Introduction

This book seeks to use a feminist analysis to tackle issues of gender justice within a profoundly unequal world. It asks: how do we care about women in a global economy who labour to produce cheap food, clothing and consumer durables? Do we care for the workers recruited in the South who migrate to enable women and men to undertake (relatively well-) paid work in northern economies? What aspects of people’s lives do we care about? Can this ethically-based approach to law be used to find ways of tackling global injustices? The previous chapter addressed these questions through analyses of social and economic processes and provided a framework through which to explore them. It argued that global commodity/value chain analysis offers a way of linking the micro- and macroeconomic factors that contribute to the distribution of the benefits of contemporary globalisation. This approach, with its emphasis on the importance of governance to this distribution, assists with a legal analysis. However, the economic focus only provides part of the picture for a gender analysis which requires an understanding of the way in which constructions of sex/gender interact with these processes.