The Global and the Intimate

Sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors establish new paths in the study of intimacy and globalization, challenging globalization's grand narratives and their representation of women as either victims of forced migration or local actors of limited influence. These essays intervene in grand narratives of global relations by focusing on the specific, the quotidian, the affective, and the eccentric. They scrutinize the frames we use to recognize and organize intimacy and analyze the global forces that undergird personal experience and exchange. Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, contributors extend a long-standing feminist tradition of challenging gender-based oppositions by upending hierarchies of space and scale. By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, they forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange. This pairing encourages more personal modes of writing and engagement with the globalization debate and fashions a sense of justice that responds more thoroughly to the specificity of time, place, and feeling.