This paper asserts that research on gender and livelihood (production and social reproduction in feminist thought of the mid-late 20th century) remains central to efforts to understand gendered in/equity in any given socio-historical context, as well as internationally. Two relatively recent theoretical trends distracted attention from livelihood studies. Discourses of globalisation imperiously dominate in western academies, at best producing new insights about global economic power but typically neglecting to question whether and how livelihoods change for most “global subjects”.

Equally distracting yet contradictory are discourses of post-modernity attending to the interpretive limitations of language and the fluid nature of social identities. Important as these reminders are, particularly for feminist thinking about gendered subjectivities, their enthusiastic embrace arguably discourages research linking material conditions to the social and power relations which lie at the heart of so-called global processes. Even in gender and development studies, a focus upon empowerment is often at the expense of material realities and gender main-streaming promises to sidestep differential material realities. “Post-modern” perspectives may have run their course as the unwitting foil to global abstractions; modernity flourishes and local gendered contradictions abound. Still, the global discursive turn demands our critical attention.

Here, I argue that research about the material and cultural politics of livelihood - its gendered, class and social complexities, context by context - is necessary for understanding gendered inequities within and between nations. In the paper, examples are drawn from current research about migration and development leading to transnational livelihoods and politics. Is this modernity disguised as globalisation?