Ferguson, Ann, Professor

By Stine Adrian on 28 Aug | 0 comments

Ann Ferguson is Professor emerita of Philosophy and Women's Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

GEXCEL PROJECT
Global Gender Solidarity and a Feminist Paradigm of Justice

My project involves the development of a new feminist paradigm for global justice that includes several components. First is a new analysis of the concept of solidarity as it applies to the idea of feminist solidarity.  I argue that, given social differences between women which create unjust domination and oppression relations (based on race/ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality and nationality), we must develop a materialist feminist analysis of global feminist politics based around both a historical and intersectional feminist analysis of what kind of feminist coalitions are possible in the present period, given capitalist corporate globalization and previous national and regional inequalities based on European colonialism.

Second, I claim that the time is ripe for a new progressive feminist Solidarity paradigm of justice that supercedes the classical liberal debates between Libertarian (Neo-Liberal) and Welfare State Paradigms of Justice.  I will outline the anti-globalization economic and political networks coming into existence, as evidenced by networks of worker-owned cooperatives, labor unions, fair trade commitments, squatter and other land reform movements. Such movements are creating the material conditions in which North-South women’s coalition movements, based not on essentialist  but on transformational identities, can tackle such issues as reproductive rights, LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual) rights, violence against women, forced sex-trafficking, environmental justice, unjust global care chains involving women’s caring labor, and the feminization of poverty.

After outlining my general line of thought above, I will also engage in case studies of two of the above issues as they are becoming global feminist issues: reproductive rights and LGBT rights.  It will be seen that a materialist intersectional feminist analysis will require negotiating individual rights vs. group rights to cultural self-determination on these issues, and will also require situating rights to sexual autonomy in economic and racial justice.  The Solidarity paradigm of Justice suggests that economic alternatives to neo-liberal corporate globalization, not simply abstract proclamations of universal sexual rights or national state legal rights, are a pre-condition for all women and LGBT individuals to be able to exercise such rights in any secure fashion.