Made in Egypt: Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor by Leila Zaki Chakravarti (review)

From February to December 2004 Leila Zaki Chakravarti worked in Egypt on the shop floor of an enterprise she calls “Fashion Express”—a private-sector garment-assembly factory owned by Qasim Fahmy, a local Port Said notable. Made in Egypt: Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor is the ethnographic report of her participant observation. Chakravarti’s research is over a decade old, and the firm went out of business in August 2005. Nonetheless, the book remains a rare, fine-grained account of the formation of gendered working-class identity in Egypt, although more historical than current. It is generously illustrated with photographs, maps, plans of the factory, and figures on the organization and composition of the labor force. Chakravarti provides a helpful brief history of Port Said, including the transformation of its economic center of gravity from the commercial duty-free zone established in 1975 to the Export Processing Zone established in 2002 (renamed the Public Free Zone in 2011), where Fashion Express and sixteen other garment-assembly firms were located.

The main theoretical issues organizing the ethnography are: the interaction of global economic forces and local culture on the practices and culture of the workplace; the intersection of class, gender, and religion in recruiting, retaining, and disciplining the workforce; and workers’ compliance and contestation of management’s labor-control strategies (29). Chakravarti also examines “the lived experience of space” in the factory and concludes that the principal method of labor control was “an all-pervasive system of surveillance” that relied on formal and informal spies, who reported regularly to top management (32, 34). Unsurprisingly for those familiar with Egypt, kinship ties and a forbearing interpretation of Islam were powerful forces structuring relations at all levels of the factory hierarchy. Chakravarti’s investigations demonstrate the specific ways that the cultural and material components of class and gender relations were inextricably intertwined in this workplace.

It is well established that female ethnographers can witness critical aspects of gender relations in Egypt that are unavailable to male researchers. Made in Egypt does not disappoint in this respect. This is especially important since a majority of the 450 workers at Fashion Express were female. “Girls” were preferred for production jobs because managers considered them to be “by nature obedient and shy to say no” (77).

The detailed account of “love and consumption” on the factory floor highlights the simultaneously profound and entertaining gender analysis. Young women from rural or conservative urban backgrounds did not historically work for wages outside the home or circulate in nonfamily mixed-gender settings. Over the last several decades, however, such young, single women have entered factory work. Their families need the income and cannot otherwise provide what have become the required items for a trousseau (gihaaz).

Shop talk at Fashion Express featured gossip about flirtations, romances, appropriate feminine and masculine style, and the latest consumer goods required for a proper trousseau. Interactions between young men and women were performed in full view of their colleagues and supervisors, who policed them to maintain the respectability of the females and the reputation of the factory while encouraging pursuit of socially acceptable marital matches. Workers bought, sold, and bartered commodities during the workday. These practices transformed the shop floor “into a landscape where personal aspirations of love marriages and financial security are made real” (99).

Cash and exposure to the wider world have made aspirations for consumption previously associated with the middle class a key element in the definition of “respectable” working-class marriage and family life. For the young production workers, display of the trousseau was central to a distinctively Port Saidian wedding practice—the “fluffing party”—where a “quilt fluffer” prepares the couple’s mattress and other soft furnishings. Chakravarti is particularly proud of her account of this performance (134–37), which she believes is unique in Middle Eastern anthropological literature.

The...