-Strauss noted, represents the fundamental distinction between
nature and culture. Cooking sets us apart from other animals. Humans are
the only species to use fire, and apart from a few exceptions in some cuis-
ines, meat, unlike vegetables, must be cooked. Of course, vegetables are
cooked, but whereas it is accepted that vegetables are frequently eaten
raw, the consumption of raw meat (for the most part) is considered bar-
baric. ‘Throughout the dominant scheme cooking increases the status of
food’ (Twigg 1983: 26), and the semi-cooked meat through the preserva-
tion of blood is rendered more prestigious. Methods of cooking are also
hierarchically ordered, ranging from roasting (high) to boiling (low).
Meat is a source of prestige and wellbeing in our culture. As meat has
become cheaper and more plentiful, its symbolic importance has not
declined. Nevertheless, changing consumer behaviour, especially in the
AICs, is noticeable. Recent writers have emphasized the importance of
non-price factors as an explanation for the declining consumption of
meat. These changes have to do with the place of meat in the agro-food
system and the meanings people give to meat. But the meanings con-
sumers give to meat arise under conditions largely prescribed and deter-
mined by the producers.
So far, we have accounted for the pervasive hold meat has in our culture
and this is, I am arguing, an important reason behind the substitution of
animal for vegetable protein. Of course, the argument is more complex
than indicated above. The proposition that increased consumption of
meat did not take place because of some innate liking for meat does not
in itself lead to any firm conclusions concerning the mechanisms
which translated the symbolic meanings attached to meat into mass
consumption. Certainly, imitation of the habits of the rich came into it,
as did liberation from a monotonous diet. It does not, however, fully
explain the changing trends in meat consumption noted above. In order
to develop this argument we need to turn to challenges to meat-eating.
Challenges to the culture of meat
Dominant ideologies rarely determine the entire construction of social

and political space. The terms of cultural engagement are as much marked
by antagonistic and conflictual relations as by consent and cooperation.

In this section, I explore one of the most persistent challenges to the
ideology of meat. The decline in the consumption of meat and meat
products cannot be reduced to the espousal of vegetarianism, but modern
vegetarianism remains the most focused opposition to meatology.
To coin a cliché, we are what we eat. The connection between con-
sumption and identity finds an apt expression in the politics of veget-
arianism. It is significant that modern vegetarianism developed in the
19th century at exactly the moment meat was becoming more access-
ible to all members of society. Vegetarianism as a social movement was
created by and in response to the greater availability of meat. In many
respects, vegetarianism shares many of the assumptions of the ideology
of meat but rejects the positive connotations placed on values such as
masculinity and aggression. For example, the rejection of blood is a
central motif in vegetarianism. The Vegetarian Messenger, in an article
published in 1850, claimed: ‘Blood is perhaps the most objectionable
form of nutriment; flesh being principally composed of blood is next to
it in its gross, stimulating and exciting qualities’ (quoted in Twigg 1983:
26). In her seminal article, Twigg argues (Twigg 1983: 28) that vegetari-
anism ‘challenges and disrupts the meaning’ contained in the domin-
ant discourse on meat. Vegetarianism is thus not a negative reaction to
something undesirable but has positive connotations. Price probably
plays a minimal role in the decision to become a vegetarian, although it
cannot be discounted. Moreover, it is likely that such price-induced
vegetarianism will be short-lived.
Four major reasons are frequently given for the decision to abandon
meat. Some people abandon meat-eating on the grounds of health. In
the current context in the United Kingdom, such reasons are all too
familiar. Scares over BSE and the e-coli virus have led consumers to
rethink their dietary habits. The uncertainty, confusion and fear felt by
millions of people has resulted in a decline in the demand for meat and
meat products. But the connection between vegetarianism and good
health did not have to wait for modern food scares. Catherine Beecher
and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote, in the last century, that reduced con-
sumption of meat would ‘greatly reduce the amount of fevers, erup-
tions, headaches, bilious attacks, and many other ailments which are
produced or aggravated by too gross a diet . . . The popular notion that
meat is more nourishing than bread, is a great mistake’ (quoted in Adams
1990: 158). The decline in the consumption of red meat and the rise in
the demand for white meat is linked to health concerns. Another reason
for the change in diet arises from concern for the welfare of animals.
Perhaps the most popular view of the vegetarian is that of someone

with animal welfare uppermost. Increasingly, economic/ecological
arguments are made by many converts to vegetarianism. The ineffi-
ciency of converting grain into animal protein (Lappé 1975) coupled
with worsening food shortages and deforestation lead many to reject
the dominant culture. And vegetarianism has also long appealed to
those seeking a higher moral plane. Lady Paget, writing in the 19th cen-
tury, captured the social purity sentiment behind vegetarianism:
Since I have adopted the diet, I have experienced a delightful sense

of repose and freedom, a kind of superior elevation above things
material . . . it has a decided effect on moral character, rendering
people docile and more spirituelle and if spread among the masses
would make them less coarse and brutal. It refines the lower
instincts . . . and reduces sensuality.
(Quoted in Twigg 1983: 27)
These different challenges to the dominant culture indicate that the

rejection of meat is often linked with wider social considerations.
Indeed, it can be argued that in the structuring of identity vegetarianism
has long been associated with radical movements (Hitler’s vegetarian-
ism notwithstanding). The different ways in which rejection of meat-
eating is portrayed needs to be located in the wider context of social
protest. The idea of vegetarianism as a dissident, critical stance is central
to an appreciation of the hegemony of meat-eating. Vegetarianism can
thus be seen as an attempt to (re)construct an identity. If, as a critique
of meat-eating, vegetarianism begins by accepting many of the assump-
tions of the dominant ideology, its critique is not confined to mere
oppositional politics. This difference in consumption is frequently
linked with countercultural movements.
The American New Left’s critique of corporate America included a
rejection of America’s food habits (Levenstein 1993: 180–4). Vegetarian-
ism became a strong strand in American ‘liberal’ political circles in the
early 1970s.
It should be evident from what has been said above that the body is
not a physical given prior to history or culture but rather is subject to
cultural forces which, in turn, reflect wider notions about class, ethni-
city, gender and so on. The human body and the biological process of nu-
trition are indisputably basic to survival but they are socialized, that is,
put into a cultural category. Eating is not only a biological process but a
social one. Not only is what we eat controlled, for example cannibalism,
it is also socially constructed. Western Europeans think eating animals

kept as domestic pets is barbaric, but why that should be more revolting
and repulsive than killing pigs or sheep is not readily apparent. In rela-
tion to food, the body is ordered and regulated. In the hierarchical food
chain certain kinds of meat are prohibited; for example, we do not eat
human beings or carnivores. Poultry’s low ranking on the food chain of
consumable meats is at odds with its increased share of the market in
the last 30 years. But apart from the cost efficiency of producing broilers,
the marketing of poultry benefited from the cultural stereotype of the
domestic fowl.
Of all edible creatures (with the exception of insects, which are still
nutritious and popular complements to the diet of many people)
domestic fowl are probably least likely to arouse affection in us.
Chickens are without exception mean-tempered, cowardly, and stu-
pid in our folk tales and idioms . . . All of which is extremely useful to
us since chickens make delicious, versatile and delicate meat, which
we can easily eat without a shred of compunction to mar our pleasure.
(Visser 1989:144)
We not only have social codes which restrict diet but food is intim-
ately connected with body image. The eruption of eating disorders is
symptomatic of crises concerning who we are and how we should look
(Donellan 1996). In contemporary western societies, the standards of
health and beauty have become intertwined. There is, of course, no
such thing as a standard western society, and the impact of the general
trends discussed below will be subject to the specificities of time and
place. Western societies do exhibit many features in common but also
differ in their approaches to food and consumption. Conspicuous con-
sumption (especially) of flesh was, in the pre-industrial age, the privil-
ege of the wealthy. A person’s wealth and status could be deduced from
his or her size. Large size was sought after as a demonstration of super-
ior (purchasing) power. But the democratization of animal protein
forced the rich and powerful to invent other symbolic ways of exerting
their power. In the realm of food this has been evident in a stress on
limited consumption (nouvelle cuisine represented this movement at
its zenith) and healthy eating. When bulk could no longer be held to
be a convenient sign of affluence it had to be replaced. If industrializa-
tion brought ‘food for all’ then satisfaction of appetite no longer had
the same resonance it once held. It was a fairly logical step to invest the
control of appetite with the functions previously performed by the
pursuit of excess. In practice, it is the educated and wealthy who first

follow nutritional advice. Medical opinion in the 20th century has con-
sistently promoted non-fatty foods, and emphasized the link between
food and cardiovascular problems. As far as meat is concerned, this
privileges lean cuts and white meat over red meat. The rejection of fat
and cholesterol in the diet has changed attitudes towards meat. This
re-evaluation is not a rejection (since meat is still held to be the best
source of protein) but it has affected the total consumption and the rel-
ative share of different meats in the market. It is not accidental that it is
in the most affluent countries that the most marked change in con-
sumption patterns has been noted. If knowledge is power, the ability
to act on that knowledge remains a function of wealth and socio-
economic class.
Changing dietary advice is also linked to changing ideal body types.
It isn’t so much that we conform to these ideal shapes and sizes but
rather that the standards of perfection are culturally inscribed and con-
stantly reiterated. The shift to leaner meat consumption has been
accompanied, especially for women, by a fetish for thinness. Bulimia
and anorexia nervosa are primarily diseases of affluent societies.
Healthy young women (for the most part) in their quest for the fashion-
able shape dictated by society become the victims of eating disorders.
The price they pay in pursuit of flat stomachs, thin legs and slender
hips is their own body. In the midst of plenty, concern for body image
becomes entangled with food consumption. It is ironic that in an age of
overconsumption, the body shape, for women, promoted by many
western magazines equates with that of the undernourished in the
Third World. It should also be noted, however, that the vision of
women as victims of the dictates of fashion is only partially correct.
Indeed, many women are driven to seek the body shape deemed desir-
able by men. But it is also the case that for many western women (I am
assuming that these women have greater ‘choice’ in determining body
image related to diet) control of diet, and hence control over their
body, is part of a quest for power, and control over their life. In other
words, the assignation of victim status is inappropriate and misleading.
Conclusion
In the course of less than a century, western consumers formerly sub-

sisting almost exclusively on grains became prodigious eaters of meat.
This is an astonishing development which is often lauded as a triumph
of progress. A recent article by a self-proclaimed meat eater casts some
doubt on the unalloyed benefits of this change in diet. ‘Humans are

essentially vegetarian as a species and insatiable meat-eating brings its
familiar toll of heart disease, stroke and cancer’ (Cockburn 1996). In the
course of this dependence on animal protein, the distance between farm
and table became greater. This intensification of space between the
animal and its appearance on the table radically transformed the cut,
style and shape of meat. The presentation of meat has increasingly been
divorced from any likeness to the animal killed.
Conventional economic analysis, although demonstrating awareness
of the role of non-economic factors in the production and consump-
tion of meat, argues that shifts in patterns of production and consumption
are best explained in terms of income and price. This chapter has
attempted to show not only that are non-economic factors important
but that they have to be understood in the context of what has been
termed the dominant meat culture. I have suggested that the produc-
tion, distribution and consumption of meat is encoded within a cul-
tural context. Anthropologists and sociologists have studied food and
eating. This short chapter is a preliminary attempt to go beyond com-
parative statics. It suggests that the production and consumption of
meat is closely interwoven with an ideology of meat.
We are producers and consumers, and through engaging in both
kinds of activity we not only provide meaning for our lives but also
shape our bodies. One of the central issues of contemporary society is
that of control. Through our daily acts as producers and consumers we
attempt to control our lives. And in the realm of food, society offers us a
sense of control absent in other areas of our lives. Prepackaged conveni-
ence foods increase our leisure time; the availability of fruits and vegeta-
bles throughout the year banishes notions of seasonal availability and,
therefore, increases our range of culinary choice. What we eat and how
we eat provides scope for creativity and individuality. And yet these
seemingly individualistic acts are shaped by the dynamics of market
capitalism. The meat complex has produced the world steer and the
modern broiler. Modern technology and the rationalization of indus-
trial processes has significantly affected the production of meat and
meat products. Our choice of food is not simply consequent upon a
demand which results in an attendant supply, but is created by the eco-
nomic and marketing strategies of large food conglomerates. As I have
tried to show, this economic system does not exist in a vacuum but pro-
duces and reproduces certain cultural forms. Thus, the ideology of meat
was not created by capitalism but has been instrumental in the industri-
alization of food.
This study of the political economy of meat has argued that we need
to think of meat (and other commodities) in terms of the ways in which
they are socially constructed. Key questions pertaining to continuity
and change were explored in the context of the motifs and texts of
meat. From the perspective of the body, a number of conclusions can be
drawn. First, this study reinforces a perspective which focuses on the
centrality of food in constructions of the body. These constructions are
neither universal nor neutral but, among other things, reflect power
relations within human societies. Thus, gender and class considerations
are crucial variables in the determination of what is produced and con-
sumed. Furthermore, the dominion of humans over animals is based in
this instance on the erasure of the animal body. Animals are seen solely
as commodities and not as rights holders. It is this erasure which justi-
fies the consumption of animal flesh. Eating meat is the embodiment of
the contempt humans feel for animals.
This chapter has argued that meat’s position in the contemporary
political economy has been historically constructed. In terms of the
production structure, it is the result of developments in 19th-century
capitalism. The spread of industrial society was concomitant with the
growth of industrial food. These changes were linked to the develop-
ment of nationalism in a number of ways. First, the nationalist project
was based upon an improvement of material conditions, and the suc-
cess of ‘meat for all’ part of the movement to greater democracy and a
mass society. Secondly, modern armies also required ‘modern’ food,
and the military in North America and Europe were early supporters of
refrigeration and key consumers of the new industrial food. But we
have also argued that myths about meat – the ideology surrounding
meat – have played a crucial role in creating and preserving its status in
the food chain.
This analysis of the production and consumption of meat has
attempted to bring the body into IPE. We can now return to the four
themes identified at the outset of this chapter and examine the conclu-
sions which can be derived from the evidence presented above. The first
theme we noted, previously, was that of the construction of value. Our
discussion suggests that neither use value nor exchange value can be
properly understood without giving significance to the cultural context
within which meat is encoded. This is directly related to the body. In
conventional terms this can be clearly discerned in terms of nutrition
but, as the evidence presented above suggests, a much wider set of con-
siderations relating to identity, taboo and myth are also relevant. The
second theme concerns spatiality, and in its focus on the historical
embodiment of the subject this chapter contends that abstract and separ-
ated categories of political and economic analysis are seriously deficient.
Consumption is a social process, and since the construction of the body
and the satisfaction of its needs are historically contingent, attention to
the body challenges abstract and asocial conceptualizations. This study
of the inter-relationship between food, culture and identity has brought
the question of selfhood and group identity to the fore. It has shown that
individual identity and group identity affect our consumption decisions.
Body image conditions purchases of meat both in terms of quantity and
type. And myths about meat and blood are crucial to the creation and
maintenance of religious and national difference. Finally, the theme of
human agency was explored through opposition to the dominant meat
culture. In this context vegetarianism can be seen as resistance to
organized and officially sanctioned violence. But a violence which is
legitimized because the bodies of the victims are accorded value only in
relation to their ability to satisfy human desires.
Notes
1 In writing this chapter I have been fortunate in the support I have received
from a number of sources. Inka Stock provided valuable research assistance for
the first version, and Julian Saurin provided helpful comments and sugges-
tions. I have benefited from questions and reactions to earlier versions at the
British International Studies Association Conference (December 1996) and the
International Studies Association Conference (March 1997). I am very grateful
to all who attended the sessions, in particular Eric Helleiner, Vivienne Jabri,
Bradley Kline, Jane Parpart, Anne Sisson Runyan and Gillian Youngs.
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8
The Widow Refuses: Embodied
Practices and Negotiations over
Inheritance in Zimbabwe
Jane L. Parpart 1
Introduction
The subject of this chapter – urban, middle-class widows trying to rede-

