Place through the Body

Show description

For the left, the question is, how might we challenge the dominant script of globalization and the victim role it ascribes to workers and communities in both “first” and “third” worlds? To break from the victim role prescribed for her in the rape script, Marcus suggests, a woman might change the script, use speech in unexpected ways, “resist self-defeating notions of polite feminine speech as well as develop physical self- 18 GIBSON-GRAHAM defence tactics” (1992:389). She might remember that an erection is fragile and quite temporal, that men’s testicles are certainly no stronger than women’s knees, that a rapist confronted with a wisecracking, scolding, and bossy woman may lose his grip on his power to rape; a rapist responded to with fear may feel his power consolidated.

E. e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another…. There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production. (Marx 1973:539–40) The world market is the site of economic reproduction of the global capital relation, as well as of the political organization of hegemony. An opening to the world market is thus synonymous with integration into the global process of economic reproduction and a historically determined system of hegemony.

The loss of labor from source countries is usually portrayed as yet another outcome of the penetration of capitalism, via a process in which “the market” or “commodification” has destroyed the traditional, often agricultural, economy and forced people into proletarianization. When incorporated into a script of globalization, the extraordinary economic diversity of immigrant economies in “host” countries is subsumed to, or depicted as an “enclave” within, the capitalist totality, located on a trajectory of homogenization or synthesis with the host society.