Crossing the Factory Frontier: Gender, Place and Power in the Mexican Maquiladora

Abstract

Across disciplines, a pressing question raised by contemporary feminist theorists is how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between "real" women -women as social agents -and "Woman"-an ideological representation of a female subject (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990; Poovey, 1990). In addressing this issue, some feminist scholars have shown how women often face the paradoxical situation of having to disavow this Woman in order to become the kind of women they want to be (Scott, 1996). For instance, in the workplace women still frequently contend with representations of Woman as the embodiment of a hormonally unstable, fecund, passive and uncontrollably sexual subject which they must somehow subvert in their efforts to establish their own careers (Martin, 1987;McDowell, 1995). A related question asks: Can we theorize how women participate in their own representation of themselves while simultaneously rejecting the representation of themselves as exemplars of Woman?Although I cannot explore all facets of this vexing issue, I will open up the discussion by way of an exploration of one woman's journey through the ideological representation of her as a "typical Mexican woman" in the Mexican maquiladoras. 1 My aim is to demonstrate how this ideology produces the capitalist division of labor through the reproduction of sex-difference, nationality and ethnic categories within one firm.The Mexican woman I highlight has the goal of becoming skilled within a U.S.-based firm that is initiating efforts to upgrade its Mexican labor force as part of a larger strategy for making the transition to flexible production.

Unsettling the Yin-Yang Harmony: An Analysis of Gender Inequalities in Academic Mobility among Chinese Scholars

“…Reflecting the propensity of women's engagement in specific economic sectors, the extant body of literature on gender and migration/mobilities has a heavy focus on gender divisions of mobility and work experiences played out in mostly lesser-/de-skilled sectors such as export-orientated manufacturing (e.g., Pun, 2004;Wright, 1997), domestic and care work (e.g., Lutz, 2011;Momsen, 1999;Parreñas, 2001;Pratt, 1997), sex work (e.g., Anderson and Phizacklea, 1997;Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003), escort and entertainment work (Truong, 1996;Tyner, 1996), and to a lesser extent in entrepreneurship (Apitzsch und Kontos, 2003;Hillmann, 2007). Comparatively, the significance of gender in higher-skilled migration/ mobilities had a late start (Kofmann and Raghuram, 2005).…”

Imagining the future from the margins: cyborg labor in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer

“…After his father is killed, Memo goes north to Tijuana to earn money to help support his family. Viewers follow Memo to this new location and can see the landscape here is dominated by global assembly plants, known commonly as maquiladoras, or maquilas (Wright 1997;Cravey 1998). In Tijuana, assisted by a coyotech (a cybercoyote), 1 Memo becomes a node-worker in a modern global assembly-factory, a maquiladora.…”

Detailing spaces and processes of resistance: Working women in Dundee’s jute industry

“…Although the geography of the factory system has been discussed (see for example, Spain 1992 andStein 1995), except for the work of Wright (1997) and Ong (1987) to which this paper contributes, little attention has been paid to the spaces and processes of resistance that operated in tandem with procedures of social and spatial control. For example, writing about factory life in Cornwall, Ontario in the mid to late nineteenth century, Stein (1995) suggests that space was important for two reasons: first, because of its role in implementing social control; and second, because the tending of machines had implications for the way space itself was conceptualised.…”