1. Producing Women: Femininity on the Line
By: Jennie Lesmeister

2. Maquiladora Industry “On the line”-assembly line
Mexico’s Northern border
First established in the 1960’s
Widespread recruitment of young women

3. Maquiladoras Cont.
First-world male breadwinners losing their jobs to girls from the third-world
Modeled after export processing plants in East Asia: operate under a feminine ideal
Feminized Industry; but not occupied solely by women

4. Docile and Dextrous Woman
Productive femininity
Marianismo (once again)
Standard in which all potential workers are assessed
Docility, no matter who displays it, is produced on the shop floor

5. Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich
Early analysts concerned with gender in export processing workforces
Argue that high levels of surplus due to access to cheap labor
Exploitation of docile and dextrous woman
Saw women as being predisposed this way
Managers believed in this ready-made workforce too

6. Gender Fixity Gender varies across social arenas
“Envisioning subjectivity as fixed makes such processes invisible, thus making it impossible to see that femininity matters in global production not because it accurately describes a set of traits, but because it functions as a consecutive discourse which creates exploitable subjects.”
The self is always in [re]construction
Gender is relative

7. Femininity/Masculinity
“Femininity and masculinity are relational categories which operate fundamentally through contrast with each other whether or not that process is made explicit in any particular case. As a result, as one moves through levels of social complexity, what counts as feminine or masculine often shifts, as at each level the attempt to see what goes where necessarily operates on the terrain of old oppositions, creating new contrasts in the process. Thus ‘feminine’ on one level can be ‘masculine’ at the next…

8. Colliding/Contradicting spheres
“Take sewing gloves in a factory: one could imagine a cultural context in which it would be marked as masculine in contrast to work in the home; then within the category of paid work as feminine in contrast to construction work; and still again within the category of garment production as masculine in contrast to sewing lingerie. None of these activities are inherently either feminine or masculine, of course, but the process whereby they become gendered is an inherent aspect of how gender functions.”

9. Need for Ethnographic Study
Author Leslie Salzinger demands a more effective technique for observing export production
Enter social world of production
Grasp processes of subject creation
Hiring and labor control

10. Frederick Taylor Father of “scientific management”
Advocated keeping workers from making any decisions at all
Aimed at converting subject to object
Schmidt
“Taylorism”

11. Workplace Control
Interpellation-the process whereby a subject is created through recognizing her or himself in another’s naming.
Works through implicit as well as explicit statements and through meaningful practices as well as through language.
One on one supervision; worker as a tool
isolation

12. Conclusion
Managers assess what is possible and acceptable in gendered terms, measuring efficiency and productivity with reference to, and sometimes in terms of, the global icon of productive femininity.
The docile and dextrous woman is a fantasy brought to life on and for the shop floor
This analysis would predict that factories exist in which workers and managers struggle directly over the definition of legitimate femininity or masculinity, as part of a larger struggle over control of the shop floor itself.