Difference and Capital

On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization of ProductionAuthor(s): Jennifer BairSource: Signs, Vol. 36, No. 1, Feminists Theorize International Political Economy Special IssueEditors Shirin M. Rai and Kate Bedford (Autumn 2010), pp. 203-226Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652912 .

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[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 36, no. 1]� 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2010/3601-0009$10.00

J e n n i f e r B a i r

On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization

of Production

Akey insight of feminist political economy is that social difference,including but not limited to the meanings and practices constitutingthe distinction between women and men, organizes the world in

concrete ways. The particular ways in which difference matters—that is,the conditions under which difference operates as a form of power or aresource for resistance and the manner in which it shapes subjectivity—are variable and contingent. Indeed, feminist inquiry is largely a processof trying to understand how, in particular historical situations, differenceworks to shape the social, including the economic. While we are not alwaysable to predict how difference will matter at a particular conjuncture ofspace and time, feminist scholars can and do look for historical and geo-graphic patterns, which we then try to understand and explain.

One such pattern is the gendered organization of transnational pro-duction. In numerous monographs and articles published over the pasttwo and a half decades, scholars have examined the participation of womenworkers in export-oriented production across the global South, docu-menting the diverse and manifold ways in which the internationalizationof production mobilizes material and discursive forms of social difference.From the beginning, this research underscored the relationship betweenthose macroprocesses that bring new commercial circuits and social re-lations of production to a region and the localized practices and culturalmeanings through which these processes are instantiated in concrete pro-duction arrangements. Thus, the literature on gender and transnationalproduction centrally engages one of the questions that motivate this special

The impetus for this article stems largely from a conversation with Marion Werner thatbegan in the Dominican Republic three years ago and has since continued in the form ofvarious joint projects. I am grateful for her collaboration and her friendship. In addition tothanking the manuscript reviewers and the Signs editors, I would also like to thank IsaacReed for his careful reading of multiple versions of this article.



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issue—namely, how to theorize the multiple ways in which differencematters for the international political economy.

In this article, I aim both to review this literature and to intervene in it.My review focuses on a set of monographs that are exemplars for under-standing not just how scholars have engaged the gendered dimension ofglobal production but also how they themselves have shaped the contoursof research and writing in this field. I make two points. First, the focus ofthis scholarship has shifted from assessing the gendered consequences oftransnational production to showing how gendered practices and subjectsare themselves constitutive of it. If earlier analysts were primarily interestedin understanding how globalization affects women, today’s scholars aremotivated to ask how gender simultaneously effects globalization. Second,as the research questions being asked in this literature have been refor-mulated, so too have the analytical strategies and epistemological com-mitments of feminist scholars; the general trend that can be detected inthis work is from a more macro- to a more micro-orientation.

An inclination toward more local accounts of gendered productionregimes does not reflect new methodological choices, since the preferencefor case-based, ethnographic research has been relatively constant overtime. Rather, it reflects the waning influence of the “new internationaldivision of labor” paradigm as the dominant framework for understandingthe relocation of light manufacturing industries from the global North tothe global South. While the first generation of feminist scholars writingabout globalization succeeded in showing that feminized workforces area consistent feature of transnational production, a number of recent con-tributions underscore the diverse and context-specific constructions ofgendered labor found at the global-local nexus. In this context, I devoteparticular attention to Leslie Salzinger’s influential monograph, Gendersin Production (2003), because her elegant analysis of four Mexican ma-quiladoras provides an exceptionally clear example of this emphasis on thecontingent and local in accounting for gender’s salience across the land-scape of the global economy. Here, the local (in this case, the factoryfloor) is not simply the empirical site at which it is possible to see thevaried ways in which feminized labor organizes transnational productionbut also the site at which the primary cause of this variation is to be found.

The intervention I want to make follows from this assessment of theliterature. While feminist scholars are increasingly attentive to how gen-dered production regimes differ across countries, industries, and evenfactories, it is also critically important to ask what is similar about themany specific locations on the global assembly line that have been studiedand, further, to ask how we can account for the similarities as well as the



S I G N S Autumn 2010 ❙ 205

differences. What the cumulative weight of research suggests is that howgender matters in a particular location on the global assembly line isvariable and contingent; that gender matters is not. We need an expla-nation, an answer to the why question implied by the latter phenomenon.

My argument is that a satisfactory answer must look to how gender,as a set of context-specific meanings and practices, intersects the structureof global capitalism and its systemic logic of value extraction and capitalaccumulation. In other words, while capitalism does not determine theconcrete modalities of gender that exist in a given locale, it is essentialfor explaining the gendered dimension of transnational production as apatterned regularity of the contemporary global economy. Feminized la-bor in export-oriented manufacturing is a real abstraction—that is, a con-cept with causal force that operates on the world and is itself generativeof the social phenomenon we seek to understand.1 Approaching the re-lationship between gender and capital as a real abstraction opens up thespace to recognize both the diverse ways in which gender is implicatedin specific moments of production and to account for the general patternthat emerges from these multiple observations about women (and men)on the global assembly line. After all, the very term “global assembly line”simultaneously expresses and diagnoses this feature of contemporary in-dustry—namely, that it fragments the labor process across space and con-tinually reconfigures the geography of production. What feminist politicaleconomists have shown, however, is that this spatial fragmentation is fre-quently accompanied by the feminization of manufacturing. In otherwords, the globalization of production is fundamentally about reorgan-izing the social geography of industry.

Vision and method in feminist analyses of globalization

Before turning in detail to the literature on gender and the global assemblyline, I begin by discussing two essays, written by Carla Freeman andChandra Talpade Mohanty, respectively, for earlier issues of Signs, thatthoughtfully engage the question of how feminist scholarship can workacross macro- and microlevels of analyses, attending both to the prevalenceof gender in shaping the manifold processes we refer to as “globalization”and to the different ways in which subjects experience and understandthese processes.

1 The foundational reference for the concept of real abstraction appears in the sectionof Karl Marx’s Grundrisse titled “The Method of Political Economy” (Marx [1857–58]1978).



