Ethnic Studies 118 Contemporary Immigration Issues: Globalization and Migration

Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics Author(s): Lisa Lowe Source: Social Justice, Vol. 25, No. 3 (73), Crossing Lines: Revisioning U.S. Race Relations (Fall 1998), pp. 31-49 Published by: Social Justice/Global Options Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29767084 . Accessed: 18/04/2013 21:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Social Justice/Global Options is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Justice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics

Lisa Lowe

Hello, my name is Fu Lee. I am 41 years old, married, and I have a 9-year old daughter. I have been living in Oakland Chinatown since I left Hong Kong 12 years ago.... My eyes hurt from straining under poor lighting; my throat hurt because of the chemical fumes from the fabric dye. Sometimes, I would wear surgical masks so I don't have to breathe in all the dust from the fabric. My back never stopped hurting from bending over the sewing machine all day. Our boss was like a dictator. He was

always pushing us to work faster. There was a sign in the shop that said, "No loud talking. You cannot go to the bathroom." When we did talk

loudly or laugh during work, he would throw empty boxes at us and tell us to go back to work. When there was a rush order, we had to eat lunch at our workstation.

Last year, my employer closed his shop and left us holding bad pay? checks. We found out that he had filed for bankruptcy and had no intention of paying us our meager wages. The 12 Chinese seamstresses

including myself were so mad. After working so hard under such horrendous working conditions, we should at least get our pay.

With the help of Asian Iinmigrant Women Advocates, we began search?

ing for ways to get our pay....1

Mrs. Fu Lee's testimony at a community hearing initiated by Asian

Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland, California, de? scribes the conditions of many Asian immigrant women working

within the San Francisco Bay Area garment industry: low-waged or unpaid labor, forced increases in productivity through long workdays or speedups, repetitive manual labor, occupational hazards and environmental toxins, and no union or collective bargaining protections. Before the Lucky Sewing Co. closed shop and left the sewing women with bad paychecks, Mrs. Lee and the other seamstresses

Lisa Lowe is on the faculty of the Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego (9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0410; e-mail: [email protected]). This essay originally appeared in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds.), Duke University Press, 1997.

Social Justice Vol. 25, No. 3 31

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

32 Lowe

were to have been paid five dollars a dress; the subcontractor was paid $ 10 a dress, yet each dress was sold by Jessica McClintock, Inc., for $ 175. In the San Francisco

Bay Area garment industry, women sew clothing that their meager wages, when

they receive them, will not permit them to buy as commodities. The women work under physical conditions that are unsafe, unhealthy, and fatiguing. Furthermore, the policy of paying the worker by piece exploits the immigrant women in ways that extend beyond the extraction of surplus value from hourly low-waged factory labor. The incentive to complete as many pieces as possible assures that the sewing

woman will work overtime without compensation, and will intensify her produc? tivity even if it results in exhaustion or personal injury. Because many are non

English or little-English-speaking women and consider their employment options limited, and because eight out of 10 Chinatown immigrant families with multiple

wage earners say they would "barely get by" if there were but one breadwinner in the family, these women are forced to accept the payment conditions dictated by the employer (see Loo, 1991).

Mrs. Lee, in collaboration with AIWA and the other women workers, has

produced an important testimony that at once connects her life as a Chinese

immigrant woman with her struggle as a worker who desires economic justice. Struggles for empowerment are often exclusively understood within the frame? works of legal, political, and economic institutions; the subjectivity of Mrs. Lee can be comprehended in relation to systemic oppression and systemic change. Yet, an important link in this relation is the production of individual and collective

subjectivities through cultural forms and practices. In this sense, Mrs. Lee's

testimony is compelling not only for the facts it relates, but also for the way it poses relations between those facts. The narrative progression charts a movement from

being an aggrieved seamstress to forging a collective campaign for back pay; it

inspires identification that has helped to build community solidarity around the

immigrant garment workers. In addition, Mrs. Lee's testimony conveys the manner in which the factory extracted surplus value not only through her "labor" as an abstract form, but also from using and manipulating her body itself: from her

eyes that strained under poor lighting, her throat that hurt because of the chemical fumes from the fabric dye, and her back that ached from being bent over the sewing machine all day. Where Mrs. Lee's narrative evokes her conscious, embodied relation to work, it also refuses the isolation of each part as separate sites to be

instrumentally exploited; her narrative integrates the sites of bodily exploitation as constitutive parts of the value of her labor, as well as of the process in which she becomes a "political" subject. Furthermore, as the narrative moves from her

description of embodied exploitation to the decision to take collective political action, it alludes to her experiences as a woman, as a mother, as a Chinese

immigrant, and as a worker, also refusing the atomization of the conditions that issue from patriarchal subordination, racialized immigration, segregation, and labor exploitation. Mrs. Lee's narrative does not reduce her political identity or

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 33

actions to one cause or origin; it instead brings together the dimensions of her material and political subjectivity, and in that process, illuminates the intersecting axes of exploitation she inhabits and the differentiating operations of contempo? rary capital that exploit precisely through the selection and reproduction of

racially, culturally, and gendered specific labor power. Forms of individual and collective narrative are not merely representations

disconnected from "real" political life; neither are these expressions "transparent" records of histories of struggle. Rather, these forms

? life stories, oral histories, histories of community, and literature

? are crucial media that connect subjects to social relations. To consider testimony and testimonial as constituting a "genre" of cultural production is significant for Asian immigrant women, for it extends the

scope of what constitutes legitimate knowledges to include other forms and

practices that have been traditionally excluded from both empirical and aesthetic modes of evaluation. Yet, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty has observed of Third World women's narratives, they are in themselves:

not evidence of decentering hegemonic histories and subjectivities. It is the way in which they are read, understood, and located institutionally which is of paramount importance. After all, the point is not just "to record" one's history of struggle, or consciousness, but how they are

recorded; the way we read, receive, and disseminate such imaginative records is immensely significant (Talpade Mohanty, 1991: 34).

