Philosophical Topics

Volume 37, Issue 2, Fall 2009

Global Gender Justice

Transnational Rights and Wrongs
Moral Geographies of Gender and Migration

This article examines the challenges that transnational women’s migration poses to state-centered conceptions of rights. It reviews global perspectives on gender justice that are being developed by Western feminist philosophers and transnational migrant rights activists, and argues that these frameworks are contributing to imagining the moral geographies necessary for the protection of women migrants’ human rights and welfare. Specifically, based on discussion of the issues and strategies that Indonesian migrant workers’ organizations employ in relation to international human rights discourse, the article argues that adequate conceptualizations of justice must focus on the ways in which transnational gendered inequalities are produced—and indeed must be addressed—across “local,” “national,” and “global” spaces and scales. These arguments, now commonplace in the discipline of geography, are offered as an elaboration of the spatial elements of feminist philosophical conceptions of global justice.