1. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 1 Making workers: gendered subjectivities and practices in global factories Elsa Boulet

2. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 2 Leslie Salzinger, Genders in production. Making workers in Mexico's global factories Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003 Pun Ngai, Made in China. Women factory workers in a global workplace Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2005

3. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 3 ● Discussion of the “new international division of labour” conceptualisation - this vision overestimates the hiring process, and does not question the work process itself; - it rests upon a fixed and sometimes essentialist conception of women. “theorists took employers' claims about their female workers at face value. Focused on contesting attributions of causality (social, not natural) and moral tone (exploitable, not productive), they left unchallenged the basic assertion of women's preset docility.” (p. 15)

4. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 4 ● “Nimble fingers” as discursively constituted on the shop floors “The image of a nubile young woman bent over a motherboard haunts contemporary global production. It provides a structure of expectations within which hiring and supervision occur in export-processing factories around the globe. This image is important not because it reflects reality, but because it constitutes reality – functioning as a template against which workers are imagined and imagine themselves.” (p. 9) “Turning a young and rural body into an industrialized and productive laborer, a seemingly universal project of disciplining labor, is the primary task of transnational production when it meets with migrant labor in urban China.” (Ngai, p. 77)

5. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 5 ● “Nimble fingers” as discursively constituted on the shop floors “Femininity is a trope – a structure of meaning through which workers, potential and actual, are addressed and understood, and around which production itself is designed. The notion of ''productive femininity'' thus crystallizes through a process of repetitive citation by transnational managers, and the imperative to hire such workers operates as a creative force, shaping both workers and the technical structure within which they work. In this context, hiring and labor control processes emerges as messages which address potential workers within specific understandings of who they are and what the work requires.” (p. 15)

6. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 6 ● “Nimble fingers” as discursively constituted on the shop floors Citation → Judith Butler, Bodies that matter Interpellation → Louis Althusser, Ideology and State ideological apparatuses

7. Sex, gender & power Presentation 05.02.2013 7 ● Gendered meaning vary from one shop floor to the other “the emergent content of gendered attributions emerges through the intentions, understandings, and limitations of the actors struggling in and over a particular social space” (p. 23) Individuals can be “interpellated within a veritable cacophony of gendered meanings” (p. 24).