scholarly journals A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124322110469
Author(s):  
Sidra Kamran
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Hegemonic Femininity ◽