Esther Ngan-ling Chow - Böcker

In an increasingly globalized world of collapsing economic borders and extending formal political and legal equality rights, active citizenship has the potential to expand as well as deepen. At the same time, with the rise of neo-liberalism, welfare state retrenchment, decline of state employment, re-privatization and the rising gap between rich and poor, the economic, social and political citizenship rights of certain categories of people are increasingly curtailed. This book examines the complexity of citizenship in historical and contemporary contexts. It draws on empirical research from a range of countries, contexts and approaches in addressing women and citizenship in a global/local world and covers a selection of diverse issues, both present and past, to include immigration, ethnicity, class, nationality, political and economic participation, institutions and the private and public spheres. This rich collection informs our understanding of the pitfalls and possibilities for women in the persistence and changes within the contours of citizenship.

Transforming Gender and Development in East Asia brings together a collection of original essays from top scholars in the United States and Asia to explore the centrality of gender in the process of economic development in East Asia. Contributors demonstrate through ethnography, personal narratives, field observation, and in-depth interviews the essential parts women have played in the national growth, economic restructuring, and industrialization of East Asian countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China.

Transforming Gender and Development in East Asia brings together a collection of original essays from top scholars in the United States and Asia to explore the centrality of gender in the process of economic development in East Asia. Contributors demonstrate through ethnography, personal narratives, field observation, and in-depth interviews the essential parts women have played in the national growth, economic restructuring, and industrialization of East Asian countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China.

In an increasingly globalized world of collapsing economic borders and extending formal political and legal equality rights, active citizenship has the potential to expand as well as deepen. At the same time, with the rise of neo-liberalism, welfare state retrenchment, decline of state employment, re-privatization and the rising gap between rich and poor, the economic, social and political citizenship rights of certain categories of people are increasingly curtailed. This book examines the complexity of citizenship in historical and contemporary contexts. It draws on empirical research from a range of countries, contexts and approaches in addressing women and citizenship in a global/local world and covers a selection of diverse issues, both present and past, to include immigration, ethnicity, class, nationality, political and economic participation, institutions and the private and public spheres. This rich collection informs our understanding of the pitfalls and possibilities for women in the persistence and changes within the contours of citizenship.

The authors highlight how structural circumstances in countries with various degrees of industrialization are associated with specific policies. The analyses of women's experiences reveal the variety of ways in which private patriarchy in families combines with public patriarchy in economies and states to create a system of domination which subordinates women. The authors detail how gender is constructed under specific political, economic, and cultural circumstances, and seek to understand how state policies with differing sensitivities to women's issues have produced mixed outcomes for women and their families in the process of economic development.

The papers in this volume were selected and revised from among those presented at the conference "Gender and Social Transformation: Global, Transnational, and Local Realities and Perspectives", Beijing, China in 2009. Through case studies and interview data from across the globe we see how intersectionality and inequality are contextualized shaping women's agencies, gender relations, identity, the politics of belonging, power structures, institutional arrangements, and empowerment (self and/or collective) in local communities and cultures influenced by transnational and global networks and processes. Those who experience inequality, the politics of exclusion and social injustice by virtue of gender, ethnicity and/or class and other differences are the most vulnerable in the face of new adversities, including those that occur in response to globalization. Broader theoretical and methodological contexts for these nation- and region-specific studies are provided in essays by leading gender theorists. Divisions of labor, migration, war and peace-building are among the specific topics addressed in papers from China, India, Israel, Korea, Germany, Australia, Turkey and the United States.