Solidarity across borders

Globalized social justice directly speaks to my research that  is questioning the ethics of globalization. Similarly to Nancy Fraser who critiques the effects of globalization I have provided concrete material from oral histories that illuminate those individual that have been made invisible by globalization. Nancy Fraser provides a three dimensional approach to critically think about global justice.  The rise of  globalized capitalism  and  the opening of borders  for transnational corporations and large institutional investors necessitates the urgency to think about justice beyond the nation state.  Globalization has resulted in the misrepresentation (Nancy def) of people of color all over the world. It continues to politically, economically, and socially exclude them.  Nancy Fraser critiques theories  of “misframing and  meta-political misrepresentation stating that it discloses core injustices overlooked by standard theories.  She states to focuse “not only on the ‘what’ of justice, but also on the ‘who’ and the ‘how’, it enables us to grasp the question of the frame as the central question of justice in a globalizing world”.

In my research I attempting to bring out the affects globalization has had on women of color from Mexico working in the Maquiladoras  and in domestic work in San diego. What have been the push and pull factors  that have fueled their migration to the North. I chose  Chandra  Mohanty  piece to add to the syllabus because it is the framework that has grounded my research. It has provided  a lens to analyze the testimonies  I have gathered for my research. Chandra Monhanty critiques Western Feminism as a universalizing patriarchal framework that reproduces the same ideals as colonial domination. She raises an urgency in establishing an ethical analytical lens that questions capitalism, moves away from misleading ideological binarisms and cultural relativist ideologies. Mohanty introduces  the anticapitalist transnational feminist methodology that is anchored in challenging colonial tools of subjugation such as patriarchy and  racism. An anti-capitalist transnational feminist practice is attentive to the micropolitics of context, subjectivity, and struggle and argues for a grounded, particularized analyses linked with larger, even global, economic and political frameworks ( Mohanty 223). . Mohanty draws on Arif Dirliks’s notion of place “place consciousness” to centralized the struggles of marginalized communities. In my research I am attempting to centralized  the experiences of my interlocuters in order to understand how global forces affect the local.

Marx and Gramsci

Karl Marx's  critique on idealism and abstract concepts on social formation was very enlightening.  I am really invested on situated bodily knowledge production. I feel that society and academia have privileged the mind over the body, legitimizing knowledge that comes from institutions that exclude knowledge produced by embodied experiences. Karl  Marx's last theses "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point  however is to change it", really resonates with my research project and my  ultimate goal. In my research I plan to document the lived experiences of Maquiladora workers in Tijuna. I believe that stories, oral histories, narratives are powerful culture forms that privilege knowledge from the body, enables understanding of individual subjectivity and connects  larger historical,  political, economic, and social forces that effect these individual experiences. I believe these narratives can produce ways to think about the world differently and deconstruct dominant U.S narratives of globalization. Karl Marx highlights the importance of  looking at historical and political conditions that produce ideologies.Women in the maquiladora's exist in the intersection of many categories and ideologies that have gendered and raciaized their bodies and subjugated them to exclusion and violence. The historical process of how ideologies of race, gender, and class were constructed must not be overlooked nor one signifier be privilege  from the other because they all work in conjunction with each other and produce material consequences. Therefore, Gramsci moves away from Marx's reductionist way of analysis and opens up a space to think about various social forces that have produced and maintained this global expansion of capitalism. Gramsci highlights how capitalism functions through differentiation and difference in the labor sector composed of racialized and gendered bodies. It is through ideology  and historical processes that exploitation and stratification of class are produced and maintained.