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By asking the question, “Is local : global as feminine : masculine?”Freeman aims “to bring into relief several powerful dichotomies in needof dialectical engagement: global/local; masculine/feminine; production/consumption; and formal/informal sectors of the economy” (2001,1009). Her attempt to overcome these stylized dichotomies centers on aparticular subject—a female worker in the Caribbean who parlays herformal job in the export sector into the entrepreneurial role of the trans-national higgler in the informal economy. Freeman’s higgler is a womanemployed in an offshore data-processing operation in Barbados. The com-pany for which she works is a local subsidiary of a foreign firm that rewardsproductive workers with airline vouchers for international travel. Thesetrips abroad provide the higgler with an opportunity to purchases clothesand accessories in places such as Miami and New York, items that canthen be resold to fellow workers upon her return to Barbados. Under-scored by the higgler’s activities is the interconnection between a particularform of employment in the export sector and the processes of subjectformation that attend this work. Through forms of consumption thataffirm her professionalism and status, the informatics worker distinguishesherself from the factory operative who works in an electronics plant or asewing factory instead of an office but whose objective conditions of workin the export-processing sector, in terms of job security and pay, may notbe that different from her own (Freeman 2001; see also Freeman 1993).

Freeman’s analysis of the higgler as a figure that bridges global marketsand local communities, as well as the formal and the informal economy,is consonant with the first trend I identified above with regard to theliterature on transnational production: the shift from asking about thegendered consequences of globalization to showing how the activities ofgendered subjects are themselves constitutive of it. Offshore informaticsworkers produce for transnational capital, but for the higgler and hercustomers this work enables new forms of consumption as well. Global-ization is thus revealed to be a process consisting of multidirectional flows(of people, money, goods, styles) that would be obscured by an analyticalapproach that focused on “a monolithic framework of multinational capi-tal” (Freeman 2000, 35). The higgler’s activities cannot be defined aseither global or local, since they are both simultaneously. Freeman em-phasizes the mutually constitutive relationship between these domains asa way to avoid what she regards as the common but mistaken analyticalstrategy of positing the local in opposition to the global and then definingthe former (but not the latter) as the terrain on which the salience ofgender is demonstrated and argued to matter. The mistake here, as Free-man sees it, is that gender and locality are conflated, thereby precluding




any examination of how gendered subjects may shape the organization ofthe global capitalist economy at the macrolevel. Freeman’s interventionaims to overcome a model of globalization that portrays “the local ascontained within, and thus defined fundamentally by the global” (2001,1012) or that constructs the local only “as a space in which the heavyhand of the global makes its marks” (1031).

Mohanty engages a similar set of questions in an article reflecting onher well-traveled and oft-cited earlier essay “Under Western Eyes” ([1986]1991). This earlier essay provided a powerful critique of the reductivismcharacterizing much of the contemporary gender and development lit-erature, which purported to study how particular economic processes(structural adjustment programs, export-oriented development, etc.) af-fected a discursively constituted, undifferentiated mass of “third worldwomen.” Implicitly or explicitly, such work often featured white feministsspeaking on behalf of their less fortunate sisters, who were primarily un-derstood to be the victimized objects of a development process that pro-ceeded from the global North and acted on the global South ([1986]1991, 57–59). In “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” her reflective articlein Signs (2003), Mohanty is at particular pains to distance herself froman inaccurate, if nevertheless common, interpretation of “Under WesternEyes” as having argued that the profound differences existing amongwomen, and the varied ways in which gender matters across societies,somehow preclude the possibility of cross-cultural feminist work. Indeed,rather than dismissing the possibility of solidarity between what she called“Western feminists” and “third world feminists,” Mohanty’s earlier in-tervention is more accurately read as an impassioned plea for more genu-inely solidaristic and effective feminist engagements across difference.

Contextualizing “Under Western Eyes” as a piece of scholarship writtenin a particular institutional location and at a specific historical moment,Mohanty acknowledges that her essay was an important contribution toan emergent and ultimately influential set of postmodern and postcolonialfeminist critiques of Eurocentric epistemologies that produced certainways of knowing (and thus legitimated certain ways of acting on) theworld. Just as Mohanty calls attention to the conditions of intellectualproduction under which her earlier text was both written and read, sheemphasizes in “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” that the current con-juncture poses a different set of challenges for feminist praxis, includingvarious forms of fundamentalism, militarism, and the hegemony of anintensified global capitalism. Indeed, Mohanty concludes that she nowsees “the politics and economics of capitalism as a far more urgent locusof struggle” and argues that a focus on capitalism is, at this particular



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moment, a necessary condition for an effective feminist politics (2003,509). Mohanty seems to be arguing, on the one hand, that somethingabout the nature of capitalism has changed and that an “anticapitalisttransnational feminist practice” (509) is now urgently needed to counteran acute form of economic globalization that extends in new or heightenedways into people’s lives. Yet on the other hand, and at the same time,Mohanty’s call for what she describes as a “revised race-and-gender-con-scious historical materialism” (509) to resist the hegemony of global capitalis less a departure from, and more an extension of, the position she stakedout in “Under Western Eyes” since, as she acknowledges, implicit in herearlier analysis “was the use of historical materialism as a basic frameworkand a definition of material reality in both its local and micro-, as well asglobal, systemic dimensions” (501).

The point I want to make here is that despite the different visions thatMohanty and Freeman articulate for what a sophisticated feminist analysisof globalization would look like, with Freeman expressing a certain am-bivalence about foregrounding the operations and logics of transnationalcapital underscored by Mohanty, their positions converge when identifyinga particular author whose work exemplifies the kind of approach theyprescribe. In “Under Western Eyes,” Mohanty mentions Maria Mies’sstudy of Indian home workers (1982) and mentions Mies’s study againin “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” when she reminds readers that sheidentified Mies’s study of the lace makers of Narsapur “as a demonstrationof how to do this kind of multilayered, contextual analysis to reveal howthe particular is often universally significant—without using the universalto erase the particular or positing an unbridgeable gulf between the twoterms” (2003, 501). Freeman also singles out Mies’s scholarship, not in“Is Local : Global as Feminine : Masculine?” her article in Signs discussedabove (2001), but rather in High Tech and High Heels in the GlobalEconomy (2000), her monograph on informatics workers in the Caribbeanfrom which her discussion of the higgler is drawn. In High Tech and HighHeels, Freeman notes that Mies’s work Patriarchy and Accumulation ona World Scale (1986) revealed “the complex mechanisms through whichwomen are mobilized around the world to fuel the expansion of capitalistaccumulation” and offered an “unusual treatment of the global arena inlinking the experience of people of the first and third worlds and also inemphasizing the gendered dimensions of the workings of global capital-ism” (2000, 35).

