CFP - ALONG THE CROSSROADS OF FLEXIBLE KIN AND FLEXIBLE LABOR: PERFORMING WOMANHOOD WITHIN GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN CAPITALISM

CFP - ALONG THE CROSSROADS OF FLEXIBLE KIN AND FLEXIBLE LABOR:
PERFORMING WOMANHOOD WITHIN GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN CAPITALISM

SESSION ORGANIZERS: Nellie Chu (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Keywords: Global supply chain capitalism, kinship, womanhood, labor and
class politics

In the past few decades, global supply chains have increasingly relied on
the fragmentation and diversity of historically and spatially-specific
mobilizations of labor, capital, and resources (Ong 1991, Friedberg 2004,
Tsing 2009, Chalfin 2009). These capitalistic operations range from
outsourcing methods, factory sweatshops, family firms, to home-based
assembly work. At the same time, these global supply chains remain
remarkably dependent on feminized, migratory, and affective kinship
networks in order to sustain its trans-national reach as well as to
facilitate the flexible forms of entrepreneurship, wage labor, and
trans-national capital accumulation. From familial relationships, native
place networks, indigenous identifications, to ethical affiliations,
gender and kinship remain at the forefront of flexible capitalist
production and reproduction precisely because of their cultural resilience
and their multiplicity of relationships and forms.

Most notably, women serve as the key drivers in mobilizing, reshaping, and
reinforcing the flexible strategies of kinship and capitalist accumulation.
These women serve as the critical agents in the constitution of low-wage
factory labor (Ong 1987, Rofel 1998, Collins 2003, Pun 2005, Cairoli 2011),
performance of service work (Constable 1997, Moreton 2009), accumulation of
raw materials for manufacture (Chalfin 2009), and small-scale
entrepreneurship (Siu 2010). For example, the case of the "iPhone girl" in
2008 illustrates the pervasive figure of "the young factory girl" across
the World Wide Web within readers' imaginations and speculations of
factory
labor practices in China. Collectively, these working women represent the
world's low-wage workforce. They also constitute the varied affective and
biological modes of belonging through which they negotiate their personal
autonomy and identities within cross-cultural regimes of labor
exploitation, capital accumulation, patriarchy, and nation-state
governance. While anthropologists have pointed out that the feminization
of the global labor force simultaneously implies the retreat of
class-based solidarities and workers' resistance (Ong 1991, Lee 1998,
Comaroff 2000), what alternative forms of collectivist activist and
participatory politics among the world's feminized workforce can
anthropologists identify and mobilize?

By re-asserting women at the forefront of global supply chain capitalism,
this panel seeks to bring together the transnational contexts of work
spaces, labor regimes, and modes of belonging through which these female
agents perform, challenge, and reinforce their individual and collective
subjectivities as working women. To this end, this panel raises the
following inquiries:

* What are the specific labor regimes and institutionalized governance
to which these women are subjected around the world? What novel forms of
resistance, ambivalence, or accommodation do women use to respond to these
particular modes of power?
* What are the historically and spatially-specific forms of female and
kin-based subjectivities and collectivities through which working women
perform, construct, and affirm their identifications as workers or
non-workers?
* In what ways do workers' assertions of female subjectivities enable
or subvert multi-scalar regimes of patriarchy and labor exploitation
or
self-exploitation?
* How does anthropological attention of the varied constructions of
working womanhood illuminate the diverse forms of intimacy and belonging
upon which flexible accumulation depends? Can do we bridge these
constructions across geographical, linguistic, and affective divides?

For interested panelists, please submit your proposed abstract of no more
than 250 words to Nellie Chu (nxchu@ucsc.edu) by April 1, 2013.