This article describes and analyzes how female garment-factory workers in Sri Lanka's Free Trade Zones collectively express their difference from dominant classes and males and articulate their identities as a gendered group of migrant industrial workers by cultivating different tastes and by engaging in oppositional cultural practices. In the urban, modernized, and globalized areas of the FTZs, women develop unique tastes in the realms of music, dance, film, reading material, styles of dress, speech, and mannerisms. By performing subcultural styles that are subversive critiques of dominant values in public spaces, they pose a conscious challenge to the continued economic, social, and cultural domination they endure. But while workers' participation in a stigmatized culture is explicitly transgressive and critical at some levels, their demonstrated acquiescence to different hegemonic influences marks the inseparability of resistance and accommodation.
Utilizing extensive ethnographic research in Sri Lanka's Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ), this article analyzes women workers' engagement in sexual banter on city streets. It argues that these acts and the sexualized vocabulary associated with them are contextually negotiated and, by challenging the dominant mores of respectability, also empower its practitioners. The article further argues that by uncritically adopting Western notions of sexual harassment to condemn sexual banter NGOs have unintentionally colluded in the capitalist global scheme to produce docile working-class women and thereby ensure an ideal assembly line workforce. The article comments on how women workers refused to be governed by technologies of self, which were disseminated by the media and NGO workshops as appropriate for modern, educated, and urban women, and how this refusal not only marks their difference from the middle classes but also represent one way in which they participate in subaltern politics.
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