GLOBAL AND LOCAL GENDER IDENTITIES AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY
GLOBAL AND LOCAL GENDER IDENTITIES AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY

Summary/Abstract: This paper is meant to show that the traditional conceptions developed in order to study gender global identity form a platform useful to analyze the possibilities of new postnational local identities. At the global level, the first approach to be taken into account is essentialism. Passing to the local level we may find gender identities, according to which identity is given by social attributions that govern a category implying a structural commonality (social class, ethnicity). Globalization fundamentally transforms the relationship between the places where we live and our gender experiences and cultural identities. A second approach to local identity is constructivism, whose homologue at the global level is social constructivism: identities are built, created and rebuilt, rather than being biologically, culturally or structurally pre-ordinate. According to a pragmatic notion, global identity is the product of the relationship between social actors deeply rooted in the concrete experiences. Another view is a model of narrative identity that considers the gendered structure as a condition for thinkability of global identity. In this paper, I also focus on the idea of spatiality as being a transgresive cultural tool, showing its engagement with the category of ‘place’ that still remains the major criterion for the construction and representation of ‘global’ and ‘local’ as identity categories.

• Details
• Contents