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Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women

Ching Kwan Lee

Yuk-ling, a busy Hong Kong mother of two, and Chi-ying, a young single woman from a remote village in northern China, work in electronics factories owned by the same foreign corporation, ... More

Yuk-ling, a busy Hong Kong mother of two, and Chi-ying, a young single woman from a remote village in northern China, work in electronics factories owned by the same foreign corporation, manufacturing identical electronic components. After a decade of job growth and increasing foreign investment in Hong Kong and south China, both women are also participating in the spectacular economic transformation that has come to be called the South China miracle. Yet, as this book demonstrates in its unique and fascinating study of women workers on either side of the Chinese–Hong Kong border, the working lives and factory cultures of these women are vastly different. This comparative ethnography describes how two radically different factory cultures have emerged from a period of profound economic change. In Hong Kong, “matron workers” remain in factories for decades. In Guangdong, a seemingly endless number of young “maiden workers” travel to the south from northern provinces, following the promise of higher wages. Whereas the women in Hong Kong participate in a management system characterized by “familial hegemony,” the young women in Guangdong find an internal system of power based on regional politics and kin connections, or “localistic despotism.” The book concludes that it is primarily the differences in the gender politics of the two labor markets that determine the culture of each factory. It argues that gender plays a crucial role in the cultures and management strategies of factories that rely heavily on women workers.Less

Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development

Kathryn Moeller

The Girl Effect tells the story of how and why U.S. transnational corporations are investing in poor, racialized girls and women in the Global South as a solution to ending poverty in the pursuit of ... More

The Girl Effect tells the story of how and why U.S. transnational corporations are investing in poor, racialized girls and women in the Global South as a solution to ending poverty in the pursuit of economic growth. This book fundamentally departs from the prominent individuals and institutions that promote this logic of development. Through a multi-sited ethnography in powerful institutions, including Nike Inc., the Nike Foundation, the World Bank, the Clinton Global Initiative, and international nongovernmental organizations, this book draws on over a decade of research in the United States and Brazil to understand how these corporatized development practices simultaneously position girls and women as instruments of poverty alleviation and as new frontiers for capitalist accumulation. Its ethnographic insights demonstrate how diverse, unequally resourced actors negotiate corporatized development, and reveal its intended and unintended effects for girls and corporations. Moeller illuminates how corporations, in partnership with liberal feminists and development experts, have sought to free capitalism from the constraints of gender inequality without fundamentally transforming the lives of the girls and women that they claim to serve. She concludes that these development practices enable corporations to expand their legitimacy, authority, and reach, while depoliticizing girls’ and women’s demands for a fair global economy.Less

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

Rickie Solinger

Rebecca Sharitz (ed.)

This book is a collection of writings by and about imprisoned women in the United States, a country that jails a larger percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. This work ... More

This book is a collection of writings by and about imprisoned women in the United States, a country that jails a larger percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. This work brings together many voices from both inside and outside the prison system including incarcerated and previously incarcerated women, their advocates and allies, abolitionists, academics, and other analysts. In vivid, often highly personal essays, poems, stories, reports, and manifestos, they offer an unprecedented view of the realities of women prisoners' experiences as they try to sustain relations with children and family on the outside, struggle for healthcare, fight to define and achieve basic rights, deal with irrational sentencing systems, remake life after prison; and more. Together, these writings are an intense examination of life behind bars for women, and, taken together, they underscore the failures of imagination and policy that have too often underwritten the current prison system in the United States.Less

Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter

Laurie Essig

In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig argues that love is not all we need. As the future became less secure—with global climate change and the transfer of wealth to the few—Americans became more romantic. ... More

In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig argues that love is not all we need. As the future became less secure—with global climate change and the transfer of wealth to the few—Americans became more romantic. Romance is not just what lovers do but also what lovers learn through ideology. As an ideology, romance allowed us to privatize our futures, to imagine ourselves as safe and secure tomorrow if only we could find our "one true love" today. But the fairy dust of romance blinded us to what we really need: global movements and structural changes. By traveling through dating apps and spectacular engagements, white weddings and Disney honeymoons, Essig shows us how romance was sold to us and why we bought it. Love, Inc. seduced so many of us into a false sense of security, but it also, paradoxically, gives us hope in hopeless times. This book explores the struggle between our inner cynics and our inner romantic.Less