"The way we read, receive, and disseminate" Mrs. Lee's testimony may be, in one context, to cite it as evidence in a hearing to protest the abuse of Asian

immigrant garment industry workers; in this context, Mrs. Lee's testimony contributed to AIWA's campaign, which succeeded in establishing Jessica

McClintock's responsibility for the subcontractor. In another, and not mutually exclusive, context, the way we read Mrs. Lee's testimony may be to place it in relation to other cultural forms that make use of different techniques of narration. Such a reading need not level the differences between evidential forms that gain meaning on the horizon of the "empirical" and literary or art forms that are more

commonly interpreted on the horizon of the "aesthetic." The aim is not to "aestheticize" the testimonial text, but rather to displace the categorizing drive of

disciplinary formations that would delimit the transgressive force of articulations within regulative epistemological or evaluative boundaries. This mode of reading and reception seeks to situate different cultural forms in relation to shared social and historical processes, and to make active the dialectic that necessarily exists between those forms because of their common imbrication in those processes. It is to understand Asian American cultural production critically and broadly and to

interpret the interconnections between testimony, personal narrative, oral history, literature, film, visual arts, and other cultural forms, as sites through which subject, community, and struggle are signified and mediated. While specifying the

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

34 Lowe

differences between forms, this understanding of cultural production troubles both the strictly empirical foundations of social science and the universalizing tenden? cies of aesthetic discourse. In this mode, we can read testimony as more than a neo

positivist "truth," as a complex mediating genre that selects, conveys, and connects "facts" in particular ways, without reducing social contradiction or

compartmentalizing the individual as a site of resolution. Likewise, we can read

literary texts like the novel, not merely as the aesthetic framing of a "private" transcendence, but as a form that may narrate the dissolution or impossibility of the "private" domain in the context of the material conditions of work, geography, gender, and race. In this sense, cultural forms of many kinds are important media in the formation of oppositional narratives, and crucial to the imagination and rearticulation of new forms of political subjectivity, collectivity, and practice.

This notion of cultural production as a site for the formation of new political subjects serves to focus the next section, in which I discuss the current construction of Asian immigrant women's work within the context of what we might term the "racialized feminization of labor" in the global restructuring of capitalism. The location of Asian immigrant women's work

? at the intersection of processes of

immigration, racialization, labor exploitation, and patriarchal gender relations ?

marks that work as irreducible to the concept of "abstract labor," and distinguishes the subjectivity it constitutes as unassimilable to an abstract political identity or to a singular narrative of emancipation implied by that identity. Hence, it is often in cultural forms and practices, broadly defined, that we find the most powerful articulation of this complex subjectivity, and through those forms and practices that an alternative "politicization" of that subject is mediated. Furthermore, the focus on women's work within the global economy as a material site in which several axes of domination intersect provides the means for linking Asian

immigrant and Asian American women with other immigrant and racialized women. Asian immigrant and Asian American women are not simply the most recent formation within the genealogy of Asian American racialization; they, along with women working in the "third world," are the "new" work force within the global reorganization of capitalism. In this sense, the active affiliations of

Asian immigrant and Asian American women are informed by, yet go beyond, Asian American cultural identity as it has emerged within the confines of the U.S. nation. They are linked to an emergent political formation, organizing across race, class, and national boundaries, that includes other racialized and immigrant groups, as well as women working in, and immigrating from, the neocolonized world.

* * * From roughly 1850 to World War II, Asian immigration was the site for the

eruptions and resolutions of the contradictions between the national economy and the political state, and from World War II onward, the locus of the contradictions between the nation-state and the global economy. Hence, Asian immigrant

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 35

women's work must be understood within the history of U.S. immigration policies and the attempts to incorporate immigrants into the developing economy, on the one hand, and within the global expansion of U.S. capitalism through colonialism and global restructuring, on the other. Elsewhere, I have argued that, in the first

period, the contradiction between the economic need for inexpensive, tractable labor and the political need to constitute a homogeneous nation was "resolved"

through the series of legal exclusions, disenfranchisements, and restricted enfran? chisements of Asian immigrants that simultaneously "racialized" these groups as

"non whites" as it consolidated immigrants of diverse European descent as "white"

(Lowe, 1996). Because of the history in which economic forces and exigencies have been mediated through the legal apparatus that racializes and genders immigrant subjects, for Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, class struggles have always intersected with and been articulated through race and gender determinations. In the latter period, the capital imperative has come into greater contradiction with the political imperative of the U.S. nation-state, with capitalism requiring an economic internationalism to increase labor and capital, and the state

needing to be politically coherent and hegemonic in world affairs to determine the conditions of that internationalism. The expansion that led to U.S. colonialism and war in the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam violently displaced immigrants from those nations; the aftermath of the repressed history of U.S. imperialism in Asia now materializes in the "return" of Asian immigrants to the imperial center.2 Both the racialized, gendered character of Asian immigrant labor within the emergence of U.S. capitalism and U.S. colonial modes of development and exploitation in Asia provide the basis for understanding that U.S. capital has historically accumu?

lated and profited through the differentiation of labor, rather than through its

homogenization; in the global expansion of the capitalist mode, the racial and

gendered character of labor has been further exaggerated, refined, and built into the regime itself.