fine and renegotiate inheritance practices in Zimbabwe – provides an
entry point for exploring the intersection between gender, power,
embodied practices and property in a postcolonial society. These societ-
ies are particularly interesting because their discursive, legal and institu-
tional contexts reflect international/colonial legacies as well as local
beliefs, practices and institutions. They offer an opportunity to think
about the way individuals and groups negotiate complex and often
contradictory sets of discourses and practices, often in very unequal
circumstances, but in ways that reveal the limitations and possibilities
for change in the increasingly global/local world of the late 20th
century.
The colonial/postcolonial world has often been characterized as a
competition between two solitudes: a place where people have either
‘sold out’ to western influences or remained loyal to ‘tradition’ and ‘cul-
ture’. The tendency either to privilege the powerful or romanticize res-
istance is being challenged by new thinking which focuses on the way
indigenous beliefs, institutions and practices interact with, constrain
and modify western-based discourses and structures (Greenstein 1995;
Wolfe 1997; Cooper and Stoler 1997).2 This shift reflects a new
approach to power, which is seen as a double move that both constrains
and disciplines embodied daily life while at the same time inspiring res-
istance, disruptions and redefinitions of meanings and practices. 3 The
challenge is to avoid an either/or approach – to maintain a focus on the
messy, in-between arena of embodied daily life while acknowledging
and dealing with structural inequalities. This is particularly true for
159
women, who often seem caught in a web of structures and assumptions

designed to maintain and reinforce their subordination. Their efforts to
resist and renegotiate (and collude with) attempts to discipline and con-
strain their lives (and bodies) have much to tell us about the in-between
spaces we are seeking to understand.
The struggles of Zimbabwean widows to redefine and negotiate inher-
itance practices is a particularly interesting site in which to explore these
issues because it is a moment when the most private elements of grief,
loss and disembodiment intersect with laws, customs, discourses and
practices about the transfer and control of property. Inheritance is,
thus, a crucial point for controlling access to resources and status, with
important implications for the distribution and maintenance of power.
Struggles over inheritance are not simply personal matters. They often
determine which persons, classes, gender and generations will inherit
(or not inherit) resources and status in society. At the same time, inher-
itance is often a point of resistance, when those who do not benefit
from established practices can try to challenge the distribution of prop-
erty and status. In order to explore this world, I focus on the efforts of
six urban-based, middle-class widows to renegotiate inheritance practices
in Zimbabwe in the decade between 1984 and 1994. The cases are
drawn from the research of the Women and the Law in Southern Africa
Research Project (WLSA), which has been conducting research on
women and the law for the last decade.4 I focus on educated, employed
urban widows in Harare and Bulawayo, 5 not because they are the only
widows who resist and redefine inheritance practices,6 but because they
are particularly well placed to bargain with the extended family and to
draw on the various, sometimes competing and contradictory institu-
tions, practices and discourses in Zimbabwe. They offer an opportunity
to think about how embodied individuals navigate the disciplinary
shoals of complex, multiethnic and multiracial societies, searching for
ways to improve and redefine their lives without becoming social out-
casts. These cases also have much to tell us about the way gender, cul-
ture and class intersect with social relations of power and the embodied
practices that seek to perpetuate the transfer of property and status in
an increasingly global world.
Situating the analysis
These case studies were collected by the Zimbabwe research team of

WLSA during 1993.7 Initially, WLSA researchers focused on improving
Embodied Practices and Inheritance in Zimbabwe 161
statutory law and women’s legal knowledge. However, they soon

discovered that customary law, as practised in families and even the
lower courts, can be more flexible and sensitive to women’s needs
than the more rigid statutory or ‘official’ customary law. This inspired
a more grounded approach to legal questions, particularly their social
context (Armstrong 1995; Bentzon et al. 1998). These insights influ-
enced the inheritance research. While not present at the interviews,
I participated in discussions about the research design and analysis.
The data reflect the questions and circumstances of the interviews.
I am interrogating them for insights into the way certain middle-class
widows have negotiated and redefined inheritance practices in Zim-
babwe, with particular attention to their embodied character.
To explore these issues, the chapter draws on the growing literature
on power, gender, embodiment and the colonial/postcolonial experi-
ence. It draws heavily on Foucault’s conception of power, which is no
longer seen as the preserve of the few, but as a set of actions and reac-
tions which permeate society in an effort to create disciplined, useful
and productive bodies, knowledges and subjects (see also chapter 1 by
Youngs in this volume). Initially, Foucault (1977) emphasized the dis-
ciplinary character of social power, exploring how laws, legal structures,
discourses and institutions define the way human beings/bodies under-
stand and conduct their lives. In his later work, Foucault (1980) paid
more attention to resistance and agency, admitting that ‘there are no
relations of power without resistances; the latter are more real and
effective because they are formed right at the point where power rela-
tions are exercised’ (Foucault 1980: 142). Thus, social relations of power
both constrain and enable, leading people to both endorse and subvert
the world in which they live. ‘People are like chess players trying to beat
the system, albeit according to the rules of the game’ (Maboreke 1996:
85; Gedalof 1997).
Foucault’s analysis, however, must be extended to consider the way
power intersects with gender, race and colonial/postcolonial experi-
ence(s) (Stoler 1996). While his focus on disciplined bodies has helped
feminists think about the inscription (and self-inscription) of disciplin-
ary practices on women’s bodies (Butler 1993; Bordo 1993), Foucault
has been criticized for presenting the male body as ‘normal’, for ignor-
ing the gendered implications of his work, particularly the persistent
nature of patriarchal power, for his focus on disciplinary power rather
than resistance (Soper 1993; McNay 1992), and for his rather limited
concept of agency. 8 Feminists, especially those attuned to issues of dif-
ference,9 have posited a more engendered notion of subjectivity, as ‘the
site of multiple differences, and therefore of multiple subjectivities and

competing identities’, capable of resisting and redefining the ‘normal’,
often in unpredictable, contradictory and even unconscious ways
(Moore 1994: 57, 82). This approach allows us to incorporate gendered
structures and a more nuanced notion of agency into the analysis
(Alexander and Mohanty 1997).
Foucault’s writings also rarely address the particular inequities
and complexities of colonial and postcolonial societies (Hall and Du
Gay 1996). However, his attention to the double move of enabling
and resisting subjects resonates with recent writings in postcolonial
scholarship which question dichotomies such as domination/resist-
ance or colonizer/colonized. This scholarship focuses on the complex,
messy interactions that characterize much of life in the unequal,
global/local postcolonial world, particularly ‘affiliations, cross-pol-
linations, echoes and repetitions’ (Felski 1997: 12; Cooper and Stoler
1997; Bhabha 1994). This thinking thus draws on Foucault’s double
notion of power, while arguing for the need to pay attention to both
the discursive and structural complexities of colonial/postcolonial
societies.
How do bodies intersect with these debates in ways that illuminate
our understanding of Zimbabwean inheritance practices? Firstly, Fou-
cault’s emphasis on the body as a site of struggles over meanings, prac-
tices and resources reminds us that human beings do not simply pick
and choose among various legal and customary practices. These prac-
tices are presented as normal, inevitable and even holy, and they affect
the way people think and behave, including their bodily comport-
ment, their senses and their emotions (Grosz 1994: 23; Csordas 1994).
At the same time, people are not just docile bodies. They resist, often in
embodied ways (see the chapters by Williams and Zalewski in this vol-
ume). They get sick, withhold sex, become possessed, in order to resist
disciplinary practices they dare not challenge (Hodgson 1997; Stoller
1995). 10 Moreover, such resistances are further complicated because
women’s bodies are often seen as symbols for social identities and
communities, making their embodied compliance a matter of familial,
community and even national importance (Gedalof 1997: 313; Hasan
1994: viii). Thus, engendered bodies are often the site of struggles over
inheritance of property and status. In order to explore this arena of
negotiation, resistance and compromise, we need detailed, in-depth
case studies of individuals at particular historical conjunctures. But
before we turn to the widows, we have to know more about the world
they inhabit.
Embodied and engendered inheritance practices in

Zimbabwe
Social power relations in Zimbabwe are complicated by the historical

legacy of colonialism. The colonial authorities introduced Roman-
Dutch law and British legal practice, as well as institutions, practices
and discourses based on western assumptions about individual and
group rights. Statutory law in intestate inheritance cases (those with-
out a will) awarded widows all household goods and personal effects
of the deceased as well as a child’s portion of the estate (Ncube and
Stewart 1995: 47). This law, while still fundamentally patriarchal,11
emphasized the inheritance rights of individuals in the nuclear family,
including the widow, rather than the extended family. While pri-
marily aimed at Europeans, these discourses and practices offered an
alternative model for Africans couched in the language of modernity
and individual rights which could be used to question customary
practices. Indeed, 21 women’s organizations petitioned the government
in 1976, arguing that educated African women ‘had become part of the
modern, urban and industrialized society and, like women of other
races, believed that the time had arrived for them to be invested with
the rights and obligations accorded to all citizens of their native land’
(Weinrich 1979: 131).
At the same time, the colonial government sought to buttress cus-
tomary authority and systematically set about collecting ‘customary
laws’ from African patriarchs, missionaries, researchers and colonial
officials. This process introduced a patriarchal bias and a rigidity into
‘custom’ which belied the flexibility of customary procedures (Chanock
1985; Cheater 1987). It characterized African women ‘as subordinate,
effectively property-less, under perpetual tutelage or guardianship of a
father, then a husband’ (Stewart 1993: 1). They remained perpetual
legal minors, could not initiate legal suits, required a male guardian’s
permission to marry, had no direct rights to marital property and upon
their husband’s death were expected either to remain under the protec-
tion of their husband’s kin group (including their sons) or to return to
the natal home. The heir (usually the eldest male child or nearest male
relative) inherited the immovable property and status of the deceased.
While the widow and dependent children were seen as the responsibil-
ity of the heir and other family members, this responsibility was inter-
preted within the context of the wellbeing of the extended family,
which could, on occasion, lead to property grabbing and neglect (Stew-
art 1993: 1–3; Holleman 1952; Weinrich 1979: 129–31). 12
At independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean government declared its

full commitment to gender equality, no doubt partially to acknowledge
women’s crucial role in the liberation struggles and partially to prove its
socialist credentials. Pressure from international human rights groups,
local women’s groups and NGOs played a role as well (Batezat and
Mwala 1989). The government set up a department to monitor women’s
status, signed various international covenants supporting women’s
rights, and launched campaigns against property grabbing. Some muni-
cipalities permitted widows to remain in the family home. In 1982, the
Legal Age of Majority Act gave African women full legal status under
both statutory and customary legal systems. In 1987, the Deceased Per-
sons Family Maintenance Act provided protection from property grab-
bing and guaranteed the maintenance of the widow and dependent
children from the estate (Dengu-Zvogbo et al. 1994: 3). More recently, a
white paper and a 1997 law have altered the inheritance rights of wid-
ows and children (Coldham 1994; Stewart 1997a). 13 However, a backlash
against the Age of Majority Act, fuelled by a general outcry against inde-
pendent women, as well as a desire to protect ‘tradition’ and the author-
ity of traditional leaders, has led to considerable backpedalling (Ncube
1991; Kesby 1996). In 1992, for example, in the case Murisa vs Murisa,
the Supreme Court rejected a widow’s claim to inherit from her hus-
band’s estate, arguing that this ran counter to customary law. Widows in
financial trouble were advised to sue the heir for support (Stewart 1992a
and 1997b). Reflecting widespread support for the claims of the extended
family, senior government officials, including the president, have been
heard at funeral gatherings ‘urging people not to dispossess deceased
persons’ families’ (Dengu-Zvogbo et al. 1994: 3). Moreover, Joan May
(1983) discovered that, despite new policies, many widows found muni-
cipal officials dismissive and unsympathetic, and so turned to their more
predictable, if not always disinterested, family networks (May 1983: 90).
Some of this same ambivalence is also apparent in the behaviour of
institutional experts who work in the ‘westernized’ sector of Zimbabwe’s
political economy. Corporations and legal practitioners are officially
committed to protecting the nuclear family.14 However, customary
practices and beliefs continue to influence many individuals working
within these institutions. Despite advice from lawyers steeped in west-
ern traditions, wills by African men, for the most part, continue to leave
their property to male heirs and relatives rather than the surviving
spouse (May 1983: 95; Sibanda 1992). This practice suggests consider-
able ambivalence about the relative claims of western and customary
inheritance practices among legal experts as well as their clients.
‘Custom’ thus continues to play a central role in inheritance practices.

