Gender Justice Citizenship And Development PDF Download

How to measure justice is a focus of both Nancy Fraser's monograph, Scales of Justice: Reimaging Political Space in a Globalizing World and Linda C. McClain and Joanna L. Grossman's edited collection, Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship. While both books explore the broad theme of justice and citizenship in a globalizing world, their approaches and levels of analysis differ. Fraser's approach is more general. It is a work of normative political theory and critical social theory. The preoccupation of her elegant analysis is the heterogeneity of justice claims, with which she also describes the incommensurability of different idioms of justice, as well as the boundaries of justice in a globalizing world. Although gender justice is not the specific focus of this book, Fraser uses the trajectory of the second-wave feminist movement in the United States as a case study to “deploy” the concepts she has developed to understand justice claims in the con- temporary conjuncture. By contrast, McClain and Grossman focus specifically on gender equality, and they utilize the concept of citizenship because it is the common language for expressing aspirations to democratic and egalitarian ideals of inclusion, participation, and civic membership. This book is both more specific and eclectic than Fraser's. It focuses on citizenship as the lens for evaluating whether women have achieved substantive equality and, as a whole, explores the constitutional, political, social, sexual and reproductive, and global dimensions of citizenship. The goal of my review is not to provide a comprehensive assessment of the two books. Instead, I focus on how they join issue in order to evaluate their respective contributions to the question of gender equality in a globalizing world. To this end, I briefly sketch Fraser's overall argument, highlighting several of the concepts she uses. I then concentrate on her discussion of second-wave feminism as a bridge to my discussion of McClain and Grossman's collection. I will begin my discussion of their book by focusing on the introductory chapter, which presents the overarching themes of the collection, and I will concentrate on the fifth part of the book, which is composed of the essays that deal with global citizenship.