Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia

King, Victor T.; Ong, Aihwa

doi:10.2307/2802836

Cited by 15 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…Work is thus gender‐conditioned in the sense that female workers experience both the potentialities which come with disruption and the gendered crisis such disruption might provoke in rupturing established images of femininity and masculinity (cf. Cross 2012; Leshkowich 2011; Ong 1987; Rofel 1992).…”

Section: Technology and Masculinitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Women, on the other hand, tend to end up with tedious tasks such as collecting, sorting, wiring, and stacking, all of which call for dexterity and a focus on detail. These jobs are characterized by ‘hardship’ ( vất vả ), even though they might not resemble light industrial high‐speed quota‐determined assembly‐line work (Lee 2016; Ngai 2005; Ong 1987).…”

Section: Technology and Masculinitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Haraway 1991; Khuat 2016; Strathern 1996). Producing and using technology in the industry disrupt established ideas about gender, femininity, and masculinity, but with strings attached because of the groundwork involved in transforming established gender norms and the risk of causing a gender‐order crisis at the workplace (Ong 1987; Rofel 1992). Than, from Yate, captured the gendered imbalances imbued in women's engagement with technology and machinery:

Actually, those of us who are female engineers, we live in a man's world and we need to act like men.…”

Section: ‘A Man's World’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These, for instance, show how women workers in China's internationally owned companies face precaritization rather than empowerment (Lee 2016; Ngai 2005), thus countering research suggesting that working in light industry might provide a path to women's empowerment, as in the case of young Vietnamese women eager to eschew parental control (Bélanger & Pendakis 2010). In Malaysia's foreign‐owned factories, incidents of spirit possessions, according to Aihwa Ong (1987), resulted in ambiguous empowerment: halting assembly‐line work gave immediate relief but also meant public stigmatization of female workers. Women workers in China's globalized silk industry took another route, as described by Lisa Rofel (1992), in demarcating age‐ and skill‐defined subversive spaces to oppose production pressure in the face of Western notions of modernity, industry, and rationality.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disrupting ‘a man's world’: gender, technology, and class in Vietnam's global heavy industry

Rydström

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Only rarely is Vietnam's global heavy industry studied from an anthropological perspective in either its gender or its class dimensions. This article contributes new insights into the ways in which the interagential dynamics of gender and technology from shopfloor to engineer offices coproduce social orders in contesting and perpetuating essentializing notions of femininity and masculinity. Blue‐collar and white‐collar women working in heavy industrial workplaces represent a minority in ‘a man's world’, ambiguously both disidentifying and identifying with notions of a typical ‘female character’ vis‐à‐vis ‘male character’. Women working in heavy industry, the article shows, generate ‘disruption’ by reconfiguring conventions regarding gendered occupation, redefining gendered engagement with technology, and recalibrating images of femininity and masculinity. Doing so means carving out new opportunities and/or provoking crisis in a patrilineal universe. The article analyses the intricate ways in which women's engagement with technology is empowering while simultaneously reinforcing gender‐ and class‐specific inequalities in socialist Vietnam's global market economy.

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Section: Technology and Masculinitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Technology and Masculinitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Actually, those of us who are female engineers, we live in a man's world and we need to act like men.…”

Section: ‘A Man's World’mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disrupting ‘a man's world’: gender, technology, and class in Vietnam's global heavy industry

Rydström

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…The Nepali case has unique cultural and geo-political factors that shape women's experience of violence in migration, yet this case is also indicative of the increase in women's labour out-migration from across Asia and the attendant issues of governance and vulnerability that arise (Piper, 2008). Transnational feminist scholarship on women's labour migration has exposed violence at various junctures in the labour migration process: the violence of capitalist discipline (Ong, 2010), the violence of bureaucracy (Cheng, 2003;Ngan and Chan, 2013) and the violence of racism and sexism in receiving countries (Lan, 2006: 59-93;Pande, 2012). This literature is enormously helpful in positioning the Nepali case as part of global systems of gendered labour; however, I turn to a different scholarship to discuss violence as an object of analysis itself.…”

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confidence: 99%

Theorising violence in mobility: A case of Nepali women migrant workers

Grossman–Thompson

2021

Feminist Theory

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In this article, I examine violence as constitutive of mobility for the feminine diasporic subject through an examination of women migrant workers from Nepal. I frame this project with two distinct theoretical approaches to understanding violence. First, I draw upon Catharine MacKinnon's provocative question ‘Are women human?’ to elucidate points of disjuncture between individual women migrants and state policy that dehumanises them. Second, I address some of the gaps in MacKinnon's work by turning to Judith Butler's theory of violence as primarily embodied in the corporeal subject. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with returned women migrant workers, I examine three moments in the migration process that demonstrate how violence operates ubiquitously in and through circuits of mobility. I conclude that by putting Butler's and Mackinnon's approaches to violence in dialogue and examining the Nepali case through a dialectic framework, intriguing possibilities for approaching migration and its problematics are revealed.

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The Anthropology of Special Economic Zones (Free Ports, Export Processing Zones, Tax Havens)

Neveling¹

2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology

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Special economic zones (SEZs) are a key manifestation of neoliberal globalization. As of 2020, more than 150 nations operated more than 5,400 zones. The combined workforce of factories and service industries in bonded warehouses, export processing zones (EPZs), free trade zones (FTZs), science parks (SPs), regional development zones (RDZs), economic corridors (ECs), and other types of SEZs exceeds one hundred million. These figures include tax havens, offshore financial centers, and free ports. Neoliberal academics and researchers from international organizations say that this has been a long time coming, as the freedom offered in the zones was integral to being human and first implemented in free ports of the Roman Empire. Critical social scientists, among them many anthropologists, have instead identified the zones as products of a 1970s rupture from Keynesian welfarism and Fordist factory regimes to neoliberal globalization and post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Since the early 21st century, scholarship in anthropology has expanded this critical stance on worker exploitation in SEZs toward a historical analysis of SEZs as pacemakers of neoliberal manufacturing globalization since the 1940s. A second strand of ethnographies uses a postmodern lens to research the zones as regimes that produce neoliberal subjectivities and graduated sovereignty.

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Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Disrupting ‘a man's world’: gender, technology, and class in Vietnam's global heavy industry

Disrupting ‘a man's world’: gender, technology, and class in Vietnam's global heavy industry

Theorising violence in mobility: A case of Nepali women migrant workers

The Anthropology of Special Economic Zones (Free Ports, Export Processing Zones, Tax Havens)

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