"Love, Money, and HIV": Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS

Sanyu A. Mojola

Drawing on a rich variety of interviews and ethnographic and survey data from her native country of Kenya, Sanyu Mojola examines how young African women, who suffer disproportionate rates of HIV ... More

Drawing on a rich variety of interviews and ethnographic and survey data from her native country of Kenya, Sanyu Mojola examines how young African women, who suffer disproportionate rates of HIV infection compared to young African men, navigate their relationships, schooling, employment, and financial access in the context of a devastating HIV epidemic, economic inequality, and a changing ecological environment. Writing from a unique outsider-insider perspective, Mojola argues that the entanglement of love, money, and the production and transformation of girls into “consuming women” lies at the heart of women’s health and coming-of-age crises. Engaging in themes of gender, consumption, and the transition to adulthood, this text is an incisive analysis of gender, sexuality, and health in Africa.Less

Masculine Compromise: "Migration, Family, and Gender in China"

Susanne "Yuk-Ping Choi and Yinni Peng

How has migration changed the Chinese family? Drawing on the life stories of 192 migrant men in southern China, this book examines the effect of mass rural-to-urban migration on family and gender ... More

How has migration changed the Chinese family? Drawing on the life stories of 192 migrant men in southern China, this book examines the effect of mass rural-to-urban migration on family and gender relationships with a specific focus on changes in men and masculinities. Our findings show that migration has considerably transformed the relationships between migrant men and their lovers, spouses, children, and parents. Young and single migrant men are thrust into the tension between the persistent influence of rural parents in their grown children’s marriage decisions and the increasing cultural legitimacy for individuals in urban centers to pursue love, romance, and sexual autonomy. Married migrant men have found it increasingly difficult to maintain the traditional dominance and privilege of the husband in the realms of marital decision making and the domestic division of labor. Migrant men with children find it hard to handle the emotional distance between themselves and the children they left behind. Migrant men also need to renegotiate their traditional obligation as filial sons from afar. If women bargain with patriarchy, the migrant men in our study make masculine compromises: they strive to preserve the gender boundary and their symbolic dominance within the family by making concessions on marital power and domestic division of labor and by redefining filial piety and fatherhood. The concept of masculine compromise captures the agency and strategies of men in negotiating their changing roles and gender identity in the family, and it provides a feminist framework to analyze uneven changes in gender practices and identity.Less

Recreating Japanese Men

Sabine Fruhstuck (ed.)

The chapters in this book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The book examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits ... More

The chapters in this book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The book examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men’s sense of gender as authentic and stable.Less

Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice

Joseph J. Fischel

Consent is threadbare for sexual-justice politics, argues author Joseph Fischel. Spotlighting sex on the periphery, Screw Consent takes aim at the sex imagined at the center of our moral universe: ... More

Consent is threadbare for sexual-justice politics, argues author Joseph Fischel. Spotlighting sex on the periphery, Screw Consent takes aim at the sex imagined at the center of our moral universe: adult, consensual. Each chapter turns another “screw” on consent, interrogating sex that is unfamiliar, atypical, or weird. Consent, shows Fischel, is alternatively insufficient, inapposite, or riddled with scope contradictions. It therefore cannot scaffold a democratically hedonic sexual culture. Access and autonomy, the author suggests, are more promising idioms for our sexual politics.Less

Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering

Cameron Lynne Macdonald

This book shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with ... More

This book shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the “shadow mothers” they hire. This book illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers—immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs—this book locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. The book argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work.Less

Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones

Wenona Giles (ed.)

In conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guatemala and Somalia, the rules of war are changing dramatically. Distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and ... More

In conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guatemala and Somalia, the rules of war are changing dramatically. Distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and domestic security are breaking down. In this especially timely book, a powerful group of international authors doing feminist research brings the highly gendered and racialized dimensions of these changes into sharp relief. In essays on nationalism, the political economy of conflict, and the politics of asylum, they investigate what happens when the body, household, nation, state, and economy become sites at which violence is invoked against people. In particular, these hard-hitting essays move us forward in our understanding of violence against women — how it is perpetrated, survived, and resisted. They explore the gendered politics of ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka, the post-Yugoslav states, and Israel and Palestine. They consider “honor killings” in Iraqi Kurdistan, armed conflict in the Sudan, and geographies of violence in Ghana. This volume augments feminist analysis on conflict zones and contributes to transnational coalition-building and feminist organizing.Less