The praise that both Mohanty and Freeman lavish on Mies suggeststhe value of revisiting her work, particularly since The Lace Makers ofNarsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (1982) is,




regrettably, out of print. Of the six books that I discuss in the remainderof this article, Mies’s Lace Makers was the first to be published and is theonly study that focuses on home workers as opposed to factory operatives.Mies’s work is able to engender this consensus between Mohanty andFreeman because her analytical approach recognizes the importance ofglobal capitalism as a macrostructure that mobilizes gender but simulta-neously appreciates that multiple forms of social difference in addition togender can shape production arrangements and that these forms of dif-ference can be enrolled into regimes of capital accumulation in variousways.

Women on (and off) the global assembly line

Mies’s The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982) is a study of three groups ofwomen home workers in Andhra Pradesh, India, who populate the bottomrungs of a hierarchically organized, export-oriented industry. The laceproduced by these women accounted for 90 percent of the state’s earningsfrom handicraft exports at the time of Mies’s study, and while she tracesthe origins of lace production to the colonial period, she emphasizes thatit expanded dramatically in the 1970s, when the introduction of GreenRevolution technologies brought agricultural modernization and growingpolarization between rich and poor farmers. The heart of the analysis isa detailed explanation of the production relations within the lace industry,which includes examples drawn from Mies’s sample of 150 home workersin Narsapur and adjoining villages. What Mies emphasizes here is thegrowing impoverishment of these families and the increasing (if largelyunacknowledged) reliance of women and their families on the lace trade.The emergence of export-oriented production in Narsapur, in Mies’s view,depends on the intersection of social organization (especially the castesystem) and a set of patriarchal ideologies and practices, which togethercreate a particular opportunity structure for exploiting female labor. Inwhat is essentially a kind of feminist commodity chain analysis avant lalettre (Ramamurthy 2004), Mies details the various participants in theindustry, the differences that exist among them (e.g., differences of casteand religion among lace makers), and the relationships that connect theproducers of lace (all female), the agents who organize local productionby distributing materials and collecting finished piecework from the homeworkers (mostly men and some women), and the commercial agents andexporters (exclusively male) who connect the Narsapur cluster to globalmarkets.

Mies argues that the cottage industry of lace making in Narsapur must



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be understood not as a temporary stage en route to a more mature formof capitalism but rather as a consolidated and very particular kind ofintegration into a global capitalist economy: one in which the lace workers,as wage laborers producing for export, are “fully integrated into a worldmarket-oriented production system” (1982, 110) but whose integrationis premised on their social location and self-understanding as housewives.Their lacework is regarded as a leisure activity rather than as productivelabor, and their earnings are regarded as supplemental rather than as es-sential income. Mies refers to the ideology of the housewife, and thenaturalization of the social division of labor between women and menthat it implies, as the sociocultural foundation on which the lace tradedepends.

Through her analysis of the networks connecting domestic lace makersto foreign markets, Mies shows that the traditional model of factory workand its consequent corollary, proletarianization, do not exhaust the pos-sible ways in which women workers can be incorporated into the inter-national division of labor. And yet at around the time that Lace Makersappeared, export-processing factories featuring highly feminized laborforces were proliferating across Latin America and East Asia. One of thescholars investigating this phenomenon was Marıa Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, whose dissertation fieldwork in northern Mexico was roughly con-temporaneous with Mies’s research in southern India. The monographthat resulted from Fernandez-Kelly’s research, For We Are Sold, I and MyPeople: Women and Industry in Mexico’s Frontier (1983), was publishedone year after Lace Makers and was among the first English-languagestudies of the assembly plants, known as maquiladoras or simply maquilas,located on Mexico’s border with the United States. The maquilas thatFernandez-Kelly studied were not a new phenomenon; the oldest of thesefactories dated from the 1960s, when a government initiative called theBorder Industrialization Program created incentives for foreign firms inwhich imported components were assembled into products for export.However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the maquiladoras were at-tracting increasing scholarly attention, largely because they seemed toexemplify what Folker Frobel, Jurgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye famouslycalled “the new international division of labour” (1978).

Fernandez-Kelly’s study of factory workers in the largest maquila en-clave, Ciudad Juarez, takes the new-international-division-of-labor thesisas its point of departure, but she aims to put the gendered dimension ofthe global assembly line at the center of her analysis. Like several otherscholars who were contributing to an emerging body of literature on




women and work in the global economy (e.g., Elson and Pearson 1981;Safa 1981), Fernandez-Kelly emphasizes that the new international di-vision of labor is more than a reconfiguration of global trade patterns andthe geography of industry; what is essential about this process from afeminist perspective is the fact that the relocation of light manufacturingto the global South was accompanied by a widespread mobilization offemale labor, since the qualities most valued in export-processing work-ers—docility, dexterity, and cheapness—turned out to be, in countries asdiverse as Mexico and Malaysia, associated with the same population:young women. It is this persistent correlation—simultaneously ubiquitousand imperfect—between the type of work (export processing) and the sexof the worker (female) that feminist analysts of global production in the1980s and 1990s sought to explain.

Most of these scholars, including Fernandez-Kelly, ask a similar set ofquestions: first, why is female labor preferred—that is, why are, or whyare women believed to be, more docile, more dexterous, and cheaper thanmen? Second, what are the implications of this kind of work for women,their families, and their communities? Specifically, to what extent does theincorporation of women into the wage labor force have the potential toundermine traditional gender roles and the subordination of women? Asnoted above, Mies’s study of what she calls “semiproletarianized house-wives” found that there was no necessary opposition between capitalismand patriarchy in the case of Narsapur’s lace makers. Indeed, for Mies,the cottage lace industry was contingent on a rather seamless symbiosisbetween the reproduction of patriarchy and the accumulation of capital—but is the same true for women who are connected to the world marketnot as housewives but as factory workers?

