[lbo-talk] North-South Sex Divide (was Tariq Ramadan and IslamicSocialism)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/21/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Yoshie:
>
>
> A majority of Christians are in the global South, just as a majority
> of working people (peasants, wage workers, workers in the informal
> sector, etc.) are in the global South.  And just as there is a
> North-South economic divide in the world, there is a North-South sex
> divide in the world, too, between nations and within nations, which is
> not surprising, for the latter in part stems from the former.  (There
> also are economic, historical, and sexual differences between areas in
> the South, Africa and Asia being more conservative on homosexuality
> than Latin America.  Cf. The Pew Research Center for the People and
> the Press, Views of a Changing World, June 2003,
> <http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/185.pdf>, p. 114)  If we don't make
> efforts to bridge the sex divides, we'll end up on the wrong side of
> the multiple divides.
>
> [WS:] This geographic metaphor does not work very well.  This North-South
> division is merely a rhetorical device, wishful thinking of a handful of
> Third World nationalists and their developed-country groupies, but has very
> little empirical grounds. What you call the "global South" is as divided by
> class and cultural identities as what you call the "global North."
>
> You will find that people of certain socio-economic class status have more
> in common with people of a similar socio-economic status in geographically
> distant lands than with their own countrymen of a different socio-economic
> status.  I have more in common with, say, an Indian software engineer or a
> South African intellectual than with an Alabama redneck, Baltimore
> "gangsta," or Polish "unemployable."  That is even more true about women - I
> am pretty sure that you will find more in common with the literati women
> from Scandinavia or Middle East than with peasant women in Japan or rural
> folk in the US.

By North-South gaps I mean more or less socio-economic gaps, so I
don't think we are in disagreement in substance, North-South being
merely metaphors, just as East-West of the Cold War was.  However you
label sex divides (the North-South metaphors or income decimals or
whatever), , though, I don't think we can build a Left based on being
sexually on the same page in the world today, though you can very well
build a Right on that.
-- 
Yoshie
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