UC Berkeley

Global restructuring is a gendered process. In transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms of tropes of gendered personhood, and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its implications for workers themselves. The paper explores this process through narrating the evolution of a local labor market in Mexico's export-processing (maquila) industry. In so doing, the account reveals globalization to be less linear, obdurate and inevitable than many theories suggest. In this context, managers gendered commitments, desires and understandings prove to be literally counterproductive, undermining industry-wide shop-floor control.