Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera by Rosemary Hennessy (review)

We have very few conceptual tools with which to identify embodied intensities as they work their way through consciousness into the realm of emotions and feelings. How do we name this process? Are we aware of the many transformations of our corporeal sensations into thoughts or language? Likely we are not. Even less do we consider what their social impact might be. In Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera, Rosemary Hennessey asks us to consider these things.

Though her work with the Coalition for Justice in the Maquilas, Hennessey became curious about the role that structures of feeling play in organized resistance by workers. Despite the brutal violence and unspeakable acts of terror committed against workers in the northern border region of Mexico in recent years, neither the power of employers, nor the warring drug cartels’ governance by fear has been totalizing. Workers continue to be moved to act collectively to resist their working and living conditions nonetheless. Hennessey, as a participant observer and feminist cultural theorist began asking about the motivating dynamics permitting activists to organize, despite the dangers and ruling technologies of fear employed against them.

In part, Hennessey asks the reader to engage in a conceptual journey in which she explores the insights from theorists of affect as they might intersect with historical materialism and feminist concerns with the social relations under which basic needs are met and social reproduction is organized. For Hennessey, affect arises in each of us as an indeterminate and unformed quality. She rejects naturalist theories of emotion and suggests instead an interplay of bodily sensations, perception, consciousness and conveyance to others. Affect exists in the interconnection of mind-body-emotion and permeates the ways that production and care are undertaken. Hennessey’s brilliant contribution to labour studies in particular, and social movement theory more generally, is to offer us the concept of “affect-culture.”

For Hennessey, affect-culture is the transmission of embodied sensations and cognitive emotions through cultural practices, which are themselves contested. Affects bind us to one another and locates us in an environment. Individual activists bring their affect-culture with them to their organizing practices and each movement has its own emotional norms. Consequently, argues Hennessey, activists should become aware of this little-noticed ambience in which they are immersed. If affect-culture is an unconscious dimension of the movement, then its potential may not be realized in collective struggle, or worse, its negative impact might wear away the vibrancy of the movement and the relationships between participants.

The book is not a study of organizing strategy in labour struggles, as much as it is an exploration of affect discussed thematically and in conversation with rich literatures in each chapter. In particular, Hennessey brings an historical materialist and feminist reading of sexuality, nonconforming sexual identity and gender in the affect culture of organizing in the maquilas. In an introductory account mapping some of her own affective encounters, she locates her role in this project as one of bearing witness and identifies her responsibility to learn how to navigate the affective terrain as an outsider.

Each chapter is thematically focused. For example, Foucault’s insight about the “open secret” organizes a discussion of the knowing-not knowing when prescribed sexual identities are challenged within organizing campaigns or in all-female workforces. How does sexual identity feature in the affective culture of organizing, asks Hennessey? How do open secrets become part of the undercurrent of collective movements, or enter into the relations of power between workers, the state and capital? Hennessey explores the relationship of bodies and economies in an effort to queer materialism, or present a “socialism of the skin” that would consider the relationship between surplus value and cultural value and asks how embodiment and identity formation become part of the devaluing of some bodies, more than others within capitalism. She locates this discussion...