Abstract
The author highlights the importance of women’s perspectives in the “new enlightenment” that overtakes the earlier age of enlightenment. She also argues that the peripheral vision of women and others who are marginalized in political, economic, and social life enables them to assess more clearly their personal situation in relation to global issues. Whether their marginality stems from racial/ethnic differences, from gender, or from class, the consciousness of the injustice inflicted upon them because of discrimination, impoverishment, or disempowerment of the group with which they are identified provides a baseline for understanding global trends in embodied terms. This kind of knowledge, cultivated in the immanent roles assigned to subordinates in the world system, could promote a new enlightenment based on gender balanced and multicultural understandings. Once collectively mobilized, it could become strategic in confronting domination by global corporations, and even providing an alternative to the emergent US empire.