So How's the Family?: And Other Essays

Arlie Russell Hochschild

This book is a collection of thirteen essays that focus on the impact of social forces on the emotional side of intimate life. In a sensitizing introductory section, the author focuses on the “work” ... More

This book is a collection of thirteen essays that focus on the impact of social forces on the emotional side of intimate life. In a sensitizing introductory section, the author focuses on the “work” it takes to keep personal life personal, put feeling into work, and empathize with others. In other sections, the author explores the effect of the social-class gap on family well-being, the cultural “blur” between market and home, and the movement of care workers around the globe.Less

Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction

Susan Markens

This book takes on one of the hottest issues on the fertility front—surrogate motherhood—and illuminates the culture wars that have erupted over new reproductive technologies in the United States. In ... More

This book takes on one of the hottest issues on the fertility front—surrogate motherhood—and illuminates the culture wars that have erupted over new reproductive technologies in the United States. In an innovative analysis of legislative responses to surrogacy in the bellwether states of New York and California, it explores how discourses about gender, family, race, genetics, rights, and choice have shaped policies aimed at this issue. The author examines the views of key players, including legislators, women's organizations, religious groups, the media, and others. In a study that finds surprising ideological agreement among those with opposing views of surrogate motherhood, the author challenges common assumptions about our responses to reproductive technologies and at the same time offers a picture of how reproductive politics shape social policy.Less

Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century

Tey Meadow

In the first comprehensive academic treatment of the emerging social, medical, and psychological category of the transgender child, ethnographer Tey Meadow introduces readers to a generation of ... More

In the first comprehensive academic treatment of the emerging social, medical, and psychological category of the transgender child, ethnographer Tey Meadow introduces readers to a generation of parents who actively facilitate gender nonconformity in their children. Whereas previous generations of parents sent such children for psychiatric treatment aimed at a cure, these families call their children new names, allow them to wear whatever clothing they choose, and even approach the state to alter their legal gender. Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition. Whereas once atypical gender expression was considered a failure of gender, now it is a form of gender. It is a form that underscores both the centrality of ever more particular configurations of gender in psychic life and the increasing embeddedness of personal identities in social institutions.Less

Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army

Sabine Fruhstuck

Katharine Rodger (ed.)

Following World War II, Japan's postwar constitution forbade the country to wage war or create an army. However, with the emergence of the Cold War in the 1950s, Japan was urged to establish the ... More

Following World War II, Japan's postwar constitution forbade the country to wage war or create an army. However, with the emergence of the Cold War in the 1950s, Japan was urged to establish the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) as a way to bolster Western defenses against the tide of Asian communism. Although the SDF's role is supposedly limited to self-defense, Japan's armed forces are equipped with advanced weapons technology and the world's third-largest military budget. This book draws on interviews, historical research, and analysis to describe the unusual case of a non-war-making military. Written by the first scholar permitted to participate in basic SDF training, the book offers a firsthand look at an army trained for combat that nevertheless serves nontraditional military needs.Less

Zero Trimester: Pre-Pregnancy Care and the Politics of Reproductive Risk

Miranda R. Waggoner

Increasingly, medical and public health recommendations urge all women of reproductive age to minimize health risks to future pregnancies even when pregnancy is not on the horizon. Such advice is ... More

Increasingly, medical and public health recommendations urge all women of reproductive age to minimize health risks to future pregnancies even when pregnancy is not on the horizon. Such advice is predicated on the belief that good pre-pregnancy care will ensure better birth outcomes in the United States. This pre-pregnancy model of health care effectively designates a “zero trimester” in which women are expected, before conception, to anticipate motherhood and prepare their bodies for healthy reproduction. Some health experts believe that pre-pregnancy care will solve many medical and social ills that were not addressed by the prenatal care model that dominated medical thinking in the twentieth century. Others believe it represents yet another attempt to control women’s bodies. In The Zero Trimester, Miranda Waggoner traces the shifting boundaries of reproductive risk and maternal responsibility in America to understand how and why the task of perfecting pregnancies now encompasses the whole of a woman’s reproductive life, from menarche to menopause. Waggoner shows how the zero trimester arose alongside shifts in medical and public health priorities, contentious reproductive politics, and the changing realities of women’s lives in the twenty-first century. The emergence of the zero trimester is not simply about medical and health concerns; it is also, more broadly, about how cultural power and social ideologies can shape population health imperatives and women’s bodily experiences.Less