Crafting social change: former global factory workers negotiating new identities in Sri Lanka’s villages

ABSTRACT

This article explores how former factory workers negotiate new identities in villages, as new brides, mothers and daughters-in-law, after 5–6 years of employment in an urban Free Trade Zone. I argue that their performances of self-discipline and disavowal of transgressive knowledges allow them to make use of the limited social, economic and political spaces available while gradually reshaping local understandings about the good daughter-in-law. Former workers’ strategic deployment of social conformity represents the foundation on which their entry into village social, economic, political spaces is based on. Although individual social conformity would conventionally be identified as everyday politics, I argue that former workers’ performance of self-discipline and social conformity is strategic and leads to changes in gender norms and village social hierarchies and thus represents a form of politics that is in between everyday and transformative politics – politics that creates conditions of possibility for social transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Global factory workers
• Sri Lanka
• social change
• performing conformity
• transformative politics
• gender norms

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Catherine Harnois, Ritu Khanduri and Neil DeVotta for valuable comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All individual names are pseudonyms. Village names have also been changed to protect confidentiality. I use actual regional city names throughout the article, but these cities are big enough to not endanger confidentiality.

2. Nisha was 25 years old when her parents arranged for her to get married. She worked at a FTZ garment factory for 6 years before leaving to do so. She is Sinhala in ethnicity, Buddhist by religion and completed her Advanced Level exam in the arts stream before joining the factory.

3. Kumudu also had an agricultural background and sought work within the FTZ to help her family and earn enough money for her dowry. Kumudu completed her Advanced Level classes but did not sit for the exam due to a sickness. She was 28 years of age in 2004.

4. An honour accorded to women who proved their virginity after marriage.

5. Just like the other two women, Kalani self-identified as a well-educated woman who had to resort to factory work due to her family’s poverty. She had obtained three simple passes in the Arts stream when she sat for her Advanced Level exam. When I first interviewed her, she was 37 years of age.

6. In almost all cases, there was a somewhat distant but tender relationship between fathers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Most husbands also let their mothers and wives come to an agreement on home and outside work while displaying varying levels of support for their wives’ entrepreneurial activities.

7. I am analysing their entrepreneurial success and civic leadership in detail in another publication.

8. Kabeer (2011) further notes the importance of taking the men’s role in strengthening or hindering women’s empowerment. All 37 women interestingly had non-abusive, more or less non-involved and more or less verbally supportive husbands, fathers and fathers-in-law. Interestingly all the non-migrant women except one that I interviewed also had non-abusive husbands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wennergren Foundation and the American Institute for Sri Lanka Studies research grants, and a National Humanities Center residential writing fellowship. Wenner-Gren Foundation [NA].