Confronting State, Capital and Patriarchy brings together documentation of women's struggles in the process of industrialisation, within and outside traditional workers' organizations. With contributions from researchers and activists particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the volume gives a broad display of both the constraints, and the ingenuity and determination with which women workers strive to improve their situation. Through both theory and rich empirical detail, the volume demonstrates the integral linkages between the home, workplace, and the state and international arenas, and between activists and academe in response to technological and industrial restructuring.

This book presents a variety of feminist perspectives on human security under globalisation. Looking at gender as a multifaceted power domain, and human security as a policy framework, it explores the configuration of the state, power/knowledge systems and the implications for people living with deprivation and social exclusion. It offers new forms of analysis to expose the gendered character of global transformation and the explicit and implicit threats to human security in different places. The contributors explore the gendered implications of transnational processes such as conflict, international migration, human trafficking, the changing boundaries of work and care, environmental degradation, neo-conservatism and body politics. They challenge conventional approaches to politics and economics and suggest alternative ways of framing strategies and policies. A key thematic area concerns the intersection between gender - as a domain of power - and human security as a new policy framework. The contributions in this book present an integration of a feminist materialist analysis of gender relations with a feminist post-modern approach to gender representation and cultural construction. A combination of the two approaches links culture with politics and economics, and integrates analysis of class, ethnicity and other dimensions of gender identity.