Since the 1980s, the globalization of capitalism has shifted many manufactur?

ing operations to Asia and Latin America and has reorganized a mode of

production that at one time employed a U.S. male labor force, white and black, in industrial manufacturing, and formerly employed white working-class and racialized women in assembly, blue and pink collar, and service work. In the search for ever cheaper, more "flexible," labor pools, this reorganization also

produces a greater "pull" for new Asian and Latino immigrants, especially for Asian and Latina women, to fill the insecure assembly and service-sector jobs within the United States that have emerged largely as a result of restructuring and

"re-engineering." Just as the displacement of U.S. workers and increased immi?

gration to the United States are an index of global capitalist restructuring, so, too, has restructuring exacerbated both anti-immigrant nativism and the state's "need" to legislate "undocumented aliens" and "permanent resident aliens" who have entered since 1965. Thus, the proletarianization of Asian and Latina immigrant

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

36 Lowe

women is a current instance of the contradiction between the globalization of the

economy and the political needs of the nation-state; it takes place in conjunction with a gendered international division of labor that makes use of Third World and racialized immigrant women as a more "flexible," "casual," "docile" work force.

Transnational industry' s use of Asian and Latina women's labor?in Asia, Latin

America, and the U.S. ? is the contemporary site where the contradictions of the

national and the international converge in an overdetermination of neocolonial

capitalism, anti-immigrant racism, and patriarchal gender stratification. In this sense, the global restructuring of the capitalist mode of production can

be understood to constitute a new social formation, one whose domain has extended beyond the nation-state to global markets and international circuits of

exchange. In Reading Capital, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar (1977) extend Marx' original formulation of the relationship between the "mode of

production" and the "social formation," by defining a social formation as the

complex structure in which more than one mode of production, or set of economic

relations, may be combined. Their elaboration suggests not only that the situa? tions of uneven development, colonialist incorporation, or global restructuring and immigration are each characterized by the combination of several simulta? neous modes of production, but that each constitutes a specific, historically distinct social formation, which includes economic, political, and ideological levels of articulation. The need to understand the differentiated forms through

which capital profits by mixing and combining different modes of production suggests, too, that the complex structures of a new social formation may indeed

require interventions and modes of opposition specific to those structures. One distinct feature of the global restructuring of capital is its ability to profit not

through homogenization, but through the differentiation of specific resources and markets that permits the exploitation of gendered and racialized labor within

regional and national sites. Part of this differentiation involves transactions between "national" and "international" sites that formalize new capital accumu?

lation and production techniques that specifically target female labor markets where women are disciplined by state-instituted traditional patriarchy, whether in Malaysia or Guatemala, or by racialized immigration laws that target female

immigrants in particular, such as in California. The global racialized feminization of women's labor is a new social formation characterized by the exploitation of women both in export-oriented production zones in Asia and Latin America, and near the center of the market in the Silicon Valley, California, electronics

industry, in the Los Angeles manufacturing district, and in the San Francisco Bay Area garment industry.

Although some analysts of transnationalism argue that global capitalism has reached a near-universal extension and has incorporated all sectors into its logic of commodification, the situations of Asian and Latina women workers suggest that transnational capitalism, like nation-state capitalism and colonial capitalism

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 37

before it, continues to produce sites of contradiction, as well as the dynamics of its own negation and critique.

3 For in the complex encounters between transnational

capital and women within patriarchal gender structures, the very processes that

produce a racialized feminized proletariat both displace traditional and national

patriarchies and their defining regulations of gender, space, and work, and racialize the women in relation to other racialized groups. These displacements produce new possibilities precisely because they have led to a breakdown and a reformulation of the categories of nation, race, class, and gender, and in doing so have prompted a reconceptualization of the oppositional narratives of nationalism, Marxism, and feminism. The shift toward the transnationalization of capital is not

exclusively manifested in the "denationalization" of corporate power or the

nation-state, but perhaps more importantly, it is expressed in the reorganization of

oppositional interventions against capital that articulate themselves in terms and relations other than the singular "national," "class," or "female" subject. Asian, Asian inimigrant, and Asian American women occupy some of the sites of contradiction in the current international division of labor, and their agencies are critical to U.S. women of color activism, cross-border labor organizing, and Third

World and immigrant women's struggles. Although Asian immigrant women have been in the United States since the

19th century, the greater numbers of Asian women immigrated after the mid-20th

century and the specific recruitment of women as a labor force has intensified since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Mazumdar, 1989). Since that time,

along with African American and Mexican American women, Asian immigrant women have constituted an important low-paid work force within the U.S., "occupationally ghettoized" in menial, domestic, and reproductive labor, textile and garment industries, hotel and restaurant work, and a current mix of mass

production, subcontracting, and family-type firms. Because of their material, gender, and racial differentiation from the abstract citizen proposed by the U.S.

political sphere, they remain at a distance from its nationalist narratives. Immigra? tion laws help to produce a racially segmented and gender-stratified labor force for

capital's needs, inasmuch as such laws seek to resolve these inequalities by deferring them in the promise of equality on the political terrain of representation.

While the official narratives of immigrant inclusion propose to assimilate immi?

grants as citizens, the conditions of Asian immigrant women in the U.S. directly contradict these promises of incorporation, equal opportunity, and equal represen? tation. Asian "American" women, even as citizens, continue to be located at the

cultural, racial, and political boundaries of the nation. Indeed, I use quotation marks here to signal the ambivalent identification that both U.S.-born Asian and Asian immigrant women have to the nationalist construction "American." For Asian immigrant women, the American contract of citizenship is quite evidently contradictory; if it proposes the state as the unified body in which all subjects are

granted equal membership, it simultaneously asks that differences ? of race,

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

38 Lowe

class, gender, and locality ? be subordinated in order to qualify for membership

in that democratic body. At the same time, as a group formed through the intersecting processes of

racialization, class exploitation, and gender subordination, Asian immigrant women are also differentially situated in relation to the political narratives of social movements organized around single forms of domination. Examples are the liberal feminist critique of patriarchy, the trade union analysis of capitalism from the standpoint of class exploitation, and the critique of racism and internal colonialism from the standpoint of racialized minority subjects. From the early

post-World War II years through the 1960s, political economy in the U.S. was

dominated by the notion of development, and in that period, opposition to

exploitation was often articulated in terms of class issues (see Escobar, 1992). However, the late 1960s marked the beginning of a period in which the articulation of opposition became increasingly mediated by analyses of other forms of

domination, not only capitalism and imperialism, but also patriarchy and racism.4