I want to draw out three similarities between For We Are Sold and LaceMakers because they are important for understanding how these worksattempted to describe and explain gendered production at the intersectionof local contexts and global dynamics. First, as Mies did with India, Fer-nandez-Kelly aims to historicize and contextualize the emergence of ex-port-oriented industry in Mexico. She narrates the origins of the maqui-ladora program in a particular moment of U.S.-Mexican relations—specifically, the cancellation of the Bracero program by the United Statesin 1964. But Fernandez-Kelly also emphasizes that the maquiladoras weresimply one manifestation of a more general trend, as suggested by thefact that a delegation of Mexican policy makers traveled in 1966 “throughthe Far East with the explicit purpose of observing assembly operationsof U.S. firms” (1983, 31). Thus, although Fernandez-Kelly’s study focuses



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on a single border town, she situates the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarezwithin an international division of labor that is critical for her analysis ofwhat was occurring in northern Mexico.

Second, like Mies, Fernandez-Kelly is attentive to the kind of work thatis being done by the women she studied and where their labor fits in thestructure of these global industries. Asking if the kind of product beingmade has any implications for the kind of laborer hired, Fernandez-Kellyfocuses on the two industries that, along with autos and auto parts, havelong been the mainstay of Mexico’s maquila sector: apparel and elec-tronics. These industries share a number of characteristics: sewing clothingand assembling consumer electronics are both labor-intensive processes,and fluctuating demand in the final market introduces significant uncer-tainty into production operations for these goods, making flexibility, alongwith efficiency, a priority. But there are differences: first, lower barriers toentry make the apparel industry particularly competitive and sensitive tolabor costs; second, the (relatively) greater capital intensity of electronicsassembly means that most of the maquilas in this sector are subsidiariesof multinationals, while sewing factories are more likely to be locallyowned companies working as subcontractors for foreign firms. Compe-tition among women for the somewhat more desirable and stable jobsoffered in the electronics plants is particularly intense, enabling managersto choose younger and slightly more educated women from the ranks offemale applicants. As a result, older women (i.e., those in their midtwen-ties) and/or women with children, whether married or single heads ofhousehold, are more likely to work in garment factories.

The third and final comparison I want to draw between Fernandez-Kelly and Mies is the attention each gives to the relationship betweenproductive and reproductive labor. For Mies, this takes the form of dem-onstrating how the lace maker’s socially recognized and self-perceivedstatus as a housewife enables the exploitation of her labor. In For We AreSold, Fernandez-Kelly asks how the departure from traditional gender rolesimplied by the widespread incorporation of women into factory work isaffecting the sexual division of labor within the home and the status ofwomen in their families and communities. She outlines two widely heldviews. One contends that the maquilas are a modernizing force, usheringin a new era for the Mexican woman, who is soon to be liberated fromthe heavy hand of patriarchal authority and attendant gender subordi-nation. The other position links this feminized labor force to social dis-order and increased immorality, especially sexual promiscuity among fe-male factory workers. Fernandez-Kelly finds little evidence to support




either side of this stylized debate, concluding that women’s incorporationinto wage labor is neither appreciably affecting gender roles in Juarez interms of who does what in the household nor inspiring a widespreadsexual revolution among young women, whose behavior and mores donot seem dramatically altered by the experience of maquila work.

Fernandez-Kelly takes seriously the widespread anxiety about femalesexuality that has accompanied the growth of the maquila sector in Juarez,however, and she links this moral panic to women’s increased visibility inthe public sphere. Insofar as wage labor is providing women with a certaindegree of financial independence, reflected in new consumption patternsand practices, these factory jobs are regarded as a threat to traditionalforms of male authority. The fears that this potential loss of social controlengender are “made explicit, albeit in a distorted manner” by the discourseof increased female promiscuity (1983, 141). This ideological articulationhas an additional benefit, which is that “the members of the group inquestion are hard pressed to act aggressively when they too fear the pos-sibility of their involvement in moral corruption” (141). Thus, a discourseintended to increase the social control of women by men also reinforcesthe control of labor by capital by proscribing (although not always suc-cessfully) “unfeminine” behavior, such as work stoppages, which mightdisrupt the extraction of value from gendered labor power.

Mies’s and Fernandez-Kelly’s monographs were early and importantcontributions to the first generation of research on gender and globali-zation, and revisiting them is instructive, both for thinking about howthese scholars attempted to grapple with the relationship between femi-nized labor and transnational production and for reevaluating some ofthe characterizations that have since been made of this work. Specifically,Lace Makers and For We Are Sold fundamentally explore gender and glob-alization in ways that often, if not always, endeavor to grapple with thepowerful dichotomies that Freeman (2001) argued are still in need ofengagement more than a decade later.2 Their analyses range across macro-

2 To be fair, Freeman addresses her critical query (Is local : global as feminine : masculine?)primarily to the “prominent . . . [male] macro theorists” of globalization, such as ArjunAppadurai and David Harvey (Freeman 2001, 1009). Freeman is correct to note the absenceof sustained attention to gender in the work of these authors, but it is not clear why thesescholars (and a few others, such as Manuel Castells) should be ritually cited by feminists assomehow representative of what is actually a diverse and voluminous literature on globali-zation. For example, a claim such as “considerations [of gender] are strikingly absent inanalyses of transnational production” (Salzinger 2003, 13) would seem to be manifestlycontradicted by the fact that this observation is preceded by a series of paragraphs citing



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and microlevels in order to demonstrate the nested processes that con-stitute the experiences of Indian lace makers and Mexican factory workers.These include the dynamics of unequal exchange and dependent devel-opment within the capitalist world-system, the characteristics of particularglobal industries, the political economy of national development strategies,the operations of regional labor markets, the sexual division of labor withinhouseholds, discursive constructions of idealized femininity that are con-stitutive of cultural and religious values and belief systems, and processesof subject formation that attend this work for the women who performit. What these studies suggest is that the intersection of difference andcapital that is expressed in the gendered organization of transnationalproduction cannot be reduced to a single, unified logic—be it patriarchyor capitalism. Further, although both texts link local developments toglobal processes, the local is not understood as being “contained within,and thus defined fundamentally by, the global” (Freeman 2001, 1012).Rather than globalizing the local, Mies and Fernandez-Kelly are closer tolocalizing the new international division of labor in the sense of detailingthe particular social and economic arrangements through which globalizedproduction must be instantiated.3

The fifteen years following the publication of For We Are Sold witnesseda veritable explosion of research on feminized labor in transnational pro-duction.4 Scholars in the United States tended to focus on Mexico’s ma-quiladoras, and to a lesser extent on free-trade zones in the Caribbeanbasin, but a number of important monographs also examined the emer-

numerous feminist analyses of the sort alleged to be absent from the literature and by thefact that many more such examples can be found in the same text’s extensive bibliography.

3 I do not mean to suggest that these strengths are characteristic of all, or even most,of the literature on gender and the new international division of labor produced in the 1970sand 1980s. One reviewer of this article in manuscript form rightly diagnosed a tendencywithin this work to homogenize the experience of women working on the global assemblyline and to present them as essentially similar victims of capitalism’s totalizing logic. I agreewith this reviewer both that the early literature is replete with such examples and that theyreflect the influence that dual systems theory then enjoyed among feminist scholars. However,I am arguing here that Mies and Fernandez-Kelly are more attentive to multiple forms ofdifference and to their relative autonomy from capitalist relations than such a critique impliesand that, more generally, there are insights to be gained from revisiting the early texts thatwe should not dismiss on the grounds that this literature is irredeemably reductivist.

4 Studies of Mexico’s maquilas dominate the literature that appeared during the 1980sand 1990s on gender in the global factory (Iglesias Prieto 1985; Sklair 1993; Tiano 1994;Kopinak 1996; de la O Martınez 1997; Pena 1997; Cravey 1998), although this period alsosaw the publication of books on export-processing zones in the Caribbean (Safa 1995),Southeast Asia (Ong 1987; Wolf 1992), and China (Lee 1998). More recent contributionsinclude Pun (2005) and Caraway (2007).




gence of export-processing operations in Asia. Among these, the mostnotable are Aihwa Ong’s study of Malay factory workers (1987) and DianeWolf’s analysis of gender and industrialization in rural Java (1992). Whilemy brief discussion of these texts does not do justice to their richness andcomplexity, the point I want to make is that they simultaneously extendand depart from the analyses offered by Mies and Fernandez-Kelly aboutthe role of women in transnational production. While continuities betweenthese four texts can be identified, particularly between Wolf and Mies andbetween Fernandez Kelly and Ong, the later books also focus more onthe cultural configuration of gendered relations and practices in SoutheastAsia and how these articulated with the emergence of the export-pro-cessing sector to produce gendered production regimes.

Wolf ’s Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural In-dustrialization in Java (1992) is an ethnographic analysis of women work-ers in a rural area of Central Java, Indonesia. Unlike the maquila enclavestudied by Fernandez-Kelly, Wolf ’s research site is not a free-trade zone.Of the twelve factories operating in this region, four are producing forexport and only two are subsidiaries of multinationals. However, Wolfnotes that within this cluster the “multinationals and export-oriented firmsare by far the largest and most important” in terms of employment, em-phasizing that this area of rural Java is “heavily tethered to foreign capitaland global markets, making it vulnerable to the global economy” (1992,113). Wolf’s analysis carefully situates and historicizes the emergence ofa manufacturing sector in the political-economic context of rural life inJava. Like Mies, she examines the relationship between agrarian produc-tion and industrial production, as well as the relationship between thepatriarchal household and the process of capital accumulation. Like Fer-nandez-Kelly, Wolf finds that conceptions of gender are inextricably linkedto the process of industrialization. As in Mexico, the practice of payingwomen less than their male counterparts is justified by arguments thattheir wages merely supplement those of the breadwinning men to whomthey are (assumed to be) attached, and managers express their preferencefor female workers in terms of their (presumed) docility and dexterity.

Family dynamics and household relations fundamentally shape the wayin which female labor power is made available to capital in Java. Theextraordinarily low cost of labor in this part of Indonesia reflects the factthat daughters living at home can be paid a wage that is below the levelof subsistence precisely because many parents are subsidizing their daugh-ters’ earnings (and thus their employers’ wage bill) by providing moneyfor transportation, lunch, and so on. Wolf further shows the complexmotivations of these factory daughters, the ambiguous attitudes that their



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employment generates in family members, and the contradictory rela-tionship between their earnings and the household economy. Thus, herfindings powerfully complicate the assertion that young women are nec-essarily pushed into factory work for household maintenance, anticipatingsimilar critiques of the “familial-economic-strategy” argument frequentlyadvanced to explain the internal migration of young women from ruralvillages to the special economic zones of southern China a decade later(Lee 1998, 78; see also Pun 2005).5

While Wolf emphasizes continuity as well as change for rural Java’ssemiproletarianized families, Ong focuses instead on the “trauma of in-dustrial labor” for Malay women workers in Spirits of Resistance and Capi-talist Discipline (1987, 7). In a discussion resonant with Fernandez-Kelly’sanalysis of the moral panic around the maquilas in Juarez, Ong analyzesthe public debate and social anxieties generated by the employment offemale factory operatives in free-trade zones dominated by foreign (pri-marily Japanese) capital. She is particularly interested in understandinghow the efforts of these young women to negotiate both the new demandsof factory life, particularly industrial time, and the cultural constructionof a specifically Islamic-Malay-rural femininity are implicated in processesof subject formation that entail the emergence of a “class sexuality” (180).

In comparison with Mies and Fernandez-Kelly, Ong and Wolf are moreattentive to questions of subjectivity and agency, emphasizing that femaleworkers are not just objects of transnational capital’s frenetic search forcheap, docile, and dexterous labor but are also agentic subjects who ne-gotiate, and frequently find creative ways to resist, their encounters withgendered production regimes. Among these forms of resistance is the oneidentified in the title of Ong’s book: encounters with ghosts and spirits,whose periodic appearance is sufficient to disrupt production on factoryfloors in both Malaysia and Indonesia. Showing how local beliefs andpractices shape the confrontation between labor and capital is an importantcorrective to Marxist claims that “the labor process under capitalism hasits own internal logic and that industrial behavior cannot be explained interms of cultural attitudes or orientations” (Ong 1987, 155). Instead,both authors demonstrate that, in Ong’s words, “the organization ofcapitalist production is embedded in and transformed through culturaldiscourse/practices” (155). Yet while the local dynamics of gendered pro-

5 In another finding that foreshadows more recent work on China, such as Lee (1998)and Pun (2005), both Wolf and Ong devote significant attention to the role of the state inorganizing the industrialization process, thus suggesting that transitions to export-orienteddevelopment do not displace the state but, rather, depend on it.




duction are not reduced to an autonomous logic of capital, Ong and Wolfnevertheless describe the transformative impact of capitalism in the sitesthey studied, defining capitalism as a system of social relations and acultural configuration that intersects with Malay and Javanese practicesand understandings to produce the specific manifestations of genderedwork they describe. Thus, while Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Dis-cipline and Factory Daughters give greater explanatory weight to cultureand devote more attention to questions of subjectivity than either LaceMakers or For We Are Sold does, it is on account of the way they readthe imbrications between capitalism and feminized labor that I considerthese later texts to share some of the same analytical commitments ofMies and Fernandez-Kelly, particularly when compared with the work thatI discuss in the next section, Salzinger’s Genders in Production.

The production of difference in the making of “maquila-grade” labor

In some ways, Salzinger’s Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mex-ico’s Global Factories (2003) seems to set its sights more squarely on thegendered dimension of global production than any of the monographsdiscussed previously in this article. Salzinger’s aim is to explain the ubiquityof what she calls the “trope of productive femininity”—that is, the “iconof the ‘docile and dexterous’ woman worker” as both preferred and ex-pected embodiment of export-processing labor (2003, 10). Her explo-ration into the feminization of transnational production focuses on themeaning and construction of femininity itself. Salzinger observes that al-though the trope of productive femininity would seem to aptly describethe gendered nature of Mexico’s maquiladoras, the maquilas have longemployed a large minority of men, which leads Salzinger to the hypothesisthat productive femininity is not necessarily about the sex of the worker.To pursue this line of inquiry, she studies several assembly plants in north-ern Mexico and eventually arrives at an understanding of “feminization. . . as a discursive process which operates on both female and malebodies, producing a pool of ‘maquila-grade’ labor” (11).

Salzinger’s thesis regarding the discursive construction of productivefemininity is elaborated via a comparison of four maquiladoras in theborder state of Chihuahua, Mexico. The first of these, a television assemblyplant she calls Panoptimex, reflects a strictly gendered production regimein which female employees correspond closely to the “cheap, docile, anddexterous” worker that is the standard definition of maquila-grade labor(2003, 154). Labor control at Panoptimex is achieved via a visual economythat involves a gendered hierarchy of observation, which Salzinger defines



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as “a panopticon in which male managers watch supervisors watch womenworkers and ignore a few male workers” (60). The shop floor is highlysexualized, and relations between heavily made-up female operatives andtheir appraising male superiors correspond closely to the “factory haremmentality” described two decades earlier by Fernandez-Kelly (1983, 129).There are also male operatives at Panoptimex, but they are mostly ignored,both by management and by their female co-workers; occasional effortsby these men to assert their presence, and thus render themselves visiblein the feminized space of the production floor, are ineffectual in disruptingthis gendered production regime. Panoptimex thus exemplifies the femi-nization of export-oriented production described throughout the litera-ture on gender and transnational production. Yet Salzinger’s theoreticalcontribution is in describing this gendered production regime as itselfproduced. Like the televisions they assemble, Panoptimex’s employees aremade on the factory floor, interpellated as maquila-grade labor by a formof managerial address “in which workers are constituted and incorporatedinto production primarily as women and men and only within that frame-work as workers” (Salzinger 2003, 74).

Having described the “mechanisms through which global trope be-comes local experience” at Panoptimex (Salzinger 2003, 27), Salzingerproceeds to outline how a different set of managerial practices and workorganization at each of the other three factories she studied produces adifferently gendered production regime. At Particimex, an auto parts plantlocated in a largely agricultural area far from the maquila enclave of CiudadJuarez, female employees work alongside a smaller number of men inlargely self-directed teams. Here the trope of productive femininity func-tions as a norm to be negated, since responsibility and independence, notdocility and nubility, are the traits prized by management at Particimex.While this production regime appears to be remarkably ungendered, Sal-zinger’s careful analysis shows the ways in which gender continues tomatter, both through the contrasts that are drawn between the assertive-ness that characterizes the women at work and the submissiveness expectedof (and mostly displayed by) the same women at home and through subtlepractices in the plant that reinforce gendered hierarchies and impose limitson the kind of positions women occupy. Andromex and Anarchomex offerstill different gendered regimes: a mixed workforce composed of womenand men is gendered as masculine at Andromex, while at Anarchomexmale and female workers, as well as their ineffectual and befuddled man-agers, engage in an ongoing struggle over the gendered meaning of ma-quila work, which negatively affects the productivity of the plant.

By arguing that maquila-grade labor is produced on particular factory




floors as opposed to being found ready-made in the labor market, Salzingeraims to distance herself from what she describes as the “commonsenseessentialism” characterizing the work of earlier scholars who had studiedthe feminization of export production (2003, 15). She faults those analystsfor decrying “capital’s invidious use of women’s intrinsic exploitabilitywithout checking to see if such exploitability was indeed available for theasking” (14). Instead, Salzinger attempts to show how the workers whomcapital seeks are produced through the labor process, concluding that“femininity matters in global production, not because it accurately de-scribes a set of exploitable traits, but because it functions as a constitutivediscourse which creates exploitable subjects” (21).

While the trope of productive femininity is ubiquitous and rests on awidely shared set of assumptions about the advantages associated withdocile, dexterous, and cheap women workers, Salzinger finds that thissingular trope can accommodate significant variation in practice, as sug-gested by the different gender regimes she identifies across four produc-tion sites in a single region of northern Mexico. Variability is importantfor Salzinger’s argument, because in her view “the ‘essential similarities’between women working throughout transnational production [have]been overemphasized, increasing gender’s visibility at the cost of under-mining our capacity to recognize how gender functions in this context”(2003, 25). Consequently, she has chosen “to foreground the crucialdifferences in gendered meanings and subjectivities that emerge even inclosely situated arenas” (25). Given these differences, what explains thekind of gendered production regime that emerges on a particular shopfloor? Salzinger’s analysis gives great causal weight to the “situated visionsof managers” (34). It is by “understanding managers’ frameworks—theirlocation within structures of gender, nation, and corporation, and theperspectives that emerge from that placement—that we can begin to ac-count for the abundance of the gendered meanings we find in the Juarezmaquila industry” (163).

Ultimately, Salzinger’s argument in Genders in Production is twofold:first, that the powerful correlates on which the trope of productive fem-ininity rests (docility, dexterity, cheapness, and femaleness) are not foundin any preexisting labor force but rather are forged through the laborprocess that interpellates gendered workers; and, second, as the case stud-ies of Particimex and Anarchomex suggest, the ideal worker posited bythis trope is not necessarily the one managers will choose to produce. Theimplication of this argument, as Salzinger notes, is at once theoretical andpolitical, because it suggests both the mutability of gendered productionregimes across the landscape of global capitalism and the possibility that



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feminists and other activists can contest and ultimately transform thesearrangements. But there is a tension in the claim that gender is simul-taneously an essential category and an empty one, waiting to be filled bythe managers whose subjectivities structure the shop floor and determinethe content of the genders produced there. If productive femininity is asmalleable and contingent as Salzinger suggests, why is it so powerful andpervasive? Salzinger ultimately acknowledges the importance of this ques-tion in her conclusion, noting that productive femininity is “merely themost recent incarnation of a much older discourse” (2003, 154). Findingits resilience in the maquila industry “puzzling” given the large numbersof men working in these factories, Salzinger concludes that productivefemininity’s staying power “can in part be accounted for by the longevityof the concept of cheap labor and of women’s association with it” (154).

This brings us back to the relationship between difference and capitalthat I discussed in the opening section of this article—namely, that thisrelationship is both contingent and patterned. Salzinger’s analysis, inwhich a feminized global assembly line is understood as an aggregationof local gender regimes, privileges one of the two dimensions of therelationship; it recognizes that the gendered dimension of production iscontingent, specifically, in her account, on the situated visions of plantmanagers. But how does this inform our understanding of the patternednature of gendered production globally—that is, the consistent correlationbetween the kind of work (export-oriented production), the conditionsof work (precarious and poorly paid), and the preferred worker (female)?This correlation is the raison d’etre of the feminist literature on trans-national production, and as Salzinger notes, it persists: productive femi-ninity may be a discursive construction, but it corresponds to an empiricalregularity, which is a global assembly line that continues to be populatedprimarily by women, notwithstanding the fact that in some countries, suchas Mexico, a growing number of men are working alongside women (and,for the most part, experiencing similar conditions of work). Salzingercriticizes the first generation of feminist scholars who tried to explain thispattern, claiming that by “arguing that capital is dependent on its accessto women, they confused cause with consequence” (2003, 15). But it isnot clear how much we gain from an analysis that reverses the causalarrow, as Salzinger’s does, in positing that the feminization of industryglobally is a consequence of how gender is produced locally.

Salzinger’s failure to pursue the patterned as well as the contingentnature of gendered production in the global economy reflects the epis-temology of local causality upon which her analysis rests, or perhaps apresuppositional ontological commitment to the locality of all social forms.




It is in this sense that Genders in Production represents a break from thetexts described earlier, which attempt to explain the feminization of trans-national production and the juncture of gender and capitalism as twodistinct but imbricated logics organizing social and economic life. Capi-talism falls out of Salzinger’s analysis of how gender is produced; it isgiven little causal or explanatory weight, except as it is incarnate in themanagers whose situated visions determine how gender matters. Salzingeracknowledges that these managers must operate within limits, such as thestrategies and objectives of the corporations for which they work, butgives little attention to how these limits might constrain or enable certainconstructions of productive femininity instead of others. She further notesthat a discursive understanding of how maquila-grade labor is constituteddoes not necessitate a move away from the real, since “global productionis structured around and through abstract explanations. . . . Certainlythe managerial assumption of productive femininity is an explanatory ab-straction with tremendous consequences for the lived experiences ofwomen and men around the world” (2003, 34). While this formulationseems similar to my argument that the gendered global assembly line isa real abstraction, Salzinger’s claim is that productive femininity reflectsa managerial assumption that is widely shared but variously implemented.My argument, in contrast, is that managers’ assumptions about productivefemininity reflect not just their “location within structures of gender,nation, and corporation, and the perspectives that emerge from that place-ment” (Salzinger 2003, 163) but also their placement within a largerstructure of global capitalism and that without attending to that structureit is impossible to provide a satisfactory account of the contingent andpatterned nature of gender in transnational production.

Productive femininity, female disposability: Toward an understanding

of the gendered global assembly line as real abstraction

Melissa Wright’s book Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Cap-italism opens with this claim: “Everyday, around the world, women whowork in the third world factories of global firms face the idea that theyare disposable” (2006, 1). Like Salzinger, Wright begins by identifying apowerful trope. For her, it is the myth of the disposable woman that wemust interrogate to understand how gender shapes the organization oftransnational production, and, again like Salzinger, Wright investigateshow this discursive construct operates across multiple sites. Yet unlikeSalzinger, she also asks if there are relationships among the concrete mani-festations of disposability she identifies in particular locations on the global



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assembly line. The comparative research design that enables Wright to ex-plore this question ultimately brings her to an appreciation of the manyways in which the myth of disposability works but also to the realizationthat its mutability across locations is fundamentally bound up with themobility of global capital. Discourses of disposability differ, but in each casethey serve to devalue female labor power and to naturalize that devaluationthrough culturally specific idioms. Linking the myth of disposability to thelogic of capital, and specifically to the extraction of value from embodiedlabor, Wright is able to “put together the globality of this story and itssignificance for the global networks of capitalism” (9).

What Wright originally conceived as an ethnographic study of maquilaworkers in northern Mexico becomes a comparative inquiry into the mythsof global capitalism when she hears managers in a maquiladora comparelocal workers to their counterparts at other locations within the parentcorporation’s global production network. In terms of managing this work-force, managers specifically note the importance of knowing when workersin these various sites are “not worth keeping anymore” (2006, 9). Thisobservation leads Wright to expand the scope of her project to includefieldwork in the corporation’s factory in southern China, where she learnsthat the discourse of disposability involves managerial narratives of “fac-tory daughters, their filial obligations, and the entitlements of factoryfathers. These narratives both justify their invasive managerial techniquesas well as function as smokescreens for corporate policies that dismissworkers who become injured, ill, or pregnant during their tenure” (43).Managerial subjectivities are given their due here, as Wright, like Salzinger,recognizes the role these agents play in implementing transnational pro-duction on the ground. Yet Wright’s account also positions managerswithin the systemic logic of capitalist competition; specifically, she showsthat the mobility of capital exerts pressure on managers as well as onworkers, since the former can also be rendered disposable if the workerson their watch are found to be lacking when benchmarked against theircounterparts elsewhere on the global assembly line.

Two episodes in Disposable Women underscore the importance of capitalmobility in shaping the contingent but patterned nature of gendered pro-duction. The factory in Dongguan, China, that Wright studied is a sub-sidiary of a U.S.-based multinational firm that manufactures electronics.This corporation’s global production network included a factory in CiudadJuarez, where Wright also conducted fieldwork. Over the course ofWright’s research, the Mexican factory was closed and its production linesmoved to China. Wright argues that this outcome reflected the greatersuccess of the Asian-based managers in negotiating the turnover rate of




its female workforce—or, in other words, their superior ability to suc-cessfully manage disposability.

Wright’s interest in explaining the gendered pattern of global produc-tion does not mean that she fails to appreciate the contingent forms thatdisposability takes, as underscored by her discussion in chapter 6 of anothermaquila closure. The export-processing activity that had been carried outin this maquiladora—coupon sorting—was relocated not to southernChina but rather to a U.S. prison. Wright draws out the implications ofthis shift for the link between disposability, difference, and capital, notingthat “the myth of third world disposability can change with the times. Itscentral protagonist may take on different traits—transforming from singleand female to incarcerated and male—but the intrinsic quality of dispos-ability remains intact, along with the capitalist value that emerges fromit” (2006, 150).6 Thus, as Wright reminds us, gender is not the only axisof difference that is implicated in this process, since the distinction betweenmen and women is almost always made meaningful and socially consequentthrough its juxtaposition or intersection with other forms of difference,including race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.

In pursuing the myth of the disposable woman, Wright identifies someof the cultural idioms and social practices that generate disposability indifferent contexts, and she shows the concrete ways in which these workto naturalize the devaluation of female labor. By tracing the way dispos-ability operates across space, Wright illuminates the continuous reconfig-uration of the gendered global assembly line in a way that Salzinger cannot,precisely because Salzinger’s Genders in Production is focused on the var-

6 Ching Kwan Lee also observed the relationship between capital mobility and the de-valuation of embodied labor while studying the gendered organization of export manufac-turing in southern China. In Gender and the South China Miracle (1998), Lee argues thatthe gendered dynamics of production differ in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, in waysthat reflect the social organization of the labor market in each site. But in the midst ofcarrying out this comparative project elucidating the differences between Hong Kong’smatron workers (primarily older women who combined factory employment with their do-mestic responsibilities as wives and mothers) and Shenzhen’s maiden workers (young, un-married, and predominantly rural women who lived and worked in export-processing com-pounds that were frequently far from their home villages), the factory that served as herresearch site in Hong Kong closed. With the massive rise of export-processing on the main-land, such closures have become exceedingly common in Hong Kong. But, for Lee, whohad planned to conduct two months of additional fieldwork there, this routine event pre-sented problems for her comparative research design and also, perhaps, for her argumentregarding the coexistence of two distinct worlds of work for women in the region. As Leenotes, “The precariousness of the field itself was indicative of the fluidity of the transformationof manufacturing production in the region” (1998, 177).



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iation to be found across shop floors but not on the connections thatexist among them. The gendered organization of transnational productionis not simply a reflection of the specific meanings and practices throughwhich social difference is manifest at particular sites on the global assemblyline; it is, rather, an ongoing process in which these forms of differenceare brought within a particular social relation, which is capitalist produc-tion, and mobilized for a specific purpose, which is the creation of profit.

In this essay, I have argued for feminist analyses of the gendered natureof global production that are attentive to the contingent and patternednature of the relationship between difference and capital. Specifically, Isuggest that the gendered global assembly line is a real abstraction. It isnot only a discursive construction with material effects; the contours ofthis construction are themselves shaped by the material processes throughwhich gendered workers are enrolled into and expelled from the pro-duction networks comprising the global assembly line. Thanks to the workof feminist scholars, including several discussed in this article, we are betterable to grasp the discursive and performative dimensions of local genderregimes. But this should not be the end point of feminist political econ-omy, because while certain commitments may encourage an emphasis onthe local and specific, social reality remains multileveled and dialectical inits causal dynamics. Our inquiries into the relationship between differenceand capital must grapple with this complexity in order to generate novelunderstandings of how and why difference matters for the globalizationof production and, ultimately, to open up new forms of politics acrossgeographic and social space.

Department of SociologyUniversity of Colorado at Boulder

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