Philosophical Topics

Volume 37, Issue 2, Fall 2009

Global Gender Justice

Feminist Paradigms of Solidarity and Justice

This paper develops a new feminist paradigm for global justice that includes several components. I deploy a non-ideal ethics approach based on an argument about what principle of justice is possible to act on, given a historical and intersectional feminist analysis of what kind of feminist coalitions are possible in the present period. I claim that the time is ripe for a new progressive feminist Solidarity paradigm of justice that supersedes the classical liberal debates between Libertarian Freedom paradigm and the Social Democrat Equality paradigm of Justice. I outline the antiglobalization economic and political networks coming into existence, as evidenced by networks of worker-owned cooperatives, labor unions, fair trade commitments, squatter and other land reform movements. Such movements are creating the material conditions in which North-South women’s coalition movements, based not on essentialist but on transformational identities, can unite around various issues of global gender justice, including reproductive rights, environmental justice, and the feminization of poverty.