The Global and the Intimate: WSQ: Spring/Summer 2006 (Womens Studies Quartley, 34)

The personal and the political, the public and the private: The Global and the Intimate issue of WSQ extends the feminist tradition by forging this new pairing for our time. The domain of intimacy is that of the private sphere, of the interior, of mental life; of individuals and the bonds between them; of touching, feeling, and reacting; of the local, the idiosyncratic, and the personal. How do intimate structures inhere in the global, too often imagined as undifferentiated, impersonal and diffuse space? How do we connect the intimate with the global, and what do such connections reveal about the ways in which we order our worlds?

Grand narratives of globalization have frequently adopted a gender-neutral (and implicitly masculine) stance, while women typically are represented as pure victims of globalization, either coerced to migrate or limited to the local scale, mired in their bodies and familial relations. We seek to push past this dichotomy and, by doing so, to locate agency for women and to understand how deeply global forces penetrate the intimate spaces of our psyches and bodies.

Victoria Rosner earned her Ph.D. in English at Columbia University before she became an assistant professor of English and the assistant director of Graduate Studies at Texas A & M University. Dr. Gerry Pratt teaches in the department of Geography at University of British Columbia and has been involved with several projects as diverse as investigating the experiences of Filipino youth who are re-united with their mothers after extended separation and the use of interior decoration by wealthy Vancouver women compared with those from the nouveau riche group.