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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Alexandra Hughes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Feminist scholarship has often focused on gendered workspaces within the apparel sector, where it is taken for granted that it is work conventionally attracting neophyte women. Within it, the task of managers is to discipline these young women to become docile and malleable workers. While this may have held to be the case temporally and regionally, South Asia’s experience has exhibited country-specific facets. This paper focuses on these gendered workspaces in three factories in Karachi, Pakistan, where we undertook research. In this context there was a deliberate change in place facilitated by a United Nations Gender Promotion (GENPROM) initiative – to recruit and retain women workers, even though they acknowledged skilled workers were men. The factory managers we interviewed and spoke with used discursive tropes of gender equality and culturally appropriate women’s-only spaces as ways of justifying their labor recruitment strategy. However, digging deeper through interviews with managers at various levels suggested that their recruitment tactic had similar undertones to that revealed by early feminist research – although articulated via different mechanisms. We argue that this creation of empowerment spaces in particular Pakistani apparel sector factories requires careful tracing because it suggests how management interpellations reconfigure worker subjectivities. We also want to suggest that attentiveness to these practices is important because they may have specific bearings on temporal and spatial realities faced by Pakistan.
Author(s): Ruwanpura K, Hughes A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Gender, Place and Culture
Year: 2016
Volume: 23
Issue: 9
Pages: 1270-1285
Online publication date: 21/03/2016
Acceptance date: 30/10/2015
Date deposited: 31/10/2015
ISSN (print): 0966-369X
ISSN (electronic): 1360-0524
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1136815
DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2015.1136815
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