But custom is a complicated matter. Official customary law has changed
little since independence, no doubt partly because it cannot be struck
down for conflicting with the constitution. The Supreme Court has
reinforced this legalistic approach, interpreting the Age of Majority Act
in ways that reduce the rights of widows and daughters to inherit
directly or to be guardians and heirs to estates (Ncube 1991; Stewart
1997b: 10). While ‘official’ customary law explicitly supports the wel-
fare function of inheritance practices, the widow’s right to protection
is based on her role as mother, not her contributions to the estate.
Widowers, in contrast, continue to control all but their wife’s personal
property. However, ‘official’ customary law and customary practices on
the ground often vary. These more nuanced, flexible and interactive
interpretations of customary practices in daily life (the living law) affect
the way inheritance plays out, especially in the family and the lower
courts. For example, WLSA researchers discovered that, contrary to offi-
cial ‘customary’ law, Ndebele widows traditionally remain in the family
home with their youngest son. Urban Ndebele widows are increasingly
awarded legal title to the family home (Stewart 1997c: 5; Ncube and
Stewart 1995: 96). The lower customary courts in Bulawayo reflect these
assumptions and practices, which no doubt explains the fact that widows
made up 33 per cent of the heirs; with daughters the figure was 45.8 per
cent. In contrast, only 6.25 per cent of the heirs in Shona-dominated
Harare were widows. Daughters raised it to 12.5 per cent. These figures
reflect the closer agreement between official and living law among the
Shona. While based only on 40 cases, the data suggest considerable slip-
page between practice and ‘official’ customary law (Dengu-Zvogbo et al.
1994: 235).
In order to understand how continuing and often contradictory inter-
pretations of ‘tradition’ affect inheritance practices in Zimbabwe, we
must examine both the core assumptions about inheritance among the
Ndebele and Shona peoples, and various alternative discourses and prac-
tices. Recapturing ‘pure’ tradition is clearly impossible, but we can try to
identify the discourses and practices that are widely seen as ‘traditional’
today, noting particularly their embodied and engendered character.
Inheritance practices begin with the handling of the body and the
organization of the funeral. Among both the Shona and the Ndebele,
burial practices reinforce the central role and rights of the deceased hus-
band’s kin group. The family council, which includes key members of
the deceased’s extended family, including children, is expected to take
charge of the funeral arrangements. ‘The widow becomes a foreigner
who has no decision whatsoever in the burial arrangements of her hus-

band’ (Dengu-Zvogbo et al. 1994: 162). A senior wife may be consulted,
but more as a courtesy. She often has to communicate with the family
through an intermediary. Junior wives are generally ignored. If unpopu-
lar or insufficiently grief-stricken, a widow may be accused of causing
the death. If ‘proven’, she can be chased away. 15 After the burial, the
widow is not permitted to wash away the taint of death. All others do.
In contrast, the widower is actively involved in the funeral arrange-
ments, although the deceased wife’s kin prepare the body for burial
(Aschwanden 1987: 229–31; Ncube and Stewart 1995: 96).
The period of mourning symbolizes and reinforces the widow’s con-
tinuing dependence on her husband’s kin group, often in embodied
ways. During the year or more of mourning, both Shona and Ndebele
expect widows to wear mourning clothes chosen for them by the fam-
ily. All important decisions over property and children must be referred
to the extended family (Ncube and Stewart 1995; Aschwanden 1987:
238–42, 315). The widow is regarded as still married to her dead hus-
band, and she is expressly forbidden to have sex as it would endanger
the safe return of his spirit to the family home. Thus, the widow’s sexu-
ality ‘proves’ her continuing commitment to the extended family. Vio-
lations forfeit her right to protection and raise the spectre of mystical
mishaps (Shenje 1992). In contrast, the widower simply wears a black
cloth on his arm, runs his household and rarely remains celibate for
long (Dengu-Zvogbo et al. 1994).
Mourning can be broken only by the kurova guva (Shona) or umbuyiso
(Ndebele) ceremony. The widow’s dependence is highlighted by the
family’s control over the date and organization of the ceremony. She
must prove her celibacy before being released from mourning. Failure
can lead to banishment. Once this question is settled, the widow must
clarify her commitment to the extended family, either by marrying one
of her husband’s brothers,16 or by choosing a ‘protector’ from the family
and remaining celibate. If she marries outside the kin group, she must
leave with only her personal property (Dengu-Zvogbo et al. 1994). Thus,
a widow who wants the extended family’s support must pledge her
body and its reproductive powers to the kin group (Gaidzanwa 1985:
52). In contrast, the widower’s ceremony is more perfunctory. His rights
to property and support are based on his position in the natal family
rather than his sexuality (Stewart 1997a; May 1983: 89).
The family council assigns an heir and finalizes property distribution
during this ceremony, although larger estates are often divided earlier.
These practices are highly gendered. The eldest son usually inherits the
deceased’s status, but he does not hold legal title to property, and sib-
lings receive some as well. While Ndebele widows are more apt than
Shona widows to inherit directly from the marital estate, among both
groups, childless widows and junior polygamous wives have few rights.
Widowers, in contrast, are expected neither to abandon the marital
home nor to give up the bulk of the family estate. Moreover, the wid-
ower’s central role in managing family affairs is never questioned (Dengu-
Zvogbo et al. 1994).
Of course, cultural beliefs and practices are never static; new discourses
compete with ‘traditional’ practices. Horror stories of widows abused by
greedy in-laws, and even children, provide cautionary tales legitimizing
widows’ demands for control over some marital property. Campaigns
for women’s/widows’ rights have sensitized people to the evils of prop-
erty grabbing (Stewart 1997c; Stewart 1992a: 13; Folta and Deck 1987).
Popular sentiment seems increasingly concerned with the nuclear rather
than the extended family. Moreover, the right of widows to inherit
some marital property is increasingly accepted, although more as moth-
ers than contributors to the marital estate (Batezat and Mwala 1989).
Some women advocate joint ownership of family property, and even
direct challenges to cultural practices that subordinate women (Chitsike
1995; ZWRCN 1996).
However, ‘traditional’ interpretations of women’s place continue to
thrive (Kaarsholm 1997; Ncube 1991). Many women (and men) con-
tinue to believe ‘it is “cultural” for women to be subordinate to men’
(Chitsike 1995: 20, 24). They believe women need a man for protection,
particularly regarding money matters, and consequently oppose inher-
itance rights for women on the grounds that it would lead to misman-
agement and economic difficulties (Stewart 1997b: 14; Gaidzanwa
1985: 51–2). Moreover, few Zimbabweans believe widows should
inherit everything. Even women who supported women’s inheritance
rights balked when reminded this would give their daughters-in-law full
rights to their son’s property (May 1987: 86). Additionally, challenging
culture ‘always takes time and runs the risk of trauma’ (Chitsike 1995:
24). For many, it is not worth losing the extended family’s support
(Stewart and Ncube 1997: 32).
Thus, many competing and sometimes contradictory forces are at play.
They offer ammunition for a variety of interpretations and practices, and
thus further complicate the social relations of power in which women
and men experience inheritance in Zimbabwe. To discover more about
how embodied women and men navigate these various forcefields, we
now turn to the case studies of our educated, employed urban widows.
Renegotiating inheritance: new structures, practices and

beliefs
It is important to set the context for our cases. They took place in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, when economic decline and AIDS were
beginning to take hold. During the 1980s, quite a number of Zim-
babweans managed to advance into the middle class, but many were left
behind. Inheritance offered an opportunity to redistribute the wealth of
a more successful offspring. General economic decline has intensified
competition over resources, especially between nuclear and extended
families. At the same time, AIDS-related deaths dramatized the import-
ance of the extended family support networks.
The six widows live in middle-class housing areas of Greendale in
Harare and Hillside in Bulawayo. Five couples had been married 13 to
19 years, the sixth for 23 years. They have several children, with at least
one son, and had married in church, either initially or after some time.
Only one husband left a will, and all but one died as a result of a car
accident. The deaths occurred between 1984 and 1991.
Mrs Ganyanyi lives in Harare. Her husband worked for a large
company as personnel manager. She is a nurse. Relations with the in-
laws have been tense, as they depended on the deceased for support.
Mrs Mavhuna lives in Harare. She and her husband ran a business
together. Relations with the in-laws have been strained, again because of
financial dependence on the deceased. Mrs Mapinda’s husband was head
accountant for a large company. She ran several family businesses. The
husband’s will left everything to the son, with the widow as guardian.
The daughter received the car. The extended family is well off, but con-
cerns about control over the marital property are numerous. Mrs Nya-
honde lives in the family home in Greendale. The husband had recently
joined the police and the widow works for the government. They also
own a rural home, occupied by a poorer brother-in-law, who claims it is
his. Mrs Mkandla lives in Bulawayo. Her husband was a lecturer and she
is a nurse. Relations with her in-laws have been strained, more over per-
sonalities than property. Mrs Masuku also lives in Bulawayo. Her hus-
band was a teacher and she is a nurse. They deliberately set up joint
ownership of the house, so she shares it with her daughter, the heir.
A brother-in-law opposed a woman heir and wants some of the estate.
Issues around control over people and property quickly came to the
fore. The family councils immediately took charge of the preparation of
the body and the funeral. Challenges met sharp rebuke. Mrs Ganyanyi’s
in-laws abruptly cancelled the church ceremony she had organized, and
took the body to the rural areas for burial in a spot of their choosing. 17
Widows were watched for signs of disrespect or insincerity. Mrs Mavhuna
and Mrs Mapinda were accused of causing their husbands’ death. In
several cases, relatives tried to grab property. Mrs Ganyanyi’s in-laws
started dividing the lounge furniture before the burial. The brother-in-
law of Mrs Masuku ‘wanted to take everything. He was waiting for the
keys [to the car] even before the deceased was buried’. Sometimes a
needy (or greedy) individual created conflicts. For example, Mrs Nya-
honde’s brother-in-law, a waiter with few prospects, caused most of the
problems. Other more financially secure family members advised the
widow to ignore him.
All of the extended families accepted their responsibility for the well-
being of the widow and dependent children, but this protection was
expected to come with considerable say over the children and family
property. Appointments of heirs and guardians were particularly con-
tentious. Mrs Mkandla’s in-laws unilaterally appointed her son the heir.
Despite Mrs Mavhuna’s appointment as guardian, the family appointed
a person (sarapavana) to assist her. Mrs Ganyanyi’s brother-in-law
insisted he should be guardian against the widow’s wishes. Some families
tried to intervene in decisions about pensions, insurance and other
monies. When Mrs Ganyanyi went to talk with her husband’s employer,
the brother-in-law insisted on coming along. When the employer insisted
on talking to the widow alone, the brother-in-law
. . . raised hell and told them that if they did not allow him to be pres-
ent then he was going to wash his hands over anything to do with
me and that I was not to return to the house in Greendale.
Fearing such a reprisal, she left the office and pursued the matter later.
Mrs Nyahonde had similar problems.
Widows who did not consult in-laws about property and children
were sharply criticized, often in embodied ways. For example, Mrs
Mapinda’s father-in-law criticized her mourning clothes, arguing that
‘when one is wearing “sorry” it means one leads a rather restricted
lifestyle, different from the one she led before’. Her brother-in-law
denounced her for:
. . . not behaving like someone in mourning. She wore fancy clothes,

silk scarfs and stiletto shoes. That to me is not mourning. No one
knows what she is doing in those countries [she visits on
business] . . . She even started drinking.
Moreover, she was criticized for closing her husband’s shop, bullying
his second wife and, worst of all, ‘she did this without consulting any-
one’. Mrs Mavhuna was upbraided for making property decisions on
her own. She was accused of ‘not suffering . . . [of] sitting pretty . . . and
being supported by the Supreme Court’. Of course, some family mem-
bers supported the widows. Mrs Mapinda’s sister-in-law agreed to be her
official ‘protector’, and defended the widow’s rights to her own life. Her
father and brother remained sceptical, however, adopting a ‘wait and
see attitude’, assuming the widow and their sister ‘would need to be res-
cued one of these days’.
The kurova guva/umbuyiso ceremony remained a moment of high pol-
itics, when the widow’s celibacy could be challenged and her (sexual/
embodied) position in the family had to be settled. Struggles over the
timing and outcome of the ceremony were common. Mrs Mkandla’s
brother-in-law abruptly changed the date of the ceremony. Mrs
Mavhuna had ‘heard rumours that they are planning a ceremony . . .
I wish they could advise me soon so that I can make arrangements to
be away from work . . . ’ Mrs Masuku learned about the ceremony only
from a friend. The ceremony allowed families to question the fidelity
of unpopular widows. One father-in-law wanted the widow to lie on
the grave to see if white ants bit her (proof of infidelity), but this was
dismissed as old-fashioned. However, several of the poorer brothers-
in-law tried unsuccessfully to convince the widows to marry them. They
were furious when the widows chose a ‘protector’ from among their
children or female relatives. In one case, the father-in-law, not his sons,
favoured remarriage.
None of them realized that I was trying to ensure that there would be
a ‘policeman’ at the house who would oversee how the property was
being used.
Sexuality remained central to discussions of widows’ rights both during

and after the mourning period. Sexual fidelity symbolized the widow’s
commitment to the extended family and, consequently, her rights to
property and protection. No one challenged the assumption that an out-
side alliance would forfeit those rights. As Mrs Nyahonde’s brother-in-
law put it: ‘[The widow] is free to marry as long as she realizes that once
she does so, then she must quit our home.’ In fact, he interpreted her
celibacy as a symbolic marriage to the family. The widow’s house, he
argued, is ‘in a way my house and she is my wife’. Accusations of
infidelity became a means of disciplining widows by threatening them
with expulsion from the ‘family’ property. Mrs Nyahonde’s relatives

suggested she ‘may have been having affairs . . . We hear rumours of
men coming and the widow buying booze for them. She is now drink-
ing a lot’. Mrs Mavhuna was accused of ‘having affairs with other part-
ners in the company’. Celibacy (or remarriage within the family) thus
remains a litmus test of the widow’s acceptance within the family, as
well as her rights to protection and support. The widow’s sexualized
body thus represents the link between sexuality, people and property,
and the disciplinary consequences of disrupting these associations.
The widows responded to these pressures/disciplinary practices in a
number of ways. Witchcraft accusations seemed to have little impact.
Mrs Mavhuna was exonerated by the n’anga (traditional healer), but
seemed unconcerned about the matter. Mrs Mapinda shrugged off
accusations, claiming:
This didn’t bother me a bit because I knew that a lot of our African
people always talk like that and anyway I loved my husband and
could never have even dreamt of harming him.
Several families disclaimed belief in witchcraft, especially as they were

committed Christians.
The women moved most decisively to redefine their control over
property and children. Mrs Mavhuna dissolved her husband’s company
and set up another one. She ignored the sarapavana appointed to ‘assist’
her, dismissing him as a ‘traditional whim’. The family, she claimed,
should have told the elders ‘the way things are done now’. Mrs
Mkandla refused her brother-in-law’s request for money. One widow
put up a high concrete wall and an electric gate to keep her brother-in-
law away from the children. Another threatened to call the police if the
brothers-in-law took her husband’s clothing. The widows also used law-
yers, laws and courts to defend their interests. Mrs Ganyanyi’s lawyer
stopped attempts to grab property. The Community Court appointed
her guardian against the brother-in-law’s wishes. Family lawyers pro-
tected Mrs Mapinda and Mrs Masuku from demanding brothers-in-
law. Mrs Mkandla persuaded her son to transfer the estate to her in
the High Court.
The widows also utilized corporate policies to gain control over their
husbands’ savings and pensions. After her initial abortive meeting,
Mrs Ganyanyi phoned her husband’s employers and persuaded them
to tell her brother-in-law
. . . what my husband was said to have contributed as pension, add a