Emerging out of this earlier moment in the capitalist mode of production, U.S.

oppositional social movements of the 1970s ?

feminist, labor, civil rights, and ethno-nationalist ? produced narratives of political development for the subjects resisting domination within this earlier mode. According to these narratives, the

"woman," "worker," and "racial or ethnic minority" subjects were said to develop from a pre-hegemonic pre-class identified position to that of politicized partici? pants who could "grasp" their exploitation in relation to their function within

patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. Asian immigrant and Asian "American"

women, like other racialized women, have a different political formation than that

prescribed by either narratives of liberal capitalist development and citizenship or

the narratives proposed by these oppositional movements of the 1970s. The isolation of one axis of power, such as the exploitation of labor under capitalism,

masks the historical processes through which capitalism has emerged in conjunc? tion with, and made more efficient by, other systems of discrimination and

subordination ?

patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.5 The Asian "American"

woman and the racialized woman are materially in excess of the subject "woman"

posited by feminist discourse, the "proletariat" described by Marxism, or the "racial or ethnic" subject projected by civil rights and ethno-nationalist move?

ments. This excess and differential places Asian American and other racialized women in critical, and dialectical, relationships to the subjects of feminism, Marxism, and ethnic nationalisms. In this sense, Asian immigrant and Asian American woman may be said to constitute the dialectical sublation of these earlier models of political subjectivity.

The particular location of racialized working women at an intersection where the contradictions of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism converge produces a

subject that cannot be determined along a single axis of power or by a single apparatus, on the one hand, or contained within a single narrative of oppositional

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 39

political formation, on the other. If Marxism proposes that the classical contradic? tion exists between capital and labor

? a contradiction that permits the accumu? lation of surplus value through the exploitation of labor at the same time that it

produces the class struggles that mark the points of crisis and vulnerability within

capitalism ? then the current situation of racialized working women makes

apparent that we must always speak of more than one contradiction. We may speak of a racial contradiction by which the state claims to be a democratic body in which all subjects are granted membership, while racial, ethnic, and immigrant subjects continue to be disenfranchised and excluded from political participation in that state. Alternatively, we may speak of various sites of gender contradiction: one in which the concept of abstract labor in political economy (that work is equivalent to pay) conflicts with unwaged female domestic labor in the home and inadequate pay for women in the "public" workplace;^ another in which a contradiction between the discourse of formal legal equality and the conditions in many countries in which a woman's choice to conceive or bear a child is an action that

may be contested by husband, father, or state. Furthermore, within the trajectory of liberal feminism, relative gains of some women in corporate, political, or

professional domains accentuate the contradictory persistence of barriers to, and what Evelyn Nakano Glenn has called "occupational ghettoization" of, poor women of color. Throughout lived social relations, it is apparent that labor is

gendered, sexuality is racialized, and race is class-associated. A multiplicity of social contradictions with different origins converge at different sites within any social formation ? the family, education, religion, communications media, sites of capitalist production

? and each is uneven and incommensurable, with certain contradictions taking priority over others in response to the material conditions of a given historical moment. Singular narratives of consciousness aim at developing a subject position from which totalization becomes possible, whereas the cultural

productions of racialized women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject. U.S. women of color have located themselves in relationship to intersecting dominations and these locations have been powerfully translated into critical practices. From the 1980s,

work by Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and the collective Asian Women United of California, for example, exemplifies "situated" non-totalizing perspectives on

conjoined dominations, as well as the emergence of politicized critiques of those

conjunctions.7 The necessary alliances between racialized and Third World women within,

outside, and across the border of the U.S. grow out of the contemporary conditions of global capitalism under which immigrant women working in the garment industries of Los Angeles are virtually part of the same labor force as those

employed in Asia or Latin America. The sweatshops of the garment industry located in San Francisco and Los Angeles, for example, employ immigrant women

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

40 Lowe

from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, while in these countries of origin, U.S. transnational corporations are also conducting garment assembly work.s Women migrate from countries of

origin formerly colonized by the United States, or currently neocolonized by U.S.

corporate capital, and come to labor here as racialized women of color. In this

sense, despite the obstacles of national, cultural, and linguistic differences, there are material continuities between the conditions of Chicanas and Latinas working in the U.S. and the women working in maquiladoras and low-cost manufacturing zones in Latin America, on the one hand, and Asian women working both within the U.S. and in Asian zones of assembly and manufacturing, on the other.

Thus, recent immigrant communities constitute the most evident sites for racialized women in the United States to intersect with women in the neocolonized world whose experiences are doubly determined by exploitation that traverses national boundaries. The important ongoing work of organizations like AIWA in the San Francisco Bay Area, in which second- and third-generation Asian

American women work for the empowerment of immigrant Asian women workers in the garment, hotel, and electronics industries, or the Garment Workers' Justice Center in Los Angeles and La Mujer Obrera in El Paso, suggests some ways of

thinking about the mutual processes of politicization that occur between racialized

immigrant women in the United States and women in the Third World. Groups like the Asian Law Caucus and the Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services have ongoing projects advocating for immigrants' rights.9 AIWA is an innovative example of cross-generational women of different national origins, classes, and language backgrounds organizing in ways that address the particular conditions of Asian immigrant women workers.i? Although AIWA organizes Asian immigrant women around the more traditional labor issue of workers' rights ? as in the successful campaign to pressure garment manufacturer Jessica

