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

This book is an ethnographic study of the economic activities of women workers at an export-oriented garment manufacturing firm located within Port Said's Export Processing Zone. With its workforce of about 450 employees, almost half of them female, this firm is a good case to discuss the public and visible economic activities of women in Egypt's globalized textile sector. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2004—almost the peak of neoliberalism—Leila Zaki Chakravarti scrutinizes the economic environment within which the firm competes; the ways factory management manipulates the categories of class, gender, and religion as a cutting-edge means of surviving in this globally competitive environment; and the ways the workers contest or appropriate the control strategies of the administration for their own interests.

Chakravarti starts by weaving the global and the local context within which the firm operates in concentric circles. The outer layer is Port Said. One of the more modern and industrialized cities of Egypt, Port Said is an important gate between Egypt and global capitalism. The second outer circle is the Export Processing Zone, a locus of integration between domestic and international private sectors as well as the center of Port Said's commercial culture. The innermost circle, which also makes up the core of this ethnographic study, is the enterprise named the Fashion Express in the book. Tracing the connections between the outer to the inner levels enables Chakravarti to situate her research in broader economic and cultural contexts. This is evidenced by the elaborate description of the production process, from cutting to assembly and packing, in the introduction. Chakravarti's thick description allows readers to imagine the shop floor and provides a vivid picture of it by giving the workers flesh and bones.

The four chapters that constitute the body of the book elaborately discuss the relations between the administration and labor as well as among the workers. Chakravarti first focuses on the "firm as family," representing a distinctive management model and workplace culture meant to ensure the loyalty and the compliance of the employees. Three main operating principles of the Fashion Express make the firm a family: ikhlass (loyalty), ihtiram (respectability), and taraabut (togetherness). By enacting these principles, the proprietor becomes a patriarch, demanding good work from the employees at all levels not only as the owner of the factory but also as the head of the factory household. In practice, Chakravarti demonstrates how this is an effective strategy for the firm to overcome crises. These values do not make the shop floor free of control, surveillance, and exploitation, which she illustrates from a bottom-up perspective; rather, they make the harsh realities of these everyday experiences less visible while ensuring the consent of the workers.

Around 450 male and female employees working in the same place means that the shop floor is often the site of emotional relations. It is not rare that the workers of the firm show solidarity with one another and establish real, not symbolic, families. Chapter 3 examines the norms and experiences of love relations in the factory through a gendered perspective. It demonstrates that factory work, though rife with exploitation, also offers emotional and commercial opportunities, transforming the factory from a space of production to a space of consumption.

Chapter 4 examines the female employees at the administrative ranks through the notions of discipline and nurture. Although there are only a handful of female supervisors in the thin layer of foremen and supervisors between entag (production) and edara (administration), their position brought them gendered benefits and burdens. The female supervisors have a performative existence as they yell, shout, and move across the shop floor all day long. Mishmish (tomcat) femininity is the term Chakravarti uses to denote the gendered labor identity of the female supervisors. She thus proposes that female supervisors discipline the workers in their charge through both masculine characteristics of...