little interest and then give it to them as the pension. They would
then work out the real pension benefits, minus the little given to the
relatives and give me the bulk of the money.
Mrs Mapinda had the pension money put directly into her account.
She could do this because the company insisted on talking to her alone.
Thus, institutionalized, westernized inheritance practices provided a
means (and rationale) for keeping resources within the nuclear family.
The women legitimized their actions by claiming responsibility for
the children’s wellbeing rather than asserting their rights as individuals.
Mrs Mavhuna dismissed her mother-in-law’s criticisms, pointing out
that ‘I had to manage every cent properly. For the sake of the children,
now that her son was dead’. Mrs Ganyanyi brushed off her in-laws’ criti-
cisms, saying:
Anyway I did not give a damn. I had my own life to lead and my
children to look after . . . Here I am with my family, working hard.
The widows’ redefinition of their inheritance rights thus remained

within the terms of customary inheritance discourses which empha-
sized the protection of widows and children, rather than the rights of
individuals or the nuclear family. This strategy deflected criticism and
garnered much support. Mrs Mapinda’s sister-in-law, for example,
believed the widow should inherit so she could ‘look after the children’.
The widows renegotiated the balance of power between the nuclear
and extended family without entirely rejecting the extended family’s
claims. Several acknowledged special responsibility for their mothers-
in-law. Mrs Ganyanyi barely touched her husband’s pension money.
‘I just don’t feel it’s mine and anyway I do not really need it.’ The com-
promises between the nuclear and extended families often took embod-
ied forms. Control over the body and burial remained with the
extended family. Mrs Ganyanyi expressed her unhappiness through
illness rather than open rebellion. The widows accepted the need to
wear black, although some interpreted this rather broadly, and none
wore black at work. No one challenged the kin group’s control over the
kurova guva/umbuyiso ceremony. One widow rejected a last minute
change, but only with her mother’s and sister-in-law’s support.
Sexuality remained a key issue. None of the widows challenged the
assumption that their property rights depended on remarriage within
the extended family or celibacy. They all refused remarriage, some
rather vehemently. As Mrs Mavhuna exclaimed: ‘I would have to be

daydreaming to accept nhaka [remarriage].’ Yet all the widows took part
in the kurova guva/umbuyiso ceremony. They appointed either a child or
sister-in-law as their ‘protector’. Moreover, although the widows
emphasized their commitment to the children, and thus the nuclear
family, they also deliberately and very publicly announced their inten-
tion to remain celibate. Mrs Mapinda declared: ‘I am 38 now and all
I want to do is look after my children. I have no desire to remarry now
or in the future.’ Mrs Nyahonde insisted that she had ‘no intention to
remarry. I don’t bring any boyfriends here [to the family home], in fact,
I don’t have any boyfriends’. This earned her sister-in-law’s approval,
who expressed relief that ‘[the widow] never embarrassed us by having
boyfriends’. Celibacy enabled the widows to remain officially commit-
ted to the extended family while redefining the terms of inheritance,
for themselves and the nuclear family.
The WLSA cases suggest more changes may be in store. Comments
made to researchers reveal new attitudes to inheritance. Mrs Ganyanyi,
for example, although a Shona, strongly opposed the practice of
appointing sons as heirs. She complained that
. . . if my son was older and married, he could choose to get me out

of his house. I also felt it was not fair to have only one child appointed
while the others get nothing. Even the children expressed dissatisfac-
tion with the law. My eldest daughter once asked me why everything
was left to the little boy.
Some widows argued for their rights to marital estates, not just as moth-
ers but also on the basis of their own contributions. Mrs Mapinda
argued that
. . . when a man and his wife work, they do so for the welfare of their
children. They are not working to enrich their brother and sisters but
they want their children to have a good life and thus it is proper that
when a spouse dies, the surviving spouse and children should get
everything.
Mrs Mkandla opposed the notion of heir. ‘If you work as a twosome,
the remaining spouse must be the heir.’ Her son agreed, and transferred
the estate to her ‘because both my parents had worked for it’.
While these views are hardly hegemonic, they suggest some move-
ment in people’s thinking. Certainly, the rights of the nuclear family
are increasingly important, especially to the élite. This is demonstrated

by the plans of all six widows to leave wills ‘to protect . . . [their] chil-
dren’s interests’. While the rights and support of the extended family
remain important, these cases suggest inheritance practices, particularly
the widow’s role in property and family management, will continue to
be a matter for negotiation and compromise.
Conclusion
Ann Whitehead (1984: 176) quite rightly points out that property (and
inheritance) is not so much about relations between people and prop-
erty as about relationships between people. When trying to explain
how inheritance influences relations between people (and property),
scholars have often focused on laws and customs (Owen 1996). Clearly,
laws and cultural practices do affect people’s relations and behaviour
during a funeral and afterwards. These laws and customs are embodied
and engendered, defining different roles for men and women, including
how they deal with their bodies. Religious sanctions further threaten
potential transgressors. Thus, on the surface, Foucault’s notion of embod-
ied, disciplinary practices seems particularly apt when thinking about
people, property and inheritance, although feminists would quite rightly
point to their patriarchal character as well.
Yet, in the increasingly complex, multiethnic (and often postcolo-
nial) societies of today, laws and customs often compete with one
another, replacing consistent disciplinary practice with a variety of pos-
sibilities. In these circumstances, scholars have generally adopted an
either/or approach. Feminists writing about the struggles over Otieno’s
body in Kenya, for example, have seen that dispute either as a struggle
between a modern widow and rural patriarchy (the husband’s Luo kin)
(Stamp 1991), or a conflict between the rising urban middle class and
those determined to protect a rural way of life (Gordon 1995). These
scholars ignore the possibility that most people seek a set of compro-
mises and renegotiations, the messy in-between spaces, rather than an
all-or-nothing struggle between ‘custom’ and ‘modernity’, or men and
women. Our cases demonstrate that some middle-class widows in Zim-
babwe have managed this middle path. They have both resisted and
acceded to disciplinary practices, often in rather contradictory and
unexpected ways.
Attention to embodied practices provides important insights into this
process. The widows defended and redefined their rights over property
and children by putting up electric gates, falling ‘ill’, adapting their
mourning clothes and refusing to stay put. At the same time, embodied
practices remained central to renegotiating relations between widows
and the extended family. The widows never challenged the extended
family’s control over the body and burial, nor the primacy of the kin
group’s survival through its children/future/bodies. As we have seen,
celibacy maintained the widows’ commitment to the family and it is
this embodied promise that seems to be at the core of the widows’
attempts to redefine inheritance practices in ways that enhance their
autonomy without rejecting the extended family’s role in the protec-
tion and maintenance of the kin group. This compromise is all the
more important in this time of AIDS and economic decline, but it
reminds us that human beings are often able to disrupt and renegotiate
even the most apparently neat, disciplinary scenario, and that this is
even more apt to happen in the complex, contradictory world of post-
colonial societies.
At the same time, this chapter is based on only six cases. They do
provide a window into the embodied collusions and compromises of
certain middle-class widows. Much more evidence is needed to make
generalizations, even about the middle class. More studies are needed,
especially of widows and widowers from different class and cultural
backgrounds. The WLSA writings have gone a long way in this direc-
tion. This chapter suggests, however, that intensive analysis of people’s
daily lives has much to tell us about those messy in-between spaces we
want to explore. Moreover, the cases remind us that women (and men)
are both enabled and constrained by laws, discourses and institutions.
They demonstrate the limits of an either/or approach, and highlight the
need for an embodied, nuanced, in-depth approach to understanding
how individuals redefine and renegotiate the relations among women,
men and property in our increasingly global/local postcolonial world.
Postscript: As this book was going to press there were protests in Zim-
babwe over a supreme court ruling that denied a woman inheritance
rights on the basis of customary status as ‘junior male’.
Notes
1 This chapter has benefited enormously from comments by Julie Stewart, Terri
Barnes, Dorothy Hodgson, Julie Wells, Ann Stewart and several seminar audi-
ences. Special thanks to the editor, Gillian Youngs, for her patience and use-
ful comments.
2 The literature on globalization reflects this tendency as well.

3 Some of the feminist scholars in this move are Christine Sylvester (1994)
and Spike Peterson (1992). For critical IR theory, see Jim George (1994)
and Rob Walker (1993).
4 WLSA researches in Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia,
Zimbabwe and now Malawi. It operates as a collective, choosing regional
topics which are then pursued at national level in accordance with local
idiosyncrasies. Each country team has seven to nine local researchers,
roughly split between lawyers and social scientists. Most are female, but
there are always several males. I am particularly grateful to Julie Stewart,
who has shared her experiences and thoughts as they have evolved during
the WLSA research, and to the writings of Welshman Ncube, Mary
Maboreke, Alice Armstrong, the Zimbabwe team and WLSA members
generally.
5 Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, is in the Shona region; Bulawayo, the second
largest city, is in the Ndebele region. The Shona and the Ndebele are the
country’s major cultural groups, although the cities are culturally very het-
erogeneous.
6 Rural women and the urban poor, especially those with powerful personalit-
ies and/or connections, have often challenged inheritance practices. How-
ever, they do have more difficulty accessing expert advice and assistance.
7 Some of the WLSA case material used in this chapter has been written up in
Dengu-Zvogbo et al. (1994). I have adopted the fictitious names given to
these widows in that book.
8 Foucault defines the acting self as embodied and performative, an aesthetics
of the self. But his subject is generally male and European (McNay 1992).
9 Third World and black feminist writings play a leading role in this debate
(Alexander and Mohanty 1997).
10 The literature on the body has exploded in the last decade. Recently,
scholars have begun to consider the body as corporeal and sentient as
well as socially inscribed. While this is an important advance, it is explored
only schematically in this chapter (Csordas 1994; Gatens 1996; Gedalof
1997; Grosz 1994).
11 Julia Segar and Caroline White (1989) argue that Roman-Dutch law in the
17th century was deeply patriarchal. Married women could neither transact
business nor appear in court without their husband. Women could not keep
their earnings and operate their own savings accounts until 1953.
12 Property grabbing has received a lot of attention. It seems to be more com-
mon in families with marked inequalities of wealth or when a widow or
widower is unpopular. WLSA discovered that property grabbing is much less
common than anticipated (Dengu-Zvogbo et al. 1994).
13 In 1997, the Administration of Estates Amendment, chapter 6, became law.
Influenced by the WLSA research, it gives the matrimonial home to the sur-
viving spouse (in a polygamous marriage this would be shared) as well as
one-third of the estate (in a polygamous marriage the senior wife receives
two shares, the others receive one share each). Monogamous unions,
whether customary or under general law, must now follow the new general
law. We will need new studies of how this law affects family inheritance pat-
terns (personal communication, Julie Stewart, July 1998).
14 Of course, denying the extended family’s claims also saves money.

15 ‘Troublesome’ women were often accused of witchcraft in the past and, if
‘proven’, faced eviction from their village (Schmidt 1995: 17). Shenje (1992)
discovered considerable use of witchcraft accusations to ‘discipline’ widows.
16 Remarriage to an in-law has often been described as marriage by inherit-
ance. This implies a lack of choice which does not reflect the situation.
WLSA thus prefers the indigenous terms – nhaka for the Shona and ukungena
for the Ndebele.
17 Control over burial sites can be very contentious. Stamp (1991) and Gordon
(1995) analyse the dispute between the widow of S. M. Otieno, a prominent
Kenyan Luo lawyer, and his family. The dispute centred on who controlled
the burial/body, which legitimized other claims and rights.
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9
Population, Politics and the Pope:
Universal Agendas and the Bodies
of Women
Palena R. Neale
Introduction
This chapter investigates a particular manifestation of the relationship

between bodies, power and politics. In particular, it examines the rela-
tionship between bodies, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the power
and politics of the spiritual in relation to United Nations (UN) sponsored
international conferences on population and development. 1 The Cath-
olic hierarchy engages the body from the corporeal to the institutional,
and from the personal to the international. This is evidenced on one
level through the hierarchical resources directed at the determination,
regulation and control of the corporeal, in particular the bodies of
women. It is also visible on another level whereby the hierarchy
deploys its spiritual power in the political and often uses this spiritual
power as political power.2 Fundamental to all bodily articulations and
engagements are the politics of the spiritual that often envelop the
political in the name of the spiritual and that are sustained through sys-
tems of power.
Part one of the chapter examines the politics of the spiritual as it per-
tains to the production of an identity. It examines the Catholic repres-
entation of woman and the power at work in defining, assigning and
confining woman to a particular identity.
Part two inquires into the Catholic hierarchy and its nonrepresent-
ative representation, including its international representation at the
UN. This is significant considering that it is the Catholic hierarchy that
is entitled to international representation, and is therefore spiritually
and legally empowered to represent woman at all international venues
and events. This also illustrates how the hierarchy’s spiritual power and
authority is used as political power in the international.
180
Universal Agendas and the Bodies of Women 181
Part three explores this Catholic representation in the context of the

UN sponsored international population conferences of Bucharest
(1974), Mexico City (1984) and Cairo (1994) with special reference to
the relationship between the Holy See, the bodies of women and the
power and politics at work to advance a universal/Catholic3 agenda.
Specifically, it exposes the power-politicking of the spiritual as it relates
to the regulation of the body, both the personal and the international,
and what this means for women and the bodies of women in terms of
reproductive options and sexuality. The chapter concludes by offering
some insights into the politics of the spiritual as they apply to the hier-
archical representation of woman and the body, as well as the politics
of the spiritual as they concern international population politicking.
The Catholic representation of woman
The Catholic articulation of woman is based on biological fact as

