I. Peasant Women become Proletarians

A. Boserup didn't anticipate women's factory work in textile and electronics sectors, particularly in Asia
B. Engels revisited

 

II. Ong: Malaysian Women and Factory Work

A. Malaysian women workers in Japanese-owned electronics factories in a Free Trade Zone (FTZ)

1. Companies exempted from most duties and taxes
2. FTZ near transportation lines
3. Countryside provides workers
4. Ong's research: FTZ founded in 1972, 3 companies, 2000 workers

B. Workers: young, unmarried, commute from family's home in the village
C. Benefits to women from factory work

1. Delay marriage, choose partners
2. Increased role in household decisions, strengthening of mothers and daughters vs. fathers
3. More independent social life, dating, premarital sex
4. Personal spending money, individualized consumption

D. Significant disadvantages

1. Lack of schooling, boys get educational preferences
2. Double burden of factory work and household chores; factory women work 3.5 hours more per day than ordinary women
3. Rigid time-based routines of capitalist work
4. Factory discipline: male scrutiny, restrictive uniforms
5. Public scrutiny of workers' morality

a. Islamic revival: factory women as immoral, sexually loose, and not religious
b. Expresses "anxiety over the social effects of capitalist development" (8)
c. Jail and fines for close proximity to men
d. Self-discipline: purity and self-sacrifice

6. Delayed marriage means longer status as junior and subordinate
7. State policies keep women subordinate to attract foreign investment

 

III. Discipline and Spirits on the Factory Floor

A. "Why are Malay women workers periodically seized by spirit possession on the shopfloor of modern factories?" (xiii)
B. Modern factory makes traditional spirits seem incongruous
C. Spirit possession = draw upon traditional beliefs to express alienation and dislocation from circumstances of labor
D. Peasant factory workers as transitional
E. Spirit possession as a strategy of resistance against the "dehumanizing aspects of market relations" (202)
F. Similar to Taussig: evil spirits mediate between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of subjectivity, but Ong says not class consciousness or critique of exchange value
G. Primary conflict: male-dominated discipline which offends their Muslim and kampung sensibilities
H. Foucault's concept of discipline

1. Factories control workers through discipline: divide body's activities into units of time or sequences of action which can be regulated
2. Discipline is power

a. Overt: physically control bodies
b. Covert: work rhythms and logic of production are internalized

I. Workers police each other and selves
J. Spirit possession resists discipline

1. Construct new ways of being
2. "Protest against the loss of autonomy/humanity in work" (8)
3. Fashion new "self-constitution" based on shared, ungendered "human dignity" (196)

 

IV. Evaluating Ong

A. Capitalism and peasant life as two opposing worldviews

1. Spirits belong to past: "The rural Malay landscape is still inhabited by spirits which move easily between human and nonhuman domains" (203).
2. Factory/village; subsistence cultivation/capitalist production; spirits/rationality
3. Are spirits really that incongruous?

B. What is life really like on factory floor? Is the discipline as bad as she describes?
C. Need more information about spirit possessions
D. Are spirits resistance? Will they continue to be so?
E. Rarity of attacks: enough to support broader claims?
F. Romanticization of peasant lifestyles and work rhythms
G. Assumes spirits to be incongruous in factory, so book is about finding the sense of dislocation to explain this incongruity: circular?
H. Provides compelling argument that factory labor doesn't necessarily liberate women
I. "Modern" work and time patterns can be oppressive
J. Gender ideologies work to undercut whatever autonomy jobs might grant (discourses of morality of young women workers)
K. Role of families, transnational corporations, Malaysian government

For Wednesday's class, read: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/opinion/workers-of-the-world-faint.html