Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism

Melissa Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136081620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyday, around the world, women who work in the Third World factories of global firms face the idea that they are disposable. Melissa W. Wright explains how this notion proliferates, both within and beyond factory walls, through the telling of a simple story: the myth of the disposable Third World woman. This myth explains how young women workers around the world eventually turn into living forms of waste. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism follows this myth inside the global factories and surrounding cities in northern Mexico and in southern China, illustrating the crucial role the tale plays in maintaining not just the constant flow of global capital, but the present regime of transnational capitalism. The author also investigates how women challenge the story and its meaning for workers in global firms. These innovative responses illustrate how a politics for confronting global capitalism must include the many creative ways that working people resist its dehumanizing effects.

1
Introduction
Disposable Women and Other
Myths of Global Capitalism

The most obvious function of myths is the explanation of facts, whether natural or cultural.

Encyclopedia Britannica Online

Myth is depoliticized speech.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1972)

Everyday, around the world, women who work in the third world factories of global frms face the idea that they are disposable. In this book, I examine how this idea proliferates, both within and beyond factory walls, through the telling of a story that I call ''the myth of the disposable third world woman.'' This international tale is told by people from all walks of life, including factory managers, corporate executives, and consumers across the globe who buy their products; it achieves translation across languages, cultures, and historical moments; and it is widely believed to be a factual account of a woman worker whose disposability is naturally and culturally scripted. Through several years of ethnographic research, spanning 1991–2003, I made this story the focus of my investigations within global factories and their surrounding urban areas in northern Mexico and in southern China. Illustrating what is at stake in the telling of this myth for these factories, for the people who work in them, and for the constant fow of global capital is my principal objective.

The myth of the disposable third world woman revolves around the trials and tribulations of its central protagonist—a young woman from a third world locale—who, through the passage of time, comes to personify the meaning of human disposability: someone who eventually evolves into a living state of worthlessness. The myth explains that this wasting process occurs within the factories that employ her, as she, within a relatively short period of time and at a young age, loses the physical and mental faculties for which she was initially employed, until she is worth no more than the cost of her dismissal and substitute. In other words, over time, this woman turns into a form of industrial waste, at which point she is discarded and replaced. The myth explains this unlucky fate as a factual outcome of natural and cultural processes that are immune to external tampering. In short, there is nothing, says the myth, that can be done to save its unfortunate protagonist from her sad destiny.

Yet, paradoxically, even as this protagonist turns into a living form of human waste, the myth explains how she simultaneously produces many valuable things with her labor. Indeed, this paradox provides the myth with its organizational structure. For, the myth explains, despite her ineluctable demise, the disposable third world woman possesses certain traits that make her labor particularly valuable to global frms that require dexterous, patient, and attentive workers. And these traits make her so desirable that global frms go out of their way to employ her whenever possible because the things that she makes generate value even as she depreciates in value. So, on the one hand, we hear a story of a woman who is, essentially, wasting away, and then, on the other, we hear that this very woman is creating all kinds of wonderful and popular things that can be bought and sold on the international market. And, as it turns out, the myth explains how this internal contradiction means that this disposable third world woman is, in fact, quite valuable since she, like so many other characters of mythic lore, generates widespread prosperity through her own destruction. This conundrum caught my attention in factories throughout Mexico and China as I sought to understand how someone whose body represents a site of living waste can still create, with that same body, things that are so valuable. How does worth develop from worthlessness?

In making such questions the focus of my investigation and the subsequent analysis, I illustrate how the myth is a discourse with direct consequences for the functioning of global factories, for their employees, and, more broadly, for the spatial circuitry of global capital. As geographer Geraldine Pratt has written, discourses are ''sociospatial circuits through which cultural and personal stories are circulated, legitimated, and given meaning'' within the production of the material realm that we call ''geography'' (Pratt 1999, 218).¹.Applied to the concern at hand, I employ this notion of discourses as sociospatial circuits to interrogate how the myth, as a form of discourse, produces specifc subjects, their spatiality, and their signifcance for the relentlessly changing landscapes of global capitalism.² This means that I probe the story's internal circuitry to examine how it contributes to the making of a sentient being who is decidedly female, third world, and disposable and yet who embodies a form of labor crucial for the materialization of global capitalism around the world.

I must confess that my motivations for exploring this topic stem from my own political opposition to the myth and from my desire to do something about it. I consider the story, and the material circuitry it supports, to be dangerous for working people, and especially for the women to whom the story is directly applied. I also believe that it implicates not only those who work for global frms but also those who consume their products. I realize that, in admitting these beliefs, I have dashed any claims to objectivity or impartiality with regard to the outcome of this research.

Socially Useful Lies

Not all stories are myths, although I believe it can be said that all myths are stories.³ Like myths told over the centuries,⁴ the myth of the disposable third world woman attempts to provide steadfast lessons about what is accepted as ''truth,'' ''factual reality,'' and deep-seated ''human essence'' all packaged within a synthetic narrative, laden with symbolism and drama. Myths have muddied the waters between fact and fction since the time of Plato and the Sophists who transformed the Homeric signifcance of myth away from ''truth'' and toward a more complex meaning of, as anthropologist Talal Asad has put it, ''a socially useful lie'' (Asad 2003, 28). Their usefulness derives largely from their claims to unquestionable authority, which Roland Barthes (1972) captured with his statement that myths are ''depoliticized speech.'' Myths, to use his words, ''empty [reality] of history'' by cloaking political situations with narratives of human essence and naturalized tautologies. In consequence, myths are vehicles for foreclosing discussions of politics as they use fantastic characters and situations that depict hierarchical relationships broadly believed to have bearing on ''real life'' without having to explain these relationships.

Common themes across the gamut of myths, including those of interest to me here, include linking chaos to social threats; justifying social hierarchies, such as those between women and men, the wealthy and the poor, and so on; and explaining inequities as resulting from the unstoppable forces of fate. In this way, myths are not told only for entertainment. Rather, such mythic themes course through narrative mediums that have long been used to infuence social behavior on the basis that power is naturalized, apolitical, and beyond human intervention. As Asad (2003) writes, ''Myth [is] not merely a (mis) representation of the real. It [is] material for shaping the possibilities and limits of action. And in general it appears to have done this by feeding the desire to display the actual'' (29; my brackets).

Mythic protagonists—such as, gods, goddesses, spirits, and other extraordinary fgures—who do not reside in the experiential realm of human existence but who, nevertheless, refect this experience writ large are key to the function of myth as an explanation or validation of social realities. Often, these fgures transcend the specifcities of any particular human condition and illustrate abstract qualities that are believed to be part of human existence more generally. For instance, some mythic fgures represent the abstract qualities of fertility, love, and power; others represent grief, mischievousness, and greed. These qualities are part of their essence and do not change with superfcial transformations in appearance (Littleton 2002). What makes these characters so compelling is that, despite their far-fetched qualities and predestined fortunes, something about them ''rings true'' with real life. And through their experiences, we are meant to learn something about ourselves and the world in which we live.

The tale of the disposable third world woman shares such properties of the mythic genre. Its protagonist is larger than life in that she exceeds the limits of human experience. No one answers to her name, ''disposable third world woman.'' She has no specifc cultural profle other than an undefned one that is found in an amorphous region called ''the third world.''⁵ Her identity as ''woman'' is likewise too vague to offer any specifc insights into her character as, obviously, women do not share some essential sameness.⁶ And even though many people around the world encounter the belief that they are disposable, few, if any, identify themselves as the bearers of the abstract condition of disposability (Bales 2004; Chang 2000). The disposable third world woman is, consequently, a composite personality built of different abstractions (third world woman, and disposability, for example), which, while not characterizing anyone in particular, form the pillar of a story intended to explain social circumstances and validate specifc practices based on the idea of her in concrete settings. In this fashion, the disposable third world woman functions like other mythic fgures, such as the self-obsessed Narcissus and the blindly ambitious Prometheus, who embody intrinsic and indelible faws that explain not only their own demise but also the demise of real people who, in everyday life and in different situations, share their signifying traits. No one may be identical to the disposable third world woman, but through the detailing of this myth, we are meant to learn something about real women who work in real factories and who embody the tangible elements of disposability within their being.

But the story's purpose, as well as the motivation behind its telling, is not only to describe its central character and her disposable fate. It also offers a blueprint for identifying the signature features of female disposability within actual human beings and for handling them accordingly. The story, in other words, serves as a vehicle for establishing the normative characteristics and behaviors of the disposable third world woman. It tells us how a normal disposable third world woman should look, act, and be treated. Therefore, it serves as a disciplinary device for patrolling the bounds of that normativity.⁷ For instance, a woman who, despite being identifed as disposable, refuses to accept the conditions of her disposability appears within the terms of the myth to be abnormal. Similarly, practices that treat women deemed to be disposable as if they were not so could also be called abnormal. Consequently, I regard the myth as a tool of interpellation, in the sense intended by Louis Althusser (1971), since it establishes the expectations both for identifying disposable third world women within specifc populations and for determining how those subjects, so identifed, should behave in relation to those who do the identifying⁸ (Butler 1997b). In this sense, the myth is an attempt to summon the disposable third world woman into existence as a normalized subject who reaffrms explicit relations of power and hierarchy.

Thus, another and related function of this myth lies in its explanation that the disposable outcome of its protagonist and of those women workers who resemble her is a matter of destiny. According to its logic, the corporate practices that treat such workers as if they were disposable are justifable and unavoidable, since to treat a disposable worker as if she were not disposable would be silly and irrational. Hence, the obvious violence and suffering that accompany the condition of disposability are not the fault of the companies that employ these women, nor the fault of the people the world over who buy their products. Indeed, not only does the myth detail how this situation is the responsibility of neither global frms nor global consumers, but it also correlates its protagonist's demise with the creation of valuable commodities such that her employment, and the practices organized with her disposability in mind, constitute good business. To achieve this connection, the tale draws upon other staple mythic themes to detail how corporations use science to conquer the hazardous forces intrinsic to the disposable third world woman, such as a chaotic sexuality and a hysterical irrationality. And, at the end of the day, reason, via scientifc management and masculinist rationality, harnesses the powerful forces that inevitably destroy the story's protagonist and channel them toward the creation of valuable commodities in some of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world. As a result, says the myth, the third world woman's path of destruction also leads the way to the capitalist development that heralds modern progress. And, again, in this respect, we see how the tale repeats a popular mythic theme that suffering and sacrifce, particularly on the part of women, are often required to move society in its proper direction (Littleton 2002).

Points of Departure

I began focusing on this myth as an object of study through several years of ethnographic research in nine different corporate facilities located in northern Mexico and southern China. The facilities included electronics, data processing, sewing, a machine shop, plastics, automobile, and textiles operations. Additional material comes from interviews conducted with employees of these and other companies, tours of those companies, and interviews conducted with business consultants, local political offcials, workers and their families, activists, civic leaders, and other urban residents.

Throughout the research, I have taken cues from other studies that have exemplifed the signifcance of ethnographic research for understanding the cultural and discursive dimensions of global capitalism. While this literature is too vast to encapsulate here, a few texts stand out as ones that directly infuenced my thinking in this book. For instance, Aihwa Ong's (1987) important study of factory workers in Malaysia illustrates how discourses that constitute worker identities are the very processes that confgure systems of power and resistance within factory contexts. Ching Kwan Lee's (1998) research in Hong Kong and southern China demonstrates how discourses of cultural identity throughout a frm's international offces also create the work categories within that company's division of labor. María Patricia Fernández-Kelly's (1983) benchmark investigation in Mexican export-processing factories clearly shows how discourses of local cultural identity contribute to the making of an international division of labor across the diverse spaces of global capital. Emily Martin's (1995) and Linda McDowell's (1997) explorations into the embodiment of identity within the workplace confrm the importance of investigating how the body is a constant site of contestation within the rarefed world of corporate capital. Leslie Salzinger's (2003) book on the discursive production of gender within Mexican-based global frms illustrates how managerial discourses of their female workers are not solely descriptive but also productive of these workers’ subjectivity. Miranda Joseph's (2002) ethnography of a gay theater group illustrates how the performance of identity simultaneously constitutes the subjects of capitalism without being fully defned by capitalism. And Erica Schoenberger's (1997) study of corporate culture exposes how executive discourses regarding a company's cultural identity guide the material processes that give shape to global capital around the world.

I situate my research in an ongoing dialogue with these and other such studies, all of which demonstrate how there is nothing ''merely cultural,'' as Judith Butler (1997a) has put it, about studies of discursive and symbolic events. These processes are, instead, central to those political and economic practices that we identify as capitalist power, exploitation, and resource distribution. And they are at the heart of the imperatives for political action on the part of people around the world who want to develop alternatives to capitalist exploitation and the many forms of discrimination and misery that accompany it. My research extends this dialogue into an interrogation of the spatial dimensions at play in the discursive-materialist dynamics of global capital. So, consequently, my research into the myth of the disposable third world woman takes me across geographic regions as I follow a discourse that travels not only by word of mouth from factory to factory and continent to continent but also through the materialist circuitry of global capitalist production and consumption.

I began my own research in 1991 in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, which, in 1965, was the offcial ''birthplace'' of the country's export-processing industries, known as the ''maquiladoras'' (or ''maquilas'' for short). Over the next four decades, Ciudad Juárez became an internationally recognized leader in low-cost, high-quality, labor-intensive manufacturing processes. Its adjacency to the United States and the constant infow of migrants from the Mexican interior contributed to this city's popularity among corporate executives seeking to cut factory costs while maintaining quality standards and easy access to the U.S. market. And I, like several other researchers from inside and outside of Mexico, set my sights on the city's maquiladoras as a window for studying how local social processes contribute to the constant renovation of global capital (Carrillo 1990; Fernández-Kelly 1983; Shaiken 1994; Cravey 1998; Reygadas 2003; Salzinger 2003).

My research required that factory managers grant me entry into their facilities.⁹ Some did so quite generously, and provided me offce space and as much access as I requested or as much as they could authorize. Others were less generous. While I can guess that the managers who did not participate in my project were reluctant to have a researcher snooping around their facilities, I do not have ready answers for why others permitted me so much latitude, other than to say that each had his (and I use that pronoun advisedly) particular interests in the project. One manager in Mexico, for example, had studied sociology in graduate school for a couple of years before deciding that he wanted to pursue a more lucrative career in business management. But he continued to express interest in sociological issues, such as labor relations, and he expressed a real commitment to supporting academic research. As he told me one day in 1996, ''You and I don't see eye to eye on everything. But you can't say that I have gotten in the way of science!'' Another manager, in southern China, extended an invitation to me to visit his facilities in Dongguan and in Hong Kong after he had been contacted by one of his colleagues in Mexico. He made numerous arrangements to allow for my research visits into his facilities over a several-month period and over two different occasions. At one point, he explained that he was hosting me as a favor to his colleague, while in a different conversation he said that he wanted me to see how much things were changing in China so that I would not have only ''stereotypes'' of ''Chinese people.'' Another manager, also in Mexico, was devoted to the study of literature, and on our first meeting, he was walking around the coupon-processing facility he managed while carrying The Complete Works of William Shakespeare under his arm. He seemed to enjoy talking with me about my ideas and how I approached the issues I investigated, yet he...