Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone
Subtitle: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka (Contemporary Ethnography)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: December 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780812240450
Subjects: Anthropology; Social Science; Archaeology / Anthropology; Sociology; Sri Lanka; Anthropology - General; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Gender Studies
Description: "Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent several months in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. Hewamanne weaves theories of identity, globalization, and cultural politics throughout her detailed accounts of the workers' efforts to negotiate ever-shifting rules and expectations of gender, class, and sexuality." "By analyzing how these workers claim political subjectivity, Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone challenges conventional notions about women at the bottom of the global economy. The book offers a journey through the vibrant subaltern universe of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, from the FTZ factory shop floor to boarding houses, from urban movie theaters to temples and beaches and back to their native rural villages. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone captures the spirit with which women confront power and violence through everyday poetics and politics, exploring how female workers construct themselves as different while investigating this difference as the space where deep anxieties and ambivalences over notions of nation, modernity, and globalization play out."--BOOK JACKET.