Women in question: Gender and labor in Bangladeshi factories.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the process of proletarianization and cultural transformation among women garment factory workers in contemporary Bangladesh. Located within a general analysis of gender in the project of national development, the main research questions focus on contestations over gender discourses and practices that have emerged with the creation of a predominantly Muslim, female industrial labor force. Two fundamental issues are addressed throughout the work: (1) the centrality of sexuality in mediating the reconstitution of gender and labor under conditions of change and (2) the links between the individual consciousness of women workers in Bangladesh and the local workings of international capital. These two themes are tied together by mapping the disciplinary practices, on the shop floor and beyond, which critically shape factory workers' subjectivities. Such practices can be subsumed under what Foucault calls practices of modernity. They promote modern forms of self-management and surveillance among workers, intensifying or reworking in many ways both class and gender domination. The deployment of sexuality, in particular, produces differences between workers that allows for better management. Underlying the analysis of the specific conditions of factory workers is the assertion that, despite differences in class and religion, discursive practices mark all Bangladeshi women as being in question when they stray into male public spaces. Women factory workers as a category are public women, whose presence is automatically open to question. This study uncovers the ways in which the discursive regulations of factory workers' sexuality, mediated by class distinctions, are similar to those of other women who transgress the social and spatial order of things. The possibilities for resistance as factory workers are similarly structured through such discursive regulations. The dissertation also explores ways of writing about women in Muslim societies without reinscribing older Orientalist stereotypes still evident in developmentalist discourses currently. Challenging the tradition/modernity dichotomy conventionally written into studies of Muslim women and work, it focuses instead on the ways in which individual women negotiate and modify various practices of seclusion as they come out to work. The study concludes that the experience of modern industrial labor for this group of women is inconsistent and contradictory, often reinforcing or reconstituting forms of domination through invoking the traditional.