Assignment 12: Sassen, “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering”
In Sasika Sassen’s “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering”, the author argues about “information outputs” that are missing from today’s dominant global economy. She states that media and policies surrounding the global economy in respect to women suggest that the highly educated professional is the only driving factor of the global workforce. She continues to argue that the contribution and marginalization of immigrant women are key factors to the growth of the global economy but usually go unnoticed in today’s world. In other words, the recognition of hypermobility and capital gain in the world economy is credited to the high wage, highly educated worker, and does not consider the low wage, marginalized immigrant woman worker. The article argues that the overlooked immigrant woman worker is one of the major factors in the gains of the global market and should be recognized as a driving force.
Sassen continues to argue that the global economy’s growth was dependent on producing a labor force of low wage women workers which focused on “first world” women’s domestic roles. Some of these domestic roles included industries such as nannies, maids, nurses and prostitution. The author argues that global cities in the U.S. and across the world contributed to the process of creating these industries and not recognizing the growth in global capital because of them. As these specific roles were being created for capital, the demand for these industries were on high and became highly profitable. These methods are seen across the world but are often not recognized as part of the dominant factor of the global economy.
When we tend to look at how the creation of a labor force happens in our global markets, in my opinion, one thing is clear: the exploitation of specific groups is a constant factor on how to gain capital. I think of how the era of slavery in the U.S. used African Americans as the driving force to its economy and profited heavily on the work of slaves. In this article, we tend to see amazing similarities on how lowly paid women workers and immigrants are exploited in given service areas to help global economies get richer and bigger. The hardest part to understand is that women and immigrants in these industrialized complexes are contained in a system that does not given them an opportunity to grow and build wealth as the ones who exploit them. They are continuously marginalized, discriminated and exploited for the almighty dollar and not recognized as the major element of global economic growth. In order to begin a system to deal with this issue, we must begin to expose the conversation and demand opportunities of equity amongst all. We must look at global cities where these systematic practices and policies exploit women and immigrants, and construct definitive action and conversations to promote change.
