The Eighteenth Blaine Sloan Lecture on International Law
The Dean and Faculty of Pace Law School
Cordially invite you to
The Eighteenth Blaine Sloan Lecture on
International Law
Presented by
Professor Barbara Stark
The University of Tennessee College of Law
Fulbright Senior Specialist
Women and Globalization: 'A World of Change.'
Thursday, April 15, 2004
4:00 P.M.
The Classroom Building Room 101
Pace Law School
78 North Broadway
White Plains, New York
A reception with Professor Stark will be held
following the lecture.
Synopsis of Professor Barbara Stark’s Lecture
'Globalization' refers to the free flow of
capital through the removal of trade barriers between states, as
well as to the accompanying cultural exchanges and transformations.
The relationship between the globalization of capital and markets on
the one hand, and the globalization of culture on the other, is
obviously complex. Women are an unendingly diverse group, moreover,
and their interactions with globalization are similarly diverse.
While a recent study by economists at the International Center for
Research on Women concludes that "women have generally
benefited from improvements in the world economy," the experts
in another Symposium describe "the overall negative effects of
globalization on women." Everyone agrees, however, that
globalization affects men and women differently, in part because of
their very different roles in most cultures and because men, in
general, have much higher incomes and much greater access to
capital. For many women, globalization has been a mixed blessing,
and for some it has been a disaster.
But for good or ill, globalization is sweeping
growing numbers of women into the public sphere of politics and of
the market. In her poem A Change of World, Adrienne Rich describes a
radical global change in the deliberately inconsequential ─
and gendered ─ terms of ‘fashion’. In the poem, however,
‘fashion’ transforms mountains and oceans more venerable than
patriarchy itself. Historically inconsequential women, similarly,
are shaping globalization ─ by creating new family forms and
new patterns of labor, and by their resistance ─ even as
globalization transforms their lives. By drawing on both the
rhetoric of social change and the metaphor of geological time, Rich
juxtaposes hopeful energy and ironic detachment to describe the ‘change
of world’ she anticipated in 1952. This paper draws on both the
hopeful energy of human rights and the ironic detachment of
postmodern theory to explain how the emergence of women into the
public sphere constitutes a ‘change of world’ with far-reaching
implications.
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