Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories (review)

Anyone writing or researching in the field of development and globalization, especially as it pertains to gender, remembers the cover of Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich's Women in the Global Factory (1983). The close-up picture is of a young, female employee using a microscope to do the tedious work characteristic of a sweatshop environment. The lingering sentiment, which echoes through much of the feminist literature on globalization, is that development has been built on the shoulders of this woman and others like her – docile, submissive women who serve as a seemingly endless supply pool of cheap labor in developing countries. The only catch being that such a claim demands an assumption of the feminine as both static and universal, and that particular attributes are inherently female. In this model, multi-national corporations are simply opportunistic in their exploitation of pre-existing gender roles. While this perspective fueled a multitude of important research around gender and globalization, it also provided something of a theoretical dead end, leaving little space for understanding resistance, agency, and subversiveness.

True to the endorsements on the back cover of the book, Genders in Production pushes for an upwelling of new arguments around these issues. A welcome respite, this text offers an alternative to the above perspective, and author, Leslie Salzinger, succeeds in writing a compelling narrative that carries interdisciplinary relevance. In the feminist vein, it is self-reflexive and ethnographic, but also offers a stinging critique of the essentialist view that has historically underscored literature in this field. In her alternate model, Salzinger does not abandon the primacy of gender in global production. On the contrary, she affirms its importance, but argues for the malleability of its nature rather than a fundamental stasis.

Adopting a more postmodern posture, Salzinger focuses her theoretical lens to investigate specifically how gender is produced within four Ciudad Juarez maquilas as she examines the creation of meaning in action. Through fieldwork which included working the lines in three of the maquilas, and functioning as observer in the fourth, she reveals the fragility of gender, exposing the almost constant need for reinforcement through words and performance. Each of the factories is assigned a suggestive pseudonym, reflective of how "femininities are idiosyncratic, evoked in the distinctive intentions and constraints of each shop floor." A point of departure from previous literature, Salzinger illuminates how it is the managers who arrive with preconceived notions not simply around gender, but nationality, productivity, efficiency and success, as opposed to workers arriving with preordained skills.

These managerial assumptions create the reality that ultimately manifests on the shop floor as workers begin to understand themselves and their gender roles through the language and meaning assigned to them. So, in Panoptimex, where power is understood through visual controls, appearance and sexuality are simultaneously emphasized and strictly monitored. However in Particimex, where a participatory model is espoused, gendered discourses are refocused around work and productivity, with workers dressed in smocks and addressed as "collaborators." Gender constructions here are infused with the discourse of modernity. The more unisex appearance of this shop floor, as well as the Andromex floor – which militarizes worker identities – creates an association between technological advancement and a lack of overt sexuality. Taken together, the four sites offer vastly different examples of gender coding, each the trajectory of a particular management style that imagines the ideal worker in varying ways.

In place of fixed notions of femininity in global capitalism, Genders in Production offers fertile ground for further study, a much more encouraging alternative in our opinion. Unfortunately, although Salzinger adeptly draws out the nuances of context in gender construction as it pertains to the case studies, when it comes to the larger context of contemporary research in the field, the brush strokes remain too wide. We appreciate the challenge to essentialist theories, but some of the work she posits herself in contrast to is overly simplified. Several of the...