McClintock, Inc. ? it also focuses on bringing Asian American and Asian

immigrant women together as members of Asian communities and addresses issues that are of concern "outside" the workplace, such as childcare, health care,

language, and literacy. In addition, it should be emphasized that AIWA does not

organize itself in a traditional hierarchy that would place "organizers" above "workers" or Asian American women above immigrant women; the reciprocally transformative relationship between Asian American organizers and Asian immi?

grant working women is expressly encouraged by AIWA's structure, n Miriam

Ching Louie (1992: 14) writes: "The challenge to AIWA organizers is to use the classes (in English) so that workers can reflect on their own lives, determine what is fair, visualize alternatives to oppressive conditions, and practice demanding their rights.... Organizers must also transform themselves in the process."12

Whereas AIWA works with Asian immigrant and Asian American women, other projects create and maintain solidarity across racial and ethnic groups and across national boundaries: groups like the Border Workers Regional Support

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 41

Committee (CAFOR) and the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM) have helped Mexican maquiladora workers organize against U.S.- and Japanese owned parent companies. The Support Committee for the Maquiladora Workers in San Diego organizes activists, a number of whom are Asian immigrant women, to assist in documenting the exploitative, unsafe working conditions of the

maquiladoras, and to provide various support services for the mostly female Mexican workers.13 Recently, the Support Committee assisted in retrieving the back wages for workers formerly employed at Exportadora de Mano de Obra in

Tijuana, Mexico, through building pressures at a variety of sites, including bringing a suit in U.S. courts against the parent company, National O-Ring, a

division of American United Global Corporation. One hundred and eighty workers had lost their wages when National O-Ring suddenly closed the Exportadora plant in Tijuana, an act precipitated by the women workers having brought charges of sexual harassment against the company president. "Solidarity among workers should cross the border as easily as companies move production," says Mary Tong, director of the Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers. Labor organizing projects are changing both in response to the modes of global restructuring and to the changes in immigration and immigrant communities over the last two decades; new strategies aim to take on the difficult work of forging understanding and

political solidarity between women and men across racial and national boundaries. The work of Asian "American," Asian immigrant and other racialized women

organizing across national boundaries, formations, and displacements entails

processes of learning, translation, and transformations of perspective. Chandra

Mohanty has written about the movements between cultures, languages, and

complex configurations of meanings and power: "Experience must be historically interpreted and theorized if it is to become the basis of feminist solidarity and

struggle, and it is at this moment that an understanding of the politics of location

proves crucial" (Talpade Mohanty, 1992). Asian American cultural forms, con?

taining a repertoire of counter-history, memory, and resources for different narratives of new subjects and practices, are a medium for this critical historical

interpretation. Rather than dictating that subjects be constituted through identifi? cation with the liberal citizen-formation of American national culture, Asian American cultural forms offer the possibility of subjects and practices constituted

through dialectics of difference and disidentification. Rather than vertical deter? mination by the state, these forms are suggestive of horizontal relations between

subjects across national boundaries. As subjects occupying the contradictions of "the national-within-the-international," the location of Asian immigrant women

is nonetheless the U.S. nation-state. Therefore, Asian immigrant women must

struggle to understand not only the process of racialization within the U. S. national

frame, but also the different processes of other immigrant women who may

already be a proletarianized, gendered labor force in their "home" countries, but within specifically nationally stratified sets of social relations there: the agencies

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

42 Lowe

of women in sites as different as South Korea, Sri Lanka, or Egypt are determined

by their specific national histories of colonialism, decolonization, nationalist

struggles, post-independence capitalist development, and multinational incur? sions.^ Asian immigrant and Asian "American" women, as always, must be

vigilant about the dangers of universalizing nationalist notions of "womanhood" or struggle. The attention to "difference" vividly evoked by Audre Lorde's 1979

speech "The Master's Tools" ?

"community must not mean a shedding of our

differences...[but] learning how to take our differences and make them strengths" (Lorde, 1981)

? is still, and all the more, crucial for Asian immigrant and Asian "American" women in the global instance of our contemporary moment.

* * #

Mah was too busy even to look up when I offered her lunch. She said she didn't have an appetite, so I put the aluminum packet of food on the water

pipe, where it'd stay warm, and her thermos on the already filled communal eating table.

She wanted to teach me to do zippers so I could sew another dozen for her at home.... Back home, I started with the darts. I sewed the facing to the

interfacing, the front to the back; then I had trouble with the zipper. I wasn't used to the slick gabardine fabric; my seams didn't match up, and the needle kept sliding over to the metal teeth. I undid the seam and tried

again. This time the needle hit the metal zipper tab and jammed. I gave up afraid I might break the needle. Mah broke a needle once and its tip flew up and lodged so close to her eye that Luday and Soon-ping had to walk her over to Chinese hospital (Ng, 1993: 178-179).

Fae Myenne Ng's novel Bone (1993), like Mrs. Lee's testimony with which we

began, portrays Chinatown sewing women who provide labor for a transnational consumer market in which they do not participate, and who bring home work and solicit the help of children and relatives, making the "private" domestic space of the immigrant home an additional site of labor. The lives of the Leong family in

Ng's novel are legibly imprinted by conditions of Mah's work as a sewing woman: from the central motif of the sewing machine in all of their lives, to the

vulnerability of the immigrant home to capitalist penetration, to the tense contrast between the father Leon's difficulty staying steadily employed and Man's "over?

employment." The marriage of Leon and Mah mediates the changes in Chinatown

immigrant community, gender, and work, as sweatshops first made use of Chinese male labor during the garment industry's growth in the 1920s to 1940s, then

turning increasingly to female labor after the 1946 modification of the Magnuson Act permitted Chinese wives and children to enter as non-quota immigrants and the Immigration Act of 1965 abolished Asian national origin quotas. 15 Finally, the

family relations in Bone allegorize the conditions of immigrant life within the

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 43

contradictions of the liberal nation-state as capitalism extends globally: the

immigrant's lack of the civil rights promised to citizens of the nation permits the

