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Globalization, Gender, and Development: Comparative Perspectives from South and Southeast Asia
Organizer: Caitrin Lynch, Olin College
Chair: Neil Devotta, Hartwick College
Discussants: Neil Devotta, Hartwick College; Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College
Women in South and Southeast Asia are at the center of narratives about global progress and development. Such narratives are used to justify economic and social policies that directly affect women's lives. Women's responses to these policies sometimes reproduce “traditional” gender expectations and sometimes redefine them. This panel focuses on population policy and export-oriented industrial production, two important arenas in which women negotiate expectations about gender, their own dreams and desires, and the realities of neoliberal models of development and progress. The papers and discussant comments span regional and social science boundaries (psychology, anthropology, and political science). The panel format will encourage new modes of analysis: one discussant will introduce issues before paper presentations; the other will raise insights afterward. Two papers on Sri Lanka focus on industrial production. Hewamanne analyzes how female garment workers negotiated global cultural flows and resources surrounding transnational production at an urban Free Trade Zone. She focuses on the spatial and discursive production of this transnational space as it intertwines with discourses on nation, modernity, and female morality. Lynch describes rural factories where women workers are caught between the pressures of a globalizing economy and the idealization of the village as a sanctuary of traditional values. Candland's analysis of an Indonesian reproductive rights movement poses a counterpoint to the Sri Lankan material; here women transformed a coercive population control program into a national reproductive health program as they simultaneously embraced and questioned “traditional” expectations for women. Each paper draws attention to how narratives of national progress and development rely on gendered norms and expectations that present dilemmas for women at the forefront of globalization.
Negotiating the “City of Whores”: Gendered Public Spaces and Transgressive Citizen-Subjects at Sri Lanka's Katunayake Free Trade Zone
Sandya Hewamanne, Drake University
When people called Sri Lanka's Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ) area a "city of whores" it produced particular gendered and classed subjects of a new modern urban project. The rapid urbanization and industrialization of Katunayake resulting from transnational production at the FTZ and the related globalized socio-cultural flows affected the lived experiences of citizens in this new urban space in varied ways. The vast majority of the workers are rural to urban migrant women. Consequently, neighbors reinvented themselves as moral guardians of these new arrivals while many agents and institutions, including the media and NGOs, got involved in spatial and conceptual production of the new city and its gendered citizen subjects. This paper explores how the FTZ women workers responded to this urban project by negotiating a particular identity that refused the particular subjectivity enforced upon them by middle class and capitalist narratives. By analyzing the new spaces and cultural practices to delineate the gender and class critique, I argue that their performances in public spaces conveyed a specific identity as migrant FTZ garment workers and registered their differences from men, other women, and their working-class counterparts. Furthermore, while FTZ workers' participation in stigmatized cultural practices was explicitly transgressive and critical, it also demonstrated acquiescence to different hegemonic influences, especially capitalist hegemony. Ultimately, these women's experiences evidence how the transnational flows of ideas and resources shape responses to marginalization in a way that discourages transformational politics.
Factory Festivals in Sri Lanka: Setting the Stage for Debates about Globalization, Culture, and Gender
Caitrin Lynch, Olin College
Every April, many Sri Lankan garment factories sponsor festivals to celebrate Sinhala and Tamil New Year. When cultural festivals meet industrial discipline, participants bring to the festivities complex concerns about the adverse affects of globalization on Sinhala Buddhist culture. Since the economy was liberalized in 1977, Sri Lankans have struggled to understand new economic arrangements, changing social practices, and the accompanying shifts in priorities and values. For many Sinhala Buddhists, women's participation in globalized labor practices has raised concern about eroding normative gender roles, expectations, and behaviors. Alongside a public discourse on idealized women's behavior, there has developed a self-consciousness about preserving and performing Sinhala Buddhist culture in a world perceived to be increasingly homogeneous. Factory discipline, the stigmatized nature of women's garment labor, and wider discourses about globalization and culture provide the context for conflicts and debates that occurred at two factory-sponsored festivals in the mid 1990s. While factory owners sponsored these festivals to create good will between workers, their communities, and factory managers and owners, the result was more complicated and meaningful than they would have anticipated. An analysis of specific events, conflicts, and debates at these festivals highlights participants' uneasy responses to economic liberalization, the changing nature of "tradition," and the negotiation of gender norms in the face of social and economic shifts. Workers' participation in and responses to these festivals at once confirmed and questioned cultural norms for women's behavior; it also reinforced and challenged "traditional" expectations for the manner in which culture would be unequivocally celebrated at New Year's festivals. These cultural festivals became the stage for debates about gender, globalization, and culture itself.
Resisting Fertility Control, Asserting Islamic Traditions, Claiming Reproductive Rights: Indonesian Muslim Women and Global Population Policy
Christopher Candland, Wellesley College
Globalization is not new. The Arabs who brought Islam to South and Southeast Asia were agents of globalization. Just as old as the forces of globalization are the local responses to them. This paper considers Muslim women's responses to the American efforts - beginning in the late 1960s - to limit population growth in Indonesia. The Indonesian government embraced external funding for population control in 1967. Indonesian Muslim associations resisted government programs to introduce contraception. These were perceived as Western efforts to weaken the ummat (Muslim community). Women within these organizations, however, realized that international funding and government programs could be harnessed for different ends. Negotiating with ulema (religious scholars) and the government, these women transformed a coercive population control program into a reproductive health program. Women encouraged ulema (often their husbands and fathers) to look again at the Ahadith (words and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad) for insights. Mohammad had advised those who did not want to have children to practice azal (withdrawal). On the basis of these teachings, ulema issued fatwa (religious opinions) in support of voluntary use of contraception. Women then used these fatwa to build a network of health facilities focused on reproductive health. Based on extensive interviews in 2005 and 2006 with the leadership of the major Muslim women's associations - Muslimat NU, Fatayat NU, Nasyiatul 'Aisyiyah Mohammadiyah, and 'Aisiyah Mohammadiyah - and a survey of 262 association leaders, the paper suggests that “traditional” gender roles can be an invaluable asset for transforming forces of globalization.