‘revealed’ in the creation narratives, and is further modelled on hier-
archical representations of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This articulation
fixes woman’s dignity and vocation as some expression of the Marian
trinity, namely as some combination of virgin–mother–spouse (Second
Vatican Ecumenical Council 1965a and b; Pope Paul VI 1974; Pope
John Paul II 1981, 1988). The predetermined vocations, along with
the requirements for their realization, are unequivocally tied to the
female body. The much esteemed role of wife or virgin demands that
woman remain virtuous and chaste in order to ensure the purity of the
female body. Only then may woman commence the next stage of her
natural progression to wife, where she is entered into for the primary
purpose of marriage, namely procreation. At the most basic level,
woman’s vocation is defined, realized and represented in relation to
the female body.
Similarly, woman as virgin is dependent upon the female body or the
regulation and control of the body (particularly the reproductive system
of the female body) in an uncompromising endeavour to devote her
entire energies to Christ. Hence, the creation narratives which specify
that ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created
him, male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:12) maintain the notions
of equality and difference. It is precisely this difference that reinforces
an essentialism rooted in biology and thus supports the notion of
woman defined in relation to her body, specifically her reproductive
parts, which confirms woman as wom(b)an (see the chapter by Zalewski
in this volume).
This means that the Catholic articulation of woman serves as one of

many fundamental ‘truths’ where one of the most significant implica-
tions regarding the Catholic articulation of woman is how this parti-
cular ‘truth’ is used: put differently, how the Catholic ‘truth’ about
woman is used to define woman, and what this means for women; in
particular, how the power to define woman’s dignity and vocation
based on ‘Christian anthropological truths’ (Pope John Paul II 1988)
determines woman’s reproductive options and sexuality, and works to
confine woman to the particular. The commitment to biological essen-
tialism that defines woman in relation to the body verifies for the
Catholic hierarchy a biologically distinct female sex. In addition, the
commitment to the immutable feminine essence suggests a more gen-
eral essentialism that operates in association with biology. As Pope
John Paul II (1988) proclaims, woman’s dignity and vocation is based
on the ‘personal resources of femininity’ that are equal to, but different
from, man’s. Woman then experiences her ‘feminine humanity’
through the sincere gift of self, realized most fully in motherhood and
virginity.
Motherhood and virginity are two particular dimensions of the
‘female personality’, and find their truest expression in the Blessed
Mary. Moreover, scientific analysis confirms woman’s ‘natural’ disposi-
tion to conception, pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Woman, as a
Christian anthropological truth, implies an essence to which the Cath-
olic hierarchy in general, and John Paul II in particular, repeatedly refer.
This ‘truth’ not only engages the biological essentialism that reinforces
woman in relation to the body, but also sustains the essentialism that
defines woman in relation to the ‘feminine nature’. Hence, this relation-
ship between biological essentialism and the feminine essence is able to
set the ‘truth’ about woman as some one thing.4
The woman/‘truth’ is also used in the institution of an ideal or, as
Foucault (1979: 145–6) would argue, in the creation of an illusory cat-
egory. The Blessed Mary is installed as the most perfect of Christ’s disci-
ples in general, and is advanced as the universal representation of
woman in particular. Mary represents the model of Christian perfection
and does so through her role as virgin–mother–spouse. Mary also illu-
minates for women the uniqueness of the ‘gift of femininity’. Analogous
to Foucault’s work on the fictitious unity of the category ‘sex’, Mary
becomes the disciplinary and regulatory ideal working on and through
the female body. This has the power to produce woman’s dignity and
vocation, and is able to masquerade this knowledge as ‘truth’ for dis-
covery. This knowledge/‘truth’ then serves as input into the power/
knowledge relationship that operates through disciplinary and regu-

latory regimes (Foucault 1979: 151–7).
As Foucault argues, and Catholic regulatory doctrine illustrates, this
results in the production of innovative and normalizing techniques and
surveillances for bodies and pleasures. For example, Catholic doctrine
has been used to define and delineate virtually every aspect of woman.
Doctrinal statements on behalf of the Church hierarchy on issues ran-
ging from marriage, the family, birth control, abortion, reproductive
technologies and homosexuality meticulously conceive the acceptable
course of action or the acceptable parameters of human sexual behavi-
our, including the corresponding discipline and punishment for non-
compliance. Like ‘sex’, Mary has the dual ability to reveal ‘truth’ and
produce systems of norms based on these ‘truths’. Mary as the model of
woman, and the model to women, becomes a disciplinary and regulatory
ideal through which to survey woman.
It is also important to consider the relationship between the produc-
tion of ‘truth’ and power. Specifically, how the presentation of a ‘nat-
ural’, ‘objective’ woman makes it possible to ignore the productive
relationship between power and ‘truth’. The collapse of woman and
‘natural’ produces the ‘natural woman’ objectively ordered through dis-
courses of science and religion: discourses that are immune from the
reach of power and politics. Hence, the naturalization of woman
depoliticizes woman and works to obfuscate the productive relations
between power and the production of ‘truth’, and power and
woman. What this means is that the production of ‘truth’ is an
occurrence of ‘nature’ rather than a power-infused and political pro-
cess, and that woman is mediated through ‘nature’ rather than sys-
tems of power. 5
The naturalization process raises a larger issue, namely the Catholic
hierarchy’s ability to operate through recourse to ‘Christian anthropo-
logical truths’ revealed through the ‘divine’. The Church hierarchy at
the most general level has been empowered supernaturally through the
Holy Trinity that is represented on earth by the Petrine ministry, or the
office of the papacy. This office enjoys a wide range of power and com-
petencies and is authorized to interpret, construct and re-present doc-
trine. The power to produce and re-present ‘truth’ calls into question a
politics of mystification, or attempts aimed at advancing the produc-
tion of ‘truth’ as a revelation of the ‘divine’ rather than a manifestation
of power. In the instance at hand, hierarchical systems of power depol-
iticize and naturalize woman through recourse to the ‘divine’ as out-
lined in the creation narratives detailed in Genesis.
Moving in a more particular direction, it is interesting to consider

how ‘truths’ are used in the politics of the spiritual: put differently, how
‘truths’ are frequently used as justification for the Catholic hierarchy’s
active engagement in the deployment of spiritual power in political
issues. For example, the Holy See’s active participation within the UN
sponsored international population conferences of Bucharest, Mexico
City and Cairo provides insight into how the Catholic ‘truth’ about
woman is promoted in the international. These engagements highlight
how the Catholic conceptualization of woman is used to articulate and
advance the Catholic perspective on women in society. This perspective
is advanced as the universal in the international, is arguably conservat-
ive, and works to homogenize women. The Holy See’s participation in
the field of international population policy illustrates attempts to pre-
serve and promote universal/Catholic ‘truths’, particularly ‘truths’ that
define and discipline woman.
In summary, the Catholic articulation of woman modelled after the
Blessed Virgin Mary finds its truest expression through the sincere gift
of self most fully realized as some combination of virgin–mother–spouse.
The lowest common denominator of each, and required for the realiza-
tion of all, is the female body, or the biological difference (or unique-
ness) detailed in Genesis. The Catholic articulation of woman is defined
in relation to the female body, and is designated as a site for Catholic
investment, where the dignity and vocation of woman are realized
most fully through the use or disuse of the female body. Furthermore,
the woman/‘truth’ serves numerous functions where it: implies an
essence; institutes an ideal; defines woman as some one thing; collapses
woman and the body; and is used to discipline and regulate the norm.
Ultimately, the ‘truth’ about woman is indoctrinated through hierarch-
ical investments that work to determine exhaustively woman in relation
to the body, particularly reproductive capacities. This power-infused
identity formation process is also directed at the regulation and control
of wom(b)an’s6 lived existence, particularly in terms of marriage and
the family, human sexuality and procreation, which is operationalized
through hierarchical systems of power. It is, therefore, important to
consider hierarchical representation in order to explore how and why
power is deployed to determine and affix meaning, as in the case of
woman, reproductive options and sexuality. Furthermore, it is imperat-
ive to inquire into how this power is used to represent wom(b)an in the
international, as well as into hierarchical attempts to regulate and con-
trol woman through the international as in the case of international
population policy.
Catholic hierarchical representation
The Catholic representation of woman has been reviewed on its own,

and in relation to marriage and the family, human sexuality and pro-
creation. The representation(s) of woman exemplifies an androcentric
process that functions to institute an ideal, and then compel perform-
ance in relation to this regulatory standard. It is an identity formation
process that is mediated and controlled by someone else, and epitomizes
a manifestation of androcentric systems of power. It also speaks of the
Catholic institutional structures and their exclusionary and nonrepres-
entative practices. This is especially pertinent when examining the
organizational structure and the representation of the Catholic hierarchy.
The Catholic hierarchy’s nonrepresentative representation is based
on the projection of Christ and his male representatives on to the world
which has become the mirror for universal/Catholic reflection. Luce
Irigaray (1985a and b) discusses this process in relation to what she
calls specularization and matricide. Briefly, Irigaray posits that the pro-
cess of specularization involves the male projecting his ego on to the
world that becomes the mirror in which to review his reflection.
Woman forms part of this mirror but is the part that never gets reflec-
ted. This process of reflection based on exclusion is what she refers to
as a form of matricide. Hence, woman as mother is a necessary part of
this process, but is never reflected.
This exclusionary relationship is reaffirmed in the case of the Cath-
olic reflection, where the Virgin Mary supports the imagery of the male/
self-reflection but is excluded as part of it. This has not only been dem-
onstrated through the all-male hierarchy and the androcentric systems
of representation, but is also seen in the use of language as an exclu-
sionary liturgical tool that is defended in relation to Christ’s maleness
(Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1976: 98–116; Pope John
Paul II 1988: 96–103). 7 Essentially, the Catholic hierarchy’s commit-
ment to an androcentric organizational structure protects and preserves
its spiritual power by guaranteeing its nonrepresentative status, and its
ability to represent woman based on the exclusion of women. The
Catholic hierarchy’s system of representation is evident from yet
another perspective, particularly concerning the Holy See’s status as
UN nonmember state permanent observer and its participation in UN
population conferences.
The Holy See is generally referred to as the government of the Church,
meaning the Pope, the Roman Curia and the College of Cardinals. As the
juridical personification of the Church, the Holy See negotiates treaties
and agreements and exercises its right of representation. The Holy See’s
juristic personality is not to be confused with that of the Catholic
Church. As Cardinale (1976: 83) attests, it is the Holy See’s institutional
character that sets it apart from the Catholic Church. The Holy See’s
UN status secures for the papacy the power to decide on issues of repres-
entation and the conditions for that representation. The Holy See exer-
cises its international right to representation and has been an active and
vocal participant at the three population conferences. As the supreme
organ of government for both the Catholic Church and the Vatican
City state, the Holy See appears to have engaged simultaneously both
the spiritual and the political.
As some have argued, the deliberately confusing Holy See/Catholic
Church/Vatican City state trinity has obscured political intent and has
overextended spiritual sovereignty (Kissling and Shannon 1995/96: 11;
Delph and Toner 1997). Questions have been raised regarding the Holy
See’s UN status, in particular its representation at the ICPD. Numerous
conference delegates called into question whether the Holy See spoke
on behalf of the Catholic Church, the Vatican City or the average Cath-
olic in the pew. Specifically, was the Holy See speaking on behalf of the
Roman Catholic Church and therefore representing an organized reli-
gion? And if so, why had the Church been granted this special privilege
while no other religious group was entitled to international representa-
tion within the UN? Moreover, if this was the representation relation-
ship, then why was the Church engaging in international politics and
negotiations when its sovereignty has been defined as spiritual? Stated
differently, why was the Catholic Church, represented by the Holy See,
permitted negotiation status within the international community at an
international conference mandated to discuss political issues?
These questions were addressed indirectly when Archbishop Martino
reaffirmed the Holy See’s involvement in the ICPD. He stated: ‘ . . . the
Holy See and the institutions of the Catholic Church throughout the
world will continue, in collaboration with the nations of the interna-
tional community, to make their specific contribution’ (L’Osservatore
Romano 1994: 8). The archbishop not only justified the Holy See’s parti-
cipation in terms of its humanitarian interest, but also reiterated the
Catholic belief that the Church had competency in virtually every aspect
of public and private life. Once again, this was founded on its commit-
ment to the good of humanity that has been licensed through the divine.
Others held a different view regarding their representation and hence
participation. For example, was it not appropriate that the Holy See, on
behalf of the Catholic Church, express its views in the NGO forum with
the other religious representatives? According to the chairman of the

main committee at Cairo, Dr Sai, the NGO forum was the appropriate
venue for the communication of the Holy See’s position and concerns.
Unsurprisingly, this sentiment was echoed by numerous NGO deleg-
ates. If, on the other hand, the Holy See was representing the Vatican
City from a purely temporal perspective then, as Frances Kissling, pres-
ident of Catholics for a Free Choice, demanded, what were representat-
ives of a virtually all-male population of less than 1,200 doing speaking
on behalf of women and children concerning reproductive and sexual
health (Los Angeles Times 1994)? Whichever hat the Holy See was wear-
ing, there were those for whom the issue of representation was called
into question, especially the representation of woman, man and child.
Religious representation in the political is not a new dynamic, nor is
Catholic representation at a UN conference. The Holy See’s right to rep-
resentation secures for a religious body intergovernmental and interna-
tional representation. This representation thus carries within it the
power to extend the Catholic reach beyond the spiritual as evidenced in
its negotiations at the conferences of Bucharest, Mexico City and Cairo.
The Holy See matters as an international juristic personality that secures
access to international and intergovernmental arenas. Through this
body, the Church is able to augment its disciplinary and regulatory
capacity by engaging international bodies and venues by virtue of its
juristic personality and its ability to define its own representational sta-
tus. This is particularly important for the advancement of papal popula-
tion policies and the condemnation of policies violating Catholic
teachings. This representation illustrates how spiritual power is used as
political power to promote Catholic representations of woman, repro-
ductive options and sexuality in an international agreement that has
the potential to affect all women. This dynamic is explored in more
detail through the Holy See’s participation in the three ICPDs.
Catholic representation(s) and the UN population conferences
The UN’s involvement in the field of population dates back to its incep-
tion and the Vatican has followed its activities with interest and parti-
cipation. The UN has allocated considerable resources to the execution
of population policies and has sponsored three population conferences
in Bucharest (1974), Mexico City (1984) and Cairo (1994). Each of these
was used as an international venue in which the Vatican was able to
communicate and advance its own ideas on population and develop-
ment issues. In particular, the conferences provided the Vatican with
opportunities to reiterate its well-known positions on the family, mar-

riage, birth control, abortion and sexuality. These conferences high-
lighted the Vatican’s astute negotiating abilities, as well as its interest in
the corporeal, specifically the Vatican’s attempts to mediate the corporeal
within population policy in relation to the universal/Catholic in the
international. What follows is an examination of the politics of the spir-
itual as they pertain to the regulation of the body, what this means for
women in terms of reproductive options and sexuality, and the power
politics of the spiritual in the context of international population policy.
The regulation of the body: the personal and the international

Common to each population conference were concerted attempts to
regulate the body, both the personal and the international, which ulti-
mately implied the promotion of the universal/Catholic to determine
women’s reproductive and sexual options, and represented a politics of
the spiritual waged in the international. For example, the Vatican del-
egation in Bucharest used the conference as an opportunity to argue, in
the field of global population, in favour of redistribution of wealth
between North and South as opposed to family planning (Johnson
1994: 116–18). The Vatican used the conference to advance its positions
on population, the family, marriage, birth control, abortion and human
sexuality that disengaged women by simultaneously engaging the bod-
ies of women. Monsignor Henri de Reidmatten, the leader of the Holy
See’s delegation to Bucharest, stated:
We will not pass over the fact that the message of the Plan relative to
contraception and the methods of preventing births are not accept-
able to us. They are not acceptable in what concerns contraceptives,
in regard to which the Catholic Church has already made her posi-
tion clear, and is aware of the need to reaffirm and maintain her
teaching without ambiguity.
(Quoted in Johnson 1994: 118)
His statement illustrated how Catholic precepts, at times, loosely

cloaked in discourses of ethics, dealt with the body as a population
input to be reproduced through carefully mediated discourses aimed at
regulation and control. Here, the Catholic mediation of the body pro-
vided the moral and ethical foundation for international population
policy in terms of reproductive choice. It also demonstrated how the
spiritual was used as the political in terms of its international repres-
entation in global population policy and called into question the
alleged distinction between the Holy See’s nondenominational and

