Gender, media, and trans/national spaces

As local worlds are inserted into larger social and economic configurations, gender issues gain new forms of visibility and invisibility. Feminist interventions into these conditions entail the navigation of multiple publics, media imaginaries, and geographies, all of which are embedded within dispersed and shifting relations of power. However, these critical mappings of the gender politics are fraught with challenges. First of all, for the most part, discussions of globalization simply bypass the subject of gender (Basu et al. 2001). Instead of developing inclusive perspectives, the tendency is to either normalize the status quo or perpetuate binary logics of differentiation. This simplification, as Scott notes, gives “schematic coherence to the messy entanglements of local, national, regional and international politics” (2002: 5). Yet these developments and perspectives are the very reason to rethink the ways in which questions of gender and sexuality are currently contested within global assemblages and their histories. The convergence of the neoliberal economy, commodity flows, and the global media apparatus poses specific types of asymmetries that warrant the attention of scholars of media and gender. In this chapter, I elaborate on some key issues that need to be considered for a nuanced transnational mapping of the politics of gender and mediated environments.