This essay aims to advance feminist debates around globalization in a number of directions. By means of a transnational perspective that takes gender into the heart of the analysis the essay challenges the erasure of gender from grand theories of globalization leaving gender difference as merely a local effect of globalization (Freeman 2001). Following path-breaking work we share the feminist view that globalization is inherently gendered and multiply produced by diverse actors in varied times and spaces and that its theorization has often been implicitly masculine. Our definition of transnationalism owes much to feminist work on globalization which stresses the complex topographies of political-economic-social and cultural transformations at interconnected scales (the body the national and international) that comprise "globalization" (Katz 2001; Nagar et al. 2002; Radcliffe Laurie and Andolina 2002). Andean development transnationalism rises to the feminist challenge to move beyond conceptual frameworks that "implicitly construe... global as masculine and local as feminine" (Nagar et al. 2002 1009). Compared with previous globalization analyses that took a decontextualized and institutional focus (see critique in Adam 2002) our essay delves through the national local and bodily scales to trace the impacts of new institutional initiatives such as gender mainstreaming and ethnodevelopment. (excerpt)