Catholic representation.
The Mexico City conference provided another opportunity for the
Vatican to regulate the body, both the personal and the international.
Despite the Church’s preconference attempts to exclude it from the
agenda, family planning surfaced as an area for contemplation within the
population debate. The Vatican was, however, able to influence the cor-
poreal through the intergovernmental and the NGO bodies in terms of
language and financial aid. The Vatican claimed success in the language
of the final document that prohibited abortion as a means of family
planning. The Vatican also won a victory when the Reagan administra-
tion of the US announced its plans to withdraw funding from the two
largest family planning organizations, the UN Fund for Population
Activities (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federa-
tion (IPPF). This was an initiative the Vatican had worked diligently to
promote, particularly through US bishops in the wake of an American
electoral year.
What this meant was a restriction in funding for abortion in UN pro-
grammes and the elimination of all such funding from the population
portion of many national foreign aid budgets. On the domestic side, the
decision became the legal instrument by which the Reagan and Bush
administrations prohibited federal support for any public or private aid
programme that included abortion in its approach to family planning
(Catholic World Report 1993: 39; Fornos and Burette 1994: 10–12; Weigel
1995). The Vatican had successfully lobbied the US administrative body,
which in turn influenced and regulated a variety of bodies, namely the
conference, intergovernmental and national entities, and NGOs, in terms
of family planning services.
Cairo was yet another opportunity to advance the regulatory dis-
course on marriage and the family, birth control, abortion and homo/
sexuality in an international setting. It also exemplified one of the most
vocal and well-organized campaigns launched by the Vatican to regu-
late an international body, namely the ICPD. The Holy See’s strategy
put perhaps the most controversial and potentially explosive issue at
the forefront of debate: abortion and the language used to talk about it.
The Holy See’s objections successfully catapulted the issue to the top of
the agenda, attracted media attention and simultaneously eliminated it
from the debate, or from within the larger context of women’s empow-
erment and reproductive health within an overall plan to stabilize
world population. The Holy See was able to impede consensus and refo-
cus both the debate and conference resources to the negotiation of
compromise language used to talk about abortion. This meant that

issues related to abortion, such as the notion of unsafe abortion as a
public health concern, abortion as an aspect of reproductive and sexual
health, as well as other conference issues, were overshadowed and
negotiation postponed. Numerous delegations were reported to have
complained that in a conference mandated to discuss population and
development issues, abortion had overshadowed development concerns
(New York Times 1994). Conference officials and several governmental
delegations noted on record that the ICPD had not been intended as an
international debate on abortion (Guardian 1994). Abortion was not the
sole area of contention between the Vatican and the majority of UN del-
egations in Cairo. Issues surrounding the family, adolescent sexuality
and individualistic lifestyles received vociferous condemnations from
the Holy See. The Vatican had clearly pursued a strategy designed to
impact and redirect an international body (the ICPD) for the purpose of
regulating the corporeal in relation to Catholic articulations of human
sexuality and procreation, which had particular implications for
women and the bodies of women.
In each setting, that of Bucharest, Mexico City and Cairo, the Vatican
employed the conferences as an international opportunity to represent
woman, reproductive options and sexuality based on an androcentric
system of nonrepresentation, and to advance the Catholic as the uni-
versal. Not only did this suggest a regulation of the body – the personal,
the international and the intergovernmental – but it also implied a
denial of choice, specifically in terms of woman’s reproductive options
and sexuality.
Universal agendas and the denial of reproductive and sexual choice

The power of reproduction cannot be underestimated for the Catholic
hierarchy, especially its role in reproducing the all-male Church struc-
ture and the corresponding systems of power. The corporeal in terms of
the individual, member of the family, and building block of the faith-
ful, represents a powerful body within the Catholic Church. These same
bodies are required and relied upon to multiply and spread the faith.
Catholic ecumenical projects and the conversion of souls requires for its
sustenance the corporeal, with a view to reproducing the faithful. It is
not surprising, therefore, that the Vatican moved to advance Catholic
articulations of human sexuality and procreation for all women which
impact directly upon reproductive and sexual choice.
In each of the conferences, the Vatican operated through an interna-
tional body to influence the course of population policy that is largely
dependent on the bodies of women. The removal of family planning

methods from the overall plan of action in Bucharest denied women
reproductive choice, freedom and health and essentially imprisoned
woman in the body, particularly in poor and developing countries. It
further separated woman from population policy and reaffirmed the
corporeal within population policy as an object, subject to domination
and control. Similarly, the restriction of family planning services and
the reduction of financial aid at Mexico City represented an attempt at
best to limit, at worst to deny, women’s reproductive choice, particularly
that which fell outside parameters previously determined by Catholic
doctrine. Furthermore, the highly public and international attempts to
condemn the draft programme of action destined for Cairo, and the
vocal condemnations of texts that contradicted Catholic teachings, par-
ticularly those regarding marriage and the family, abortion and sexuality,
suggested an international strategy intended to conserve and delimit
woman, reproductive options and sexuality.
Ultimately, the body represents a site for investment that is subse-
quently disciplined, punished, regulated and controlled through care-
fully mediated discourses surrounding marriage and the family, birth
control, abortion, reproductive technologies and (homo)sexuality. It was
during the Cairo conference that the Holy See was adamant in reinfor-
cing its position concerning the familial body and the corresponding
expression of embodiment. According to Catholic doctrine, the family
comprised a man/husband and a woman/wife which functioned as the
fundamental unit of society; there was no space within the doctrine for
‘alternative’ (read homosexual) family units. Therefore, the basic unit of
society was to consist of two biologically distinct bodies. Likewise, the
regulation of fertility debated extensively in Mexico City and later reaf-
firmed in Cairo provided another example of the Holy See’s attempts to
institute an ideal. According to Catholic doctrine and the official posi-
tion of the Holy See at these conferences, the regulation of fertility was
to fall within the limits prescribed by ‘natural family planning meth-
ods’; the only Church-approved method of regulating births. As one
conference delegate in Cairo argued, daily temperature readings and the
monitoring of a woman’s vaginal secretions for the purposes of this
allegedly natural method of family planning takes the ‘natural’ out of
‘natural family planning’. 8 It is significant that the particular, in this
case the Catholic, is advanced as the ethical standard to be imitated by
the international. It would seem that the Church hierarchy’s devoted
attention to the female body in general, and the Holy See’s preoccu-
pation with reproduction and the bodies of women at international
population conferences in particular, reflects an awareness of the power

inherent in reproduction. Perhaps this becomes more intelligible when
considering what is at stake, namely the reproduction of the faithful,
Catholic representations, and systems of power that work in conjunc-
tion to secure an all-male Church hierarchy. Bearing this in mind, there
is little incentive to expand or promote women’s reproductive and/or
sexual choice as the politicking of the spiritual surrounding the confer-
ences reveals.
The politicking of the spiritual

Each of the conferences highlights not only how the spiritual may be
employed in the political, but how the spiritual is used as the political.
At the most basic level, the Holy See’s international juristic personality
provides international representation for the Catholic bodies of Christ.9
It is this international representation, and hence opportunity, that has
given rise to some of the most visible expressions of the politics of the
spiritual in terms of international politicking by the bodies of Christ.
One such example was the Holy See’s participation at Mexico City,
specifically its lobby against the linking of financial incentives and fam-
ily planning. Ironically, the Vatican spoke against financial links
between reproduction and economic aid, coercive governmental pol-
icies aimed at restricting family size, antinatalist propaganda and mak-
ing the human person an object of government policies, but appeared
to replace one form of coercion with another. The domestic and inter-
national reduction of aid sanctioned by the Reagan–Bush administra-
tion effectively established a link between reproduction and economic
aid by reducing resources for family planning facilities that provided
abortion services (Fornos and Burette 1994: 10–11). Vatican appeals for
the elimination of coercive government policies aimed at restricting
family size were superseded by appeals that promoted increased family
size. Similarly, ‘antinatalist propaganda’ issued on behalf of family
planning providers was supplanted by religious doctrine couched in
ethical discourses that encouraged repeated pregnancies and/or abstin-
ence. Finally, calls for the human person to be an active participant
rather than a mere object of government policy appeared devoid of
meaning when considering the Catholic alternative, where ‘active parti-
cipant’ has a rather limited interpretation within Catholic doctrine,
particularly in the area of human sexuality (see, for example, Schotte
1984). Clearly the Holy See’s participation in Mexico City spoke of a
politicking of the spiritual that had as its goal pragmatic political aims.
The relationship between the US Catholic bishops and the Reagan–Bush
administration, as well as the Democrat opposition, provided an

important opportunity for securing the Vatican’s goals. In a like man-
ner, the Vatican and the US bishops represented an equally important
body of opportunity in which to influence public opinion in a US elect-
oral year and thereby secure the Catholic vote (Johnson 1994: 166).
The Vatican’s ‘war’ against the draft programme of action and its cam-
paign against the ICPD were again aligned to the political in the name of
the spiritual (Bernstein and Politi 1996: 524). There were examples in
which the bodies of Christ engaged overtly in political activities, and
other instances when they addressed the political cloaked in the spir-
itual. However, what was significant was the power and authority
deployed on behalf of the hierarchy to promote and conserve a particu-
lar agenda, and furthermore, what this power and authority looked like.
The Vatican’s strategy, commanded by John Paul II, included a range of
tools from the pastoral to the political. For example, John Paul and his
most senior advisers made public appeals to heads of states condemning
the draft document, including detailed requisitions to President Clinton
and UN officials concerning the ICPD. Meetings were held between John
Paul and Clinton, as well as with Dr Sadik, executive director of the
UNFPA and secretary general of the conference, in an attempt to re-route
the ICPD’s course. Vatican diplomatic activity increased: initiatives were
launched that included alliance building, papal lessons in population
policy to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, beatification of women
for extreme and traditional life-endangering choices, countless hierarch-
ical condemnations from around the world, as well as regular press brief-
ings. All formed part of the Vatican’s strategy to redirect the agenda of
the ICPD. Furthermore, publications were issued that added support to
both the Vatican’s definition of the population problem as well as its
corresponding solutions (Pontifical Council for the Family 1994a and b).
In addition, there were several interfaith initiatives to advance the papal
agenda, as well as countless instances of politics and prayer, most visibly
delivered by the Holy Father himself. The activities of the bodies of
Christ in the months preceding the ICPD exemplified a politicking of
the spiritual in particular; it was a political campaign waged to institu-
tionalize the particular as the universal in the name of the spiritual. This
campaign continued right up to, and included, conference negotiations.
Bearing in mind all of the conference negotiations (Bucharest, Mex-
ico City and Cairo), it is important to consider what the Vatican’s polit-
icking unveils, particularly what it reveals about the bodies of Christ,
and ultimately what it betrays about their conceptualization of woman.
The Catholic hierarchy makes the distinction between spiritual and
political power and jurisdiction, and simultaneously defends the spir-

itual sovereignty that enables them to operate on a higher moral plane
than the political (Cardinale 1976: 79; Tillard 1995: 953). Spiritual
sovereignty empowers the bodies of Christ with tremendous scope in
the execution of their divine mission. This is obviously the case with
the bodies of Christ and international population policy. The Holy See’s
activities in all three of the population conferences represents a com-
bination of politics and power; power that is traditionally characterized
and justified by the Church hierarchy as spiritual as opposed to polit-
ical. The Holy See’s performance is an expression of how the spiritual is
not only used in the political, but how it is used as the political. All of
the negotiations illustrate a conceptualization of spiritual authority that
envelops the political in the name of the spiritual, and calls into ques-
tion the alleged distinction between the spiritual and the political.
Hence, the spiritual must be considered for its political content and – in
the case of woman, the Holy See and international population policy –
its political agendas.
It is also interesting to consider the politics of the spiritual. Contrary
to the hierarchical divisions of power and authority, it is almost imposs-
ible to separate the spiritual from the political and the political from the
spiritual. This means that it is not necessarily the politics of the spiritual
that is problematic, nor, in this case, the politicking on behalf of the
bodies of Christ and international population policy. What is problem-
atic is the particular politics of the spiritual: the narrow and limiting
conceptualizations of reproductive options and sexuality that bear spe-
cific consequences for women, and how this situation is presented as
the spiritual/moral versus the political/amoral solution. It is now useful
to conclude by offering some insights on the relationship among bod-
ies, politics and power: in particular, on the relationship between bodies
and the power and politics of the spiritual.
Conclusion
By now it should be clear that there exists a relationship between the

body and the power and politics of the spiritual. The Catholic hierarchy
not only makes definitions in relation to the body, as in the case of
wom(b)an, but also determines its politics in relation to the body. Its
bodily engagement, or diplomatic activity, depends precisely on the
constitution and value attached to a particular body. This dynamic is
illustrated in papal population policy that engages bodies from the
international to the individual of the faithful. Two themes emerge: the
politics of the spiritual as they pertain to the hierarchical systems of

power used to define, assign and confine wom(b)an in relation to the
Catholic ideal, and the politics of the spiritual as they pertain to hierarch-
ical deployments of power used in international population politicking
and the quest to promote universal/Catholic agendas. Indigenous to
both is the power at work that moves the spiritual into the political and
simultaneously reimages the spiritual as the political.
The Catholic representation of woman is a manifestation of the polit-
ics of the spiritual that works to exhaustively determine, regulate and
control based on hierarchical systems of power. Woman is explained in
relation to a biological fact originating in creation, and serves as one of
many fundamental ‘truths’. There is no need to explore meaning or
specificity beyond biology; biological difference is sufficient to define
and confine woman. This is evidenced by the instituted ideals that cast
woman as some expression of virgin–mother–spouse, as well as the regu-
latory doctrine that works to confine woman based on the regulation
and control of biology. Woman’s body is further (ab)used as a site for
Catholic investment, where it is endowed with meaning, signification
and conditions for existence based on the investiture of Catholic doc-
trine. Doctrine such as that pertaining to marriage and the family, abor-
tion, birth control, contraception and homosexuality is used to regulate
and control the bodies of women while simultaneously erecting the
boundaries of reproductive ‘choice’ and sexuality. This has the effect of
instituting heterosexual, marital and procreative imperatives that
demand uncompromising compliance in relation to the Catholic norm.
Furthermore, these imperatives work in conjunction to reinforce an
arguably limited and static conceptualization of human sexuality that
offers little in the way of personal choice, and runs the risk of com-
promising personal safety, particularly in terms of the prohibition of
artificial contraception/condoms and the spread of HIV/AIDS, as well as
the damaging effects of multiple births.
It is not surprising that woman’s body is an instrumental site for
Catholic investment, regulation and control, especially when consider-
ing what is involved, namely the Church hierarchy and its nonrepres-
entative representation and the politics of the spiritual. This includes,
but is not limited to, the entitlement to represent based on exclusionary
systems of power, and the juristic capacity to promote this beyond the
Catholic faithful into the international. It seems appropriate, then, that
the bodies of Christ on earth would move to involve themselves act-
ively in public and private endeavours to preserve regulatory doctrine
that works to restrict reproductive and sexual options available to
women. The hierarchical activities surrounding the UN population con-

ferences and the efforts to advance a universal/Catholic agenda elucid-
ate the importance attached to women, the body and reproduction,
specifically the powers of reproduction. Women, and the bodies of
women, provide a primordial reproductive function, particularly in
reproducing the faithful, Catholic representations and the all-male
power base. Wom(b)an, therefore, represents a site for Catholic invest-
ment that is (ab)used in the preservation of the politics of the spiritual.
Ultimately, both the doctrine and the investment process surrounding
woman represent hierarchical deployments of power and politics in the
name of the spiritual.
At the most fundamental level, the Holy See’s representation within
the field of international population policy was dependent on women
and the bodies of women. Therefore, any initiatives perceived to
threaten Catholic representation or Catholic representations met with
vehement disapproval and hierarchical reaction, as the activities sur-
rounding the conferences illustrated. Both the words and deeds issued
on behalf of the bodies of Christ surrounding the conferences of Bucha-
rest, Mexico City and Cairo spoke of a power and politics of the body
that extended beyond the spiritual. The highly public and international
attempts to control the bodies of woman by the various bodies of Christ
at each of the conferences illustrated the power and politics recognized
in the body, from the personal to the international. The Vatican’s
population policy, specifically its efforts directed at limiting and, in
essence, determining reproductive choice and sexuality, demonstrated
just how important the corporeal figured in the politics of the spiritual
executed in the international. Ultimately, the Holy See’s moves to pro-
tect power and conserve representations suggested a strategy aimed at
disempowering rather than empowering women with respect to repro-
ductive options and sexuality. They also demonstrated how the spir-
itual was used in the international as the political. The bodies of Christ
employed the conferences as opportunities to advance particular repres-
entations of wom(b)an, reproductive options and sexuality in an inter-
national agreement, a strategy intended to conserve in relation to the
particular (Catholic) rather than empower in relation to personal choice.
Notes
1 The politics of the spiritual is taken to mean the Catholic hierarchy’s activities
concerned with the acquisition, interpretation, preservation and execution of
spiritual sovereignty. The politics of the spiritual therefore includes, but is
not limited to, activities such as the construction of identities, the produc-
tion of ‘truths’, the institution of regulatory norms, the policing of regulatory
ideals and politicking on behalf of the Church hierarchy.
2 It is imperative to explain the ‘spiritual’, the ‘political’, and the relationship
between the two, and how these concepts are utilized within this discussion.
Spiritual power, authority and competencies are taken to refer to the author-
ity conferred by God upon the Church in all matters of faith, morals and reli-
gion. This is enshrined in the doctrine of Petrine succession which suggests
that there exists a continuous and uninterrupted transmission of ministry
from Saint Peter to the current papacy. Political power, authority and com-
petencies refers to temporal or secular authority in matters that submit to
worldly or terrestrial affairs. The relationship between the spiritual and the
political is explained in Catholic theology through Church–State relations.
The basic principle that defines the relations between the spiritual and the
secular dates back to the Church’s encounter with the Roman Empire, and is
formulated in Pope Gelasius I’s letter to the Emperor Anastasius in 492 (Hehir
1995). The principle suggests that all human authority is rooted in God, and
that God in turn entrusts temporal authority to the State, and spiritual
sovereignty to the Church. This means there are two kinds of authority, spir-
itual and secular, and each are sovereign in their own sphere. This formula-
tion has evolved throughout the history of the Church and was reinforced by
the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1965a and b). The division of power
and all that it implies is a historical, hierarchical decree rather than an arbit-
rary distinction.
3 The Greek root of Catholic – katholikos – means universal (McBrien 1995:
242).
4 Luce Irigaray makes use of the term ‘some one thing’ to refer to woman as a
fixed category of meaning defined and exhaustively determined by some-
one else. For additional reading see Irigaray (1985a and b) and Whitford
(1991).
5 For a detailed discussion of the process of naturalization that works to depol-
iticize and obscure power relations see: Foucault (1979); Irigaray (1985a);
Hubbard (1992); Butler (1993).
6 Wom(b)an: woman defined in relation to her body, particularly her repro-
ductive capacity.
7 It is beyond the scope of this discussion to examine in any detail the andro-
centrism of the Catholic hierarchy and the corresponding systems of power.
For additional reading on the subject see: Daly (1973, 1975); Ruether (1983);
Carmody (1993).
8 Interview for doctoral thesis, November 2, 1997. See Neale (1998).
9 The term ‘body of Christ’ is theologically understood as the Church univer-
sal, or the home of all the Christian faithful on earth regardless of denomina-
tion. I employ the term ‘bodies of Christ’ to refer specifically to the various
institutional pillars within Catholicism, namely the Catholic Church, the
Holy See, the Vatican City state and the papacy.
References
Bernstein, C. and M. Politi (1996) His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History
of Our Time (New York: Doubleday).
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London:
Routledge).
Cardinale, E. (1976) The Holy See and the International Order (Gerrards Cross:
Colin Smythe).
Carmody, D. L. (1993) Responses to 101 Questions About Feminism (New York: Paul-
ist Press).
Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) (London: Geoffrey Chapman).
Catholic World Report (1993) ‘Exposing the Planners’, April, pp. 39–41.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1976) Declaration on the Question of
Women to the Ministerial Priesthood (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic
Bishops).
Daly, M. (1973) Beyond God the Father (London: The Women’s Press).
Daly, M. (1975) The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harder and Row).
Delph, Y. and K. Toner (1997) ‘First among Equals’, Conscience, XVIII(3), pp. 2–7.
Fornos, W. and H. Burette (1994) ‘From Bucharest to Cairo: Population Stabiliza-
tion Deliberations’, Popline (The Population Institute) 4, pp. 1–28.
Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. by
R. Hurley (London: Allen Lane).
Guardian (1994) ‘Protests as Vatican blocks progress at Cairo Forum’, September
8, p. 22.
Hehir, J. B. (1995) ‘Church and State’, in R. McBrien (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Cath-
olicism (New York: HarperCollins), pp. 314–16.
Hubbard, R. (1992) The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press).
Irigaray, L. (1985a) Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. by G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press).
Irigaray, L. (1985b) This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. by C. Porter with C. Burke
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Johnson, S. P. (1994) World Population – Turning the Tide. Three Decades of Progress
(Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group).
Kissling, F. and D. Shannon (1995/96) ‘Church and State at the United Nations’,
Conscience, XVI (4), pp. 11–12.
Los Angeles Times (1994) ‘Abortion Accord Unravels at Talks’, September 8, p. A1.
L’Osservatore Romano (1994) ‘All must be assured life and dignity: Archbishop
Martino stresses Church’s stance in context of Conference on Population and
Development’, September 14, English edn, pp. 7–8.
McBrien, R. (ed.) (1995) Encyclopaedia of Catholicism (New York: HarperCollins).
Neale, P. R. (1998) Constructions, Catholicism and Cairo: the Catholic Construction
of Woman, the Holy See, and the International Conference on Population and Devel-
opment (ICPD), PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
New York Times (1994) ‘As Abortion Fights Rages, Population-Plan Accord Nears’,
September 9, p. 5.
Pontifical Council for the Family (1994a) ‘Ethical and Pastoral Dimensions of
Population Trends’, Origins, August 4, pp. 174–86.
Pontifical Council for the Family (1994b) The Natural Methods for the Regulation of
Fertility: The Authentic Alternative (Ottawa: Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops).
Pope John Paul II (1981) Regarding the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern
World, Familiaris Consortio (Ottawa: Canadian Catholic Conference).
Pope John Paul II (1988) On the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of
the Marian Year, Mulieris Dignitatem (Vatican Polyglot Press).
Pope Paul VI (1974) Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Marialis Cultis (Ottawa:
Canadian Catholic Conference).
Ruether, R. R. (1983) Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston:
Beacon Press).
Schotte, J. (1984) ‘Perspectives on Population Policy’, Origins, September 13,
pp. 205–8.
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1965a) Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,
Lumen Gentium (London: Catholic Truth Society).
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1965b) Pastoral Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (London: Catholic Truth Society).
Tillard, J. (1995) ‘The Papacy’, in R. McBrien (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Catholicism
(New York: HarperCollins), pp. 953–5.
Weigel, G. (1995) ‘What Really Happened at Cairo’, http://www.ocf.org/
TheCh . . . gelWhatReallyHappen.html (downloaded February 22, 1997) (Ortho-
dox Christian Foundation).
Whitford, M. (ed.) (1991) The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
Index
Abortion 56, 114, 116–17, 130, Bourgeois rational masculinity/

183, 188–92, 195 subjectivity 3, 31–51
Absence (see also Presence) 39, 52, Braidotti, Rosi 57–8
56, 129 Bretton Woods 76–7
Absolutism 60 Britain see UK
Abstraction 1–2, 12–15, 17, 20–1, BSE 150
25–6, 31–2, 35–7, 43–8, 58, Buddhism 62
102, 121–2, 137, 156 Bulimia see Eating disorders
Actor 2, 13, 15, 17–18, 23 Bureaucracy 11, 21, 35, 44, 99
rational 2–3, 31–49 Burton, Julianne 96–7
Adams, Carol 147–8 Butler, Judith 33
Advertising 3, 5, 55, 57, 67, 85,
88–90, 108, 147 Capitalism 3, 5, 12, 18, 31–2, 35,
Agency 1, 5, 23, 59, 113–14, 118, 39, 42–3, 45–8, 77, 101, 103,
122, 127–9, 138, 156, 161–2 113, 115–16, 121–3, 125,
Aid 189–92 128–9, 143, 146, 154–5
AIDS; HIV 27, 63–5, 168, 175, 195 Caribbean Basin Initiative 105
Alienation 5, 113–14, 123–9 Childbirth 1, 19, 119–20, 122,
Americanization 4, 86 124–6, 129, 182, 195
Androcentrism 185, 190, 197 China 82, 90
Annals of Tourism Research 55–6 Chodorow, Nancy 125–6
Anorexia nervosa see Eating Church 1, 7–8, 78, 180–99
disorders Citizen/warrior 3, 34, 42
Anthropology 34, 135, 147, 154 Citizenship 17–18, 23, 59, 62,
Christian 182–3 65, 107, 163
cyborg 45 Class 6, 14, 20, 34, 41, 53, 63–5,
Asia Watch 64 67, 107, 118, 136, 143–4,
Australia 54, 65–7 146, 151, 153, 155, 159–61,
Autonomy 34–40, 43–7, 56, 168, 174–5
122–3, 175 Cold war 14
post- 77, 159
Barnet, Richard and Cavanagh, Colonialism; imperialism 3, 6–7,
John 86, 90 37–8, 49, 54–5, 62, 76, 85,
Biology 13, 39, 42–3, 46–7, 58, 109, 115, 159, 161–3
119, 151–2, 181–2, 184, neo- 109
191, 195 post- 6–7, 159, 161–2, 174–5
Birth control 183, 188–92, 195 Common sense 20–2, 25–6, 84
Boundaries, including bodily Communications 3–4, 16, 32, 44–6,
(see also Dichotomies) 3, 48, 66, 75, 81–3, 85, 89
16–26, 37–40, 43, 45–8, Communism 77
52–4, 57, 59, 61, 64, 66–7, Community 13, 18, 44, 53, 57,
75, 79, 96–7, 104, 107, 59, 94–111, 162
114, 123, 127, 195 international 65, 186
200
Index 201
Competition 35, 42–3, 81–2, Enlightenment 3, 32, 36–8, 42,

107, 135, 168 46–7, 127–8
Computers 16, 48, 81–3, 87, 89 Epistemology 31–2, 42–5, 47–8
Conflict (see also War) 59 Erasure 5, 52, 97, 113–14, 118–23,
resolution 11 125–9, 155
Consumerism 39, 55–6, 63, 82–9, Essentialism 32–3, 58, 181–2
120, 128, 135–6, 140, 145, Ethics 61, 112–13, 116–18,
149–50, 153–5 188, 191–2
Consumption 1, 3–6, 55–7, 75–93, Ethnocentrism 31, 36
118, 135–58 Eugenics 5, 115–16, 130
Contraception see Birth control European Community;
Cybernetics 45 European Union 17, 77,
cyborg 45, 127–9 79, 140–2
Cyberspace see Spatiality Exclusion 8, 31, 35–7, 45, 47, 56,
185, 195
Darwin, Charles; Exploitation 53, 60–1, 63–7, 99,
Darwinism 42–3 113, 128
Debt 12, 53
Defence 14, 59 Family 4–5, 7, 19, 35–6, 55, 57,
Deibert, Ronald 44–5 62–5, 84–5, 94–111, 121,
Deregulation 18, 81 159–79, 180–99
Desire 22–3, 35–6, 39–40, 47, 49, Family planning see Birth
52–3, 59–60, 85, 126, 156 control
Development 53, 62, 80, 84, Fantasy 3, 33, 35, 38–40, 46–8,
187, 190 55, 86, 89, 94–7, 123
Dichotomies; dualisms; Fascism 115
oppositions 2, 13–15, Fashion 89, 153
15, 31–53, 63, 77, 88, Femininity 2, 13, 19, 34, 39–41,
121, 128, 162 55, 67, 120–1, 125–7, 182
inside/outside 35–9, 43, hyper- 62
48, 52, 77, 122, 126 Feminism (see also Liberalism)
Discourse 7, 19–27, 31–51, 56, 19–21, 23–6, 31–71, 112–31,
58, 60–1, 64, 75, 85, 90, 109, 161, 177, 180–99
121, 129, 137–8, 150, 159–63, cyber- 45–6
165, 167, 172, 175, 183–4, Fetus 5, 38, 112–31
188–9, 191–2 Film 57, 96–7, 112–13, 120,
Disney 4–5, 76, 86–8, 91, 94–111 125, 129
Distribution 6, 31, 136, Finance 17–18, 76–82, 99–101
138–9, 154 financial markets 17, 76–9,
Domestic workers (see also 81–2
Migration) 24–5, 53, 59 financial services 4, 82
Dualisms see Dichotomies First World War 76
Florida 94–111
Eating disorders 57, 152–3 Food 1, 5–6, 31, 86–7, 135–58
Emotion 35–42, 47, 53, 120, Foreign direct investment see
125, 149, 162 Investment
Empowerment 113, 115, 189, 196 Foreign exchange 53, 76
End Child Prostitution in Asian Foreign policy 94–111
Tourism (ECPAT) 64–5 Foreign policy analysis 11
202 Index
Foucault, Michel 6–7, 21–3, 33, imagineered sense of 94

57, 126, 161–2, 174, 176, use value of 99, 107–9
182–3, 197 Hollywood 86, 91, 96, 120
Fukuyama, Francis 75, 77–8, Homosexuality 57, 59, 183, 189,
80, 90 191, 195
Hong Kong 24–5, 82, 90
Game theory 43
Gandhi, Mahatma 148 Identity (see also Subjectivity)
Gaze 5, 55–7, 114–115, 121–2 2–3, 5–8, 13–14, 19, 23,
Gender; gender analysis 2–3, 7, 31–71, 84–5, 126, 135–9,
13–71, 76, 84–5, 108–10, 150–1, 155–6, 161–2, 180,
112–31, 138, 147, 151, 184–5, 197
155, 159–99 state 15–18, 23, 43–4, 48
General Agreement on Tariffs and Ideology 12, 34, 55–6, 113,
Trade 76, 80 115–16, 118–19, 122, 128
Genetics 45–6, 118, 129–30 of consumption 4, 55–6, 84–90
Geography 16–17, 58–9, 77, of meat 6, 138, 144–5, 147–56
102, 110 Image 33, 42–3, 55, 57, 64, 66,
Giddens, Anthony 16–17 85, 97, 112–27, 137, 143,
Global political economy; 147–8, 152–3, 156, 185, 195
International political Imperialism see Colonialism
economy 1–4, 11–31, 37, Individualism 31, 35, 44, 117,
42–3, 46–7, 52–3, 55–6, 154, 190
58–9, 61, 63–5, 75–93, competitive 35
137–8, 155 Industrial revolution 35
Global/local 2, 16–26, 53–4, 159, Industrialization 128, 145–7,
162, 175 152–6
Globalization 2–4, 15–26, 75–93, Inside/outside see Dichotomies
137–8 Instrumentalism 35, 40, 47–8
Gold standard 77 Intellectual property
Good Neighbour Policy 4–5, (rights) 79–80
96–109 International Conference
Gramscian analysis 12, 18, 90 on Population and
Grenada 105 Development 7–8, 180–99
Grosz, Elizabeth 58–60 International history see History
International Monetary
Haiti 104, 106, 110 Fund 53, 76
Haraway, Donna 45–6, 49, 127 International Planned Parenthood
Hegemonic masculinity 2–3, Federation 189
31–51 International political economy
Hegemony see Global political economy
liberal 77 International relations 1–2, 4,
of meat-eating 151 11–15, 17, 23, 25, 43, 46–7,
US 3, 75–93 52, 55, 58–9, 61–2, 68, 76–7,
High politics 11–12 80, 89
HIV see AIDS Internationalization 6, 76,
History; international history 90, 139–42
3, 11–12, 20, 32, 34, 57, 76–8 Internet 16, 46, 66–7, 89,
end of 75, 77–8 91, 109
Index 203
Intervention; nonintervention Materiality 4, 21–2, 58, 75, 81–3

113, 124 Meatology see Ideology
US 4, 5, 98–109 Mechanization 6, 146
Invasion 5, 43, 113–18, 120, Media; mass media (see also
122, 125–9 Print) 62, 81, 85–6, 91,
by US 4, 105–6, 110 114, 189
Investment 76, 86, 91 Medicine; medical practice 5,
foreign direct 3, 79–80 21–2, 112–31, 140, 153
Irigaray, Luce 185, 197 Migration (see also Mail-order
brides) 20, 25, 53, 76
Japan (see also Triad) 3, 54, 75, immigration 43
77, 79, 140, 142 migrant sex workers/
Japanese Association of prostitutes 60–6
Women 61 Militarism; the military 3, 14,
34, 53–4, 59, 62, 64,
Koval, Ramona 118 106, 155
Misogyny 41, 49
Latin America 77 Mitchell, Juliet 125–6
US policy towards 4–5, 96–109 Modernity 3, 7, 31–51, 127,
Legitimacy 17, 21, 42, 57, 84, 163, 174
104–5, 109, 148, 156, 167, post- 3, 32, 45–6
172, 177 Modernization 80, 82, 84, 146–7
Leisure 4, 54–6, 76, 82, 87–9, 154 Morality 53–4, 60–1, 64–5, 95,
entertainment 4, 54, 66, 101, 108, 151, 188,
76, 87–9 193–4, 197
Level of analysis 23 Motherhood 5, 7–8, 38, 54–5,
Liberalism 12, 35–6, 38, 46–7, 60, 85, 112–31, 165, 167, 173,
64, 151 181–5, 195
democracies 116 Music 86, 91
economic 76
liberal feminists 32 Nation-state see State
liberal hegemony see Hegemony National interest 18, 62
liberal political economy 78 Nationalism 55, 59, 61, 155
neo- 13 Neoliberalism see Liberalism
Liberalization 18, 53, 138 Neorealism 13, 43–4
Lifestyle 84–8, 107–8, 136, 169, 190 Nonintervention see
Intervention
Mail-order brides 67 North American Free Trade
Manufacturing 82–3 Association 17
Marginalization 36 North–South relations 54, 88–9,
Market see State 137, 143–4, 188
Marketing 4, 75–6, 83–5, 88–9, Nutrition 118, 135–6, 143, 145,
136, 141, 147, 152, 154 148, 151–3, 155–6
Marxism 12, 126
Masculinism 2–3, 13–14, 23–6, Objectivity 39, 56, 183
60, 119, 121–2, 128 Ontology 122, 127
Asian 62 Oppositions see Dichotomies
masculinity (see also Bourgeois) Oppression 20, 56, 60–1
13, 52, 57, 121, 125, 150 Orientalism 3, 55
204 Index
Paedophilia 55, 63–6 Public/private 2, 14–20, 22–6,

Papacy see Church 35–48, 53–6, 59, 81–2,
Paternalism 35, 54–5, 109, 114 84–5, 186
Patriarchy 2, 5, 19, 25, 34–5,
42, 59, 108, 113–16, 122–3, Race 3, 7, 14, 20, 34, 37, 53–4,
125–7, 129, 147–8, 161, 58, 60–8, 116, 118, 129,
163, 174, 176 148, 160–1
Pax Americana 76 Racism 14, 37, 49, 54, 65–6,
Pax Britannica 76 115–16, 121
Philippines (see also Domestic Rape 56, 59, 64
Workers) 54 Rational actor see Actor
Philosophy 36–7, 42 Rationality (see also Actor) 37,
Pope see Church 39–42, 48, 80, 95, 124–5
Population control 7–8, 180–99 and consumption 87–90
Pornography 64, 66 corporate rationalization 141,
Positivism 13, 144 154, 184
Post-structuralism Realism (see also
feminist approaches 33 Neorealism) 13, 27
Postcolonialism see Colonialism Regimes 13, 182–3
Postmodernity; postmodernism 3, Regionalism 77
32, 45 Representation 2–5, 37–8, 52–5,
Poverty 55, 61–4, 67, 115, 122 58–9, 61–5, 67, 86, 125,
Power 135, 180–98
power/knowledge (see also Reproduction (see also Childbirth;
Foucault) 1–2, 6, 11–30, Pregnancy; Technology) 23,
33, 78–82, 113–14, 122, 54, 190–2, 196
128, 182, 153, 161–2 social 2, 19
social relations of 2, 12–15, 20, and Disney 97, 112–31
23–6, 57, 115, 160–2 Resistance 7, 21, 64, 138, 143,
structural 12, 18–19, 21, 27, 156, 159–79
67, 75, 78, 80–2, Rights 7, 17, 59–60, 64–5, 99,
159, 162 102, 109, 121, 128, 155,
Pregnancy 1, 19, 38, 112–31, 182 163–7, 170–5
Presence (see also Absence) 20, child 66
31–2, 43, 56, 62, 129 fetal 5, 120–2
visual 119 intellectual property 79–80
Print 35, 46 liberal 60
Private/public (see Public/private) patriarchal 35, 53
Privatization 18–19, 81 Risk 34–5, 41, 48, 126, 147,
Progress 36, 42, 115–16, 153–4 167, 195
ideology of 84 Roman Catholicism see Church
Propaganda 48, 96–7, 192 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 4,
Prostitute Rights Organization for 96–106, 110
Sex Workers 65 Russia; Soviet Union 106, 140
Prostitution; sex work (see also
Migration) 52–71, 119 Sassen, Saskia 17
Psychoanalysis 60, 126 Science (see also Medicine) 21–2,
Psychology 39, 42 35–6, 39, 42–8, 56, 78, 80, 90,
Public goods 18–20 136, 182–3
Index 205
Second World War 39, 76, Taboo 5, 22, 38, 40, 42, 136,
139, 141–2 138, 155
Security 78–9, 100, 104, 106 Technology 1–6, 16, 19, 21–2,
Seidler, Victor 40–1 42–8, 66–7, 73–131, 138,
Self see Subjectivity 140–1, 144–7, 154–5
Service economy, industry 4, reproductive 112–31, 183, 191
75–6, 82–4, 89 Television 85–6
Sex; sexuality; sexual relations Temporality see Spatiality
(see also Prostitution; Territorialism 13, 15–16, 43, 81,
Homosexuality) 3, 8, 95, 98–9, 108
13–14, 22–6, 32–4, 37–8, Terry, Jennifer 118
40–1, 49, 52–71, 162, Thailand 54, 62, 64–5
166, 170–2, 181–5, Theme park see Disney
187–92, 194–6 Time/space see Spatiality
virtual 46 Tourism 4, 76, 82, 87–9, 53
Sex tourism see Tourism sex 3, 52–71
Sexism 14, 41, 54, 61, 115, 121 Transnational corporations 3, 6,
Sexual harassment 56 15, 53, 75, 78–83, 86–7,
Slavery 54, 64, 76 90–1, 141
Social contract 36 Triad (US, Europe and Japan) 3, 75,
Sovereignty, state and 77, 79–80, 82
individual 15, 17, Truong, Thanh-Dam 53–4, 61
43–5, 47, 67, 119, 197 Twigg, J. 148–50
spiritual 186, 193–4, 197
Spatiality; temporality; UK 79
time/space 2, 14–26, United Nations 7, 65, 76, 180–1,
35, 44, 56, 77, 81, 85, 184–7, 189–90, 193, 196
87, 95, 99–102, 107–9, Development Programme 13
137, 155–6 Universalism 13, 15, 48, 90
cyberspace 67 Urbanization 35, 143
Starvation 12 US; America (see also Hegemony;
State (see also Identity) 2–3, 5, Intervention; Invasion;
11–26, 35, 43–5, 47–8, 53–5, Latin America; Triad) 54,
57, 59–68, 75–93, 115–18, 77–80, 140–3, 146, 151,
122–3, 126, 129 189, 192–3
and market 2, 5, 14, 16–18, cultural influence 4, 76, 86–90
22, 24–6, 75–93, 137 Utilitarianism 35–6
regulation 35
state-centrism 15, 27 Value/meaning 4, 96–9, 108
Stereotyping 55, 66, 152 Vatican see Church
Strange, Susan 3, 75, 78–80 Vegetarianism 6, 138, 150–1,
Subjectivity; self (see also 154, 156
Bourgeois) 2, 21–2, Violence 52–3, 56, 64,
31–2, 56–8, 60, 67, 109, 121, 156
121, 125–9, 135, 138, 156, gendered division of 14, 41,
161–2, 176, 182, 184–5 60, 64, 67, 113, 147
Surveillance 112–31, 183 Virginity 8, 181–4, 195
Symbolism 1–5, 14, 16, 73–131, Virtual reality, space 16, 82, 109
148–9, 152, 166, 170 virtual consumption 87
206 Index
War (see also Cold war; First and Westernization see

Second World Wars) 11, 14, Americanization
53, 59, 89, 100, 102–3, 147 World Bank 53, 76
Wealth 6, 53–4, 78–9, 82, 143–4, World Trade
152, 168, 176, 188 Organization 15, 80

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International Political Economy Series

General Editor: Timothy M. Shaw, Professor of Political Science and

International Political Economy Series

First published in the United States of America 2000 by

List of Tables vii

Notes on the Contributors viii

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations x

Part I Embodied Political Economy

2 Disembodiment, Embodiment and the Construction

3 Writing the Body: Transnational Sex 52

Part II Technologies, Symbolism and Representation

5 Imagineering Value: Good Neighbourliness in an

6 Missing Mother? Reproductive Technologies into the

Part III Embodied Identities

8 The Widow Refuses: Embodied Practices and Negotiations

9 Population, Politics and the Pope: Universal Agendas and

7.1 World meat production annual growth (percentages) 139

Palena R. Neale is Sustainability Officer, International Planned Parent-

Jane L. Parpart is Professor of International Development Studies,

Cynthia Weber is Chair of International Studies and Director of the

Marc Williams is Professor of International Relations at the University

University of Sussex, and the School of Advanced International Studies,

Gillian Youngs is Lecturer at the Centre for Mass Communication

Marysia Zalewski is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s

AIC advanced industrial country

This volume represents a collection of diverse perspectives on the prob-

Variations on the theme of power

1. Dominant knowledge structures including in IR and IPE but also of

3. Identity in the context of dominant definitions of gendered sub-

Many of the chapters build explicitly on the arguments of the grow-

I. Embodied Political Economy

Embodied political economy

‘rational actor model’ through which mainstream IPE offers a ‘depiction

Technologies, symbolism and representation

The discussion then moves to technology and materiality in the con-

an idealized notion of familial exchange which fuels the rhetoric of Cel-

The chapter begins by exploring the changing structure of meat pro-

resistance but argues that it must be extended to examine the ways in

Neale explains. The figure of the Blessed Mary (‘virgin–mother–spouse’)

A student’s starting point

This chapter explores overlapping concerns rooted in my experience of

‘normative’ approaches. 2 The overriding concern in IR with interna-

Gender analysis and social relations of power

Power may be represented, as realism claims, through possession of

The feminist reconstruction of theory shifts from ‘adding women’ to

The concept of gender grounds analysis in a number of important

political economy, a predominant sense that aspects of our embodied

War has never been an exclusively male enterprise. It depends signi-

These perspectives signal awareness of the intersections of gender

Spatiality and globalization

Complex approaches to social space are inherent in an embodied sense

across indefinite spans of time-space’. Such time/space perspectives

Changing relationships between political and economic spaces, and

state level, are transforming, implicitly and explicitly. Gramscian cri-

The question of changing relationships between public and private has

. . . globalization entails the undermining of the public character of pub-

Gender perspectives on public and private go beyond the traditional

possibilities that such issues impact on public/private social and spatial

. . . the spatially dynamic quality of multiple linkages among public

Globalization is disrupting and restructuring public/private linkages

frameworks for understanding, whereas embodied approaches are

Discourse, power and the disappearing body