...-to-person microlending Web site Kiva fosters attachments with distant others through the illusion of intimacy that reshapes the global into an emotionally manageable size. This sentimental promise of a small world is both what enables and what haunts a cosmopolitan sense of responsibility to others...

... commodity. Such transactions connect them to poor women a world away. It is the Third World woman who makes possible a transformation of the distance of gen­ der and race into a liberal intimacy with the world’s poor. Such is the case of Kiva .org, an online platform of “person-­to-­person microfinance...