"private" space of the immigrant home to become a workplace that prioritizes the relations of production over Chinese family relations. In contradistinction to the traditional novel whose progressive narrative reconciliation of the individual to the social order symbolically figures the "private" domain as the resolution of

struggles and conflicts in the nation, Bone "digresses" backward in time, narrating instead the erosion of the "private" sphere under the material pressures of racialized and gendered relations of production in a transnationally divided social

space. From the breakdowns in communication between the parents, to the various

"flights" of the three daughters (emotional, mortal, and physical), the novel

allegorizes how the affective, cultural ties in the Leong family bear the weight of

immigration laws, geographical segregation, and global flows of exchange. In associating a literary text like Bone with Mrs. Lee's testimony, I emphasize

that a relation exists between these "literary" and "evidential" forms of narrative

owing to their dialectical relationship to common historical and social processes. Both forms emerge in relation to a shift in the mode of production that expands by means of a deepened racialization, gendering, and fracturing of the labor force. Both elaborate the contradictions of this shift ? in which the global "pulls" that

bring immigrant women to work near the market's center also increase the

regulation and segregation of those women by national laws and capital ? but

neither form seeks to "resolve" those contradictions in the development of a

singular identity. Indeed, both Lee's testimony and Ng's novel suggest that the

exploitation of immigrant seamstresses depends exactly upon the cultural, racial, and gendered qualities of the work force, rather than on the reduction of their work as interchangeable "abstract labor" without characteristics; furthermore, as irnmi

grant women, it is precisely those characteristics that are the material trace of their historical disenfranchisement from the political realm and that differentiate the seamstresses from the concept of the "abstract citizen" (Lowe, 1996). Therefore, in both immigrant narratives, opposition to garment industry exploitation is redressed neither through notions of the national citizen nor through strict identification with the proletarian class subject of traditional trade unions. In other

words, both Lee's testimony and Ng's novel refuse the separation of the economic, the political, and the cultural spheres dictated by the modern state, and neither narrative resolves in the formation of abstract subjects predicated on the modern

separation of spheres. Rather, immigrant opposition articulates itself in forms and

practices that integrate, yet move beyond, the political formations dictated by the modern institutions separating the political and economic spheres; the immigrant testimony and novel are cultural forms through which new "political" subjects and

practices are narrated, and through which new "political" actions are mediated. In their common interruption of the modern separation of spheres and the political formations dictated by that separation, these cultural forms produce conceptions

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

44 Lowe

of collectivity that do not depend upon privileging a singular subject as the

representative of the group, conceptions of collectivity that do not prescribe a

singular narrative of emancipation. Engagement with these cultural forms is not

regulated by notions of identity or by modes of identification; a dialectic that

presupposes differentiation and that crosses differences is always present as part of the process of engagement.

This dialectic of difference marks these texts as belonging to a new mode of cultural practice that corresponds to the new social formation of globalized capitalism. The contradictions of Asian American formation emerged in relation to the modern nation-state's attempt to resolve the contradictions between its economic and political imperatives through laws that excluded Asian immigrant laborers as "nonwhite aliens ineligible to citizenship" from the 19th to the mid 20th century. In that period, Asians entered along the economic axis, while the state simultaneously excluded Asians along racial and citizenship lines, and thus distanced Asian Americans, even as citizens, from membership in the national culture. While official American cultural narratives aimed at reconciling the citizen to the modern nation-state, the material differentiation of Asian immigrants through racialization provided the conditions for Asian American cultural nation? alism to emerge in the 1970s in contradiction to that official culture; Asian American cultural nationalism is contestatory in the field of culture to the degree that culture operates in and for the modern state. Insofar as this notion of culture as an institution of the modern state remains in force, even today in its complex imbrication with "postmodern" global extensions and distortions, Asian Ameri? can cultural nationalism as an oppositional mode continues to have significance in relation to both residual and recast modes of the "modern." This is because transnational capital is "parasitic" upon institutions and social relations of the

modern nation-state, deploying its repressive and ideological apparatuses, ma?

nipulating the narratives of the liberal citizen-subject, as well as rearticulating modern forms of gender, temporality, and spatialization. This is nowhere clearer than in the contradiction within which global expansion precipitates the prolifera? tion of anti-immigrant legislation, combining refortified policing of borders with

ideological appeals to the racial basis of citizenship. Hence, Asian American cultural nationalism that emerged in opposition to racial exclusion continues to address these modern institutions within transnational capitalism. At the same

time, the current global restructuring ? as it moves well beyond the nation-state

and entails the differentiation of labor forces internationally ? constitutes a shift

in the mode of production that now necessitates alternative forms of cultural

practice that integrate, yet move beyond, those of cultural nationalism.

Elsewhere, I have discussed such alternative forms of cultural practice, ranging from Christine Choy, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, and Elaine Kim's video

documentary of Korean immigrant women after the 1992 Los Angeles crisis, to

Monique Truy-Dung Truong's Vietnamese American epistolary short fiction

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 45

"Kelly," to Mrs. Fu Lee's testimony against the garment industry's abuse of Chinese immigrant women (Lowe, 1996). Each engages with the dominant forces and formations that determine racialized immigrant women

? in the city, the

classroom, and the workplace ? and simultaneously alters, shifts, and marks

possible resistances to those forces by representing not only cultural difference, but also the convergence of differences, thereby producing new spaces and alternative formations. Culture in and for the modern state is not in itself

"political," but the contradictions through which immigration brings national institutions into crisis produce immigrant cultures as oppositional and contestatory, and these contradictions, critically politicized in cultural forms and practices, can

be used in the formation of alternative social practices. These alternative forms of cultural practices are the loci of the culturally,

racially, and gender-specific qualities of the "class" formations of transnational

capitalism. Since transnational capitalism does not work through the homogeni zation of the mode of production, but instead operates through and because of the differentiations of culturally, racially, and gender-specific forms and operations of

work, its "class subjects" are not homogeneous. As corporations attempt to remain

competitive in the global arena, the new patterns of flexible accumulation and mixed production that have emerged preserve and reproduce these specific differentiated forms of work. Immigration has intensified according to these new

patterns of accumulation and production, and is now more than ever the site of the contradictions between the national state and the global economy. Just as these new patterns allow capital to exploit discrete sectors of the labor force in distinct

ways and according to different means, the "class subject" of transnationalism cannot be politically and ideologically unified in any simple way, but may come

together according to a process based on strategic alliances between different

sectors, not on their abstract identity. 16 This shift in the mode of production must also shift our understanding of the terrain of politics itself

? away from an

exclusive focus on the abstract unified subject's relationship to the state or to

capital, and toward those institutions, spaces, borders, and processes that are the interstitial sites of the social formation in which the national intersects with the international. The law, workplaces, schooling, community organizations, family, sexual life, churches, and popular culture are some of the sites that govern not only this intersection and the reproduction of racialized and gendered social relations

along that intersection, but that also mediate the interruption and reorganization of those social relations. These are the regulating sites through which "immi?

grants" are "naturalized" into "citizens," or through which "immigrants" are

disciplined as "aliens" and "foreigners," but these are also the sites profoundly transformed by immigration and altered by the immigrant cultures and practices that emerge in contradiction to these regulating sites. In these sites, "immigrant acts" perform the dialectical unification across difference and critically generate the new subjects of cultural politics.

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

46 Lowe

NOTES

1. From Immigrant Women Speak Out on Garment Industry Abuse: A Community Hearing Initiated by Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (May 1, 1993), Oakland, California. Mrs. Fu Lee is

one of 12 women who were not paid by a sweatshop contracted by manufacturer Jessica McClintock, Inc. AIWA organized a long-term campaign that secured pay for these women and revealed garment

industry abuse of immigrant women workers.

2. See, for example, Heran Jun (1997) and Kim (1997). 3. On transnationalism and the capitalist mode of production, see, for example, Harvey (1990)

and Jameson (1992). For analyses of Third World and racialized women's work in the global economy, see Ong (1987, 1997), Mitter (1986), and Mies (1986).

4. See Hartsock (1985), Mackinnon (1982: 515-544), Blauner (1972), Barrera (1979), and

Acuna(1981). 5. Theorists such as Chela Sandoval (1991: 1-24), Angela Davis (1981), and Evelyn Nakano

Glenn (1983:86-109) have articulated critiques of single-axis political organization by suggesting that

an exclusive gender politics may obscure class hierarchy and racialization, while an exclusive class

politics may ignore gender stratification, racialization, and homophobia. Moreover, the critique established by many women of color has consistently argued against the hierarchization of oppressions as well as the false unification of women of color as impediments to theorizing and organizing movements for social change.

6. Scholars such as Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1983), Mary Romero (1992), and Patricia Hill

Collins (1990) have pointed out that for racialized women, the analytic categories of "private" and

"public" spheres privilege white middle-class women and occlude the work of women of color, whose

"double day" often includes unwaged domestic labor in their own "home" and waged domestic labor

in someone else's home; for these women, their "public" sphere is another woman's "private" sphere. 7. See Lorde (1981) and Asian Women United of California (1989). These cultural texts by

women of color propose new subjects and new political formations. Whereas the normative notion of

the subject of liberal society assumes an individual "oedipalized" by family relations and the state,

these texts suggest that racialized women are differently formed and articulated, defined by a

"disidentification" with the national citizen-subject formation, and constituted through lateral move?

ments across distances and disjunctions. On the subject of "women of color," see Alarc?n (1990). See

also Haraway (1988: 575-599). 8. For discussions of the global garment and electronics industries and the use of women's labor

for assembly, see Committee for Asian Women (1991), Nash and Fernandez-Kelly (1983), Fernandez

Kelly (1983), Bonacich (1994), Appelbaum (1996), and Ho, Powell, and Volpp (1996: 383^*14). 9. Asian Law Caucus, 468 Bush Street, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108; Coalition for

Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services, 995 Market Street, 11th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103.

10. Asian Immigrant Women's Advocates (AIWA), 310 - 8th Street, Suite 301, Oakland, CA

94607.

11. See Lydia Lowe (1992) and Omatsu (1994). 12. For other discussions of Asian women's labor in the garment industry, see Loo and Ong

(1991) and Yen-Mei Wong and Hayashi (1989). See also Through Strength and Struggle, a video

documentary that tells the story of Chinese immigrant women workers and the P & L and Beverly Rose

Sportwear shutdowns, by Chinese Progressive Association Workers Center, 164 Lincoln Street, 2nd

Floor, Boston, MA 02111.

13. Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers, 3909 Center Street, Suite 210, San Diego, CA

92103; see Hong and Tong (1998). 14. See, for example, Jayawardena's (1986) social history of women's work and activities in

feminist, nationalist, and labor movements in Turkey, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the

Philippines, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. For analyses of segmented labor and occupational

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 47

segregation of women within different national locations, see Redclift and Sinclair (1991). Third World

Women and the Politics of Feminism, by Talpade Mohanty, Russo, and Torres (1991), contains

important accounts of different "Third World" feminisms in the context of the specific upheavals of

decolonization, national liberation struggles, and transnational capitalism. On the cultural dimensions

of women's positions within transnationalism, see Grewal and Kaplan (1994). 15. For a study of San Francisco's Chinatown, see Nee and Nee (1972). 16. Antonio Gramsci conceived "hegemony" in these terms. See Gramsci (1971) and Hall (1986:

5-27).

REFERENCES

Acuna, Rodolfo 1981 Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New York: Harper.

Alarc?n, Norma 1990 'The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back' and Anglo

American Feminism." Gloria Anzald?a (ed.), Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Cams: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

Althusser, Louis and Etienne Balibar 1977 "On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism." L. Althusser and E. Balibar,

Reading Capital. London: New Left Books.

Appelbaum, Richard P. 1996 "Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism."

Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield (eds.), Mapping Multiculturalism.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Asian Women United of California

1989 Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women. New York: Beacon.

Barrera, Mario 1979 Race and Class in the Southwest. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Blauner, Robert 1972 Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper.

Bonacich, Edna 1994 "Asians in the Los Angeles Garment Industry." In New Asian Immigration in

Los Angeles and Global Restructuring. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ching Louie, Miriam 1992 "Immigrant Asian Women in Bay Area Garment Sweatshops: 'After Sewing,

Laundry, Cleaning, and Cooking, I Have No Breath to Sing.'" Amerasia Journal 18: 14.

Committee for Asian Women 1991 Many Paths, One Goal: Organizing Women Workers in Asia. Hong Kong:

CAW.

Davis, Angela 1981 Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House.

Escobar, Arturo 1992 "Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development, and

Social Movements." Social Text 31-32: 20-56.

Fernandez-Kelly, Maria Patricia 1983 For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry on Mexico's Frontier.

Albany: State University of New York Press.

Gramsci, Antonio 1971 "Notes on Italian History." Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (ed. and

trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

48 Lowe

Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (eds.) 1994

Hall, Stuart 1986

Haraway, Donna 1988

Hartsock, Nancy 1985

Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

"Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity." Journal of Communications Inquiry 10 (Summer): 5-27.

"Situated Knowledges." Feminist Studies 14,3 (Fall): 575-599.

'The Feminist Standpoint: Toward a Specifically Feminist Historical Material? ism." N. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Harvey, David 1990 The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Heran Jun, Helen 1997 "Contingent Nationalisms in Korean and Korean American Women's

Oppositional Struggles." positions: east asia cultures critique (Spring). Hill Collins, Patricia

1990 Black Feminist Thought. London: Unwin Hyman. Ho, Laura, Catherine Powell, and Leti Volpp

1996 "(Dis)Assembling Workers' Rights Along the Global Assemblyline: Human

Rights and the Garment Industry." Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 31,2 (Summer): 383-414.

Hong, Kyungwon and Mary Tong 1998 "Aguirre v. AUG: A Case Study." P.C. Smith (ed.), Multinational Human

Resource Management: Cases and Exercises. Tulsa, Oklahoma: Dame Publishing Comnanv.

Jameson, Fredric 1992 The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jayawardena, Kumari 1986 Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed.

Kim, Min-Jung 1997 "Moment of Danger: Continuities, Discontinuities Between Korean Nationalism

and Korean American Nationalism." positions: east asia cultures critique (Spring).

Loo, Chalsa 1991 Chinatown: Most Time, Hard Time. New York: Praeger.

Loo, Chalsa and Paul Ong 1991 "Slaying Demons with a Sewing Needle: Feminist Issues for Chinatown's

Women." In Chalsa Loo, Chinatown: Most Time, Hard Time. New York:

Praeger. Lorde, Audre

1981 "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Cherne

Moraga and Gloria Anzald?a (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown: Persephone Press.

Lowe, Lisa 1996 Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Lowe, Lydia 1992 "Paving the Way: Chinese Immigrant Workers and Community-Based Labor

Organizing in Boston." Amerasia Journal 18,1. Mackinnon, Catherine

1982 "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory." Signs 7: 515-544.

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Work, Immigration, Gender 49

Mazumdar, Sucheta 1989 "General Introduction: A Woman-Centered Perspective on Asian American

History." Sucheta Mazumdar (ed.), Making Waves, Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon Press.

Mies, Maria 1986 Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International

Division of Labor. London: Zed Press.

Mitter, Swasti 1986 Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy. London: Pluto.

Nakano Glenn, Evelyn 1983 "Racial Ethnic Women's Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class

Oppression." Review of Radical Political Economics 17,3: 86-109.

Nash, June and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly (eds.) 1983 Women in the International Division of Labor. Albany: State University of New

York Press.

Nee, Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee 1972 Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. New

York: Pantheon.

Bone. New York: Hyperion: 178-179.

'The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s." Karin Aguilar-San Juan (ed.), State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Boston: South End Press.

Ong, Aihwa 1997 'The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity." Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd

(eds.), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Durham: Duke

University Press. 1987 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia.

Albany: State University of New York Press.

Redclift, Nanneke and M. Thea Sinclair (eds.) 1991 Working Women: International Perspectives on Labour and Gender Ideology.

London: Routledge. Romero, Mary

1992 Maid in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge. Sandoval, Chela

1991 "U.S. Third World Women: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Con? sciousness in the Postmodern World." Genders 10 (Sorine): 1-24.

Talpade Mohanty, Chandra 1992 "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience." Michelle Barrett

and Anne Phillips (eds.), Destabilizing Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1991 "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism." Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press: 34.

Talpade Mohanty, Chandra, Ann Russo, and Lordes Torres (eds.) 1991 Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indian

University Press. Yen-Mei Wong, Diane and Dennis Hayashi

1989 "Behind Unmarked Doors: Developments in the Garment Industry." Asian Women United of California (eds.), Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women. New York: Beacon.

This content downloaded from 137.110.34.170 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:45:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions