Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 41
political culture of nationalism as a response to globalization shapes policy
debates, even if the institutional world of rule making may falsely
appear immune from these forces. On the other hand, a variety of progressive
new social movements have themselves become transnational –
from environmentalism to feminism, new labour movements, movements
for human rights, to name a few – and are seen to embody modes of ‘globalization
from below’.
These movements explicitly address the inequities of the neoliberal
information society, by confronting the market logic of intellectual property
rights or negotiating the tensions between universal human rights
on the one hand and cultural rights to determine gender and sexuality,
norms or societal standards for ‘decency’, on the other. They are but a
few examples of political contests over global communication and media
policy within the larger struggles over the governance of globalization
that highlight, once again the need for a cultural theory of the state – even
as the role of the state is drastically transformed. We have argued that the
experiences of the postcolonial nation-state revealed the constitutive role
of colonialism in shaping the limits of the state to represent the public, or
more precisely multiple publics. We must also pay attention to the ways
in which the intensification of ‘social suffering’ and the ‘humiliation’ associated
with globalization remain ‘unrecognized’ and outside of a public
political debate (Bourdieu and Accordo 1999; Chatterjee 2004).
The need to acknowledge difference as we rethink the relationship
between state institutions and public representation and deliberation
has been at the centre of debates within feminist theory for the last
decade (McLaughlin 2004). Feminist political theorists like Nancy Fraser
have argued that post-Fordist claims for justice are multifaceted along at
least two recognizable, interrelated dimensions of redistribution (claims
around economic equality) and recognition (claims around cultural difference).
Fraser has argued that while redistributive claims dominated
claims for justice in the Fordist era without adequate attention to gender,
race or nationality, claims for recognition have overshadowed egalitarian
claims in the post-Fordist (post-Socialist) era (Fraser and Honneth 2003).
There has been disagreement and criticism about the rigid separation of
these categories among feminist theorists, 21 but for our purposes it is useful
to note that most feminists agree that the presumed antithesis between
the material (distribution) and the cultural (recognition) dimensions of
politics needs to be rethought (Benhabib 2004; Young 2000; Butler 2004;
Mohanty 2003). Feminist theorists have long argued for the need to
theorize justice outside questions of distribution alone. Fraser points
to the ‘materiality of genocide, violence against women, hate crimes
against sexual and ethnic minorities’, and argues that claims on behalf of