Until recently, International Relations (IR) paid remarkably little attention to identities, including its own. IR called up the nation-state, while displaying very little interest in either nation or state, or the meaning(s) of the hyphen in between. Assuming state-nations removed from view the contested politics of identity and boundary making within the state. This article seeks to make these politics visible. It considers, first, why IR might have missed nationalism, and then reviews different conceptions of nation. It analyses the gendered and global politics of nationalism, and concludes with the prospect and possibility of the nation in new transnational times.
Gendered labour migration is a crucial aspect, and practice, of globalisation. This article identifies contemporary people flows, 2 and critiques the usual invisibility of migration in international relations (IR) literature, an invisibility partly due to the discipline's emphasis on the nation-state, a coincidence of territory, population, authority and identity. The increasing feminisation of many labour migrant flows can be used to contextualise a more specific focus on the international domestic labour trade from poorer South and Southeast Asian states. This trade provides revealing insights into globalisation at the intersections of culture, identity, gender, sex, and work. The new international visibility of gender issues, including women's rights as labour migrants, needs attention within IR to further the discipline's understanding of the changing international division of labour and of global gender issues.
Globalisation and GenderJane Jenson argues that "struggles over maps, names and stories about the past [and the present] are a crucial aspect of globalization". 3 How we understand what the world is, and how it got to be like this, provide different narratives of globalisation. Clearly, globalisation is a very different process for a frequent flying, faxing, net-surfing academic than for a foreign domestic worker in Saudi Arabia or an illegal immigrant in LA. It is necessary, then, to ask whose experiences of globalisation count as evidence and are used to build theory in IR.1. This article builds upon my previous work on the international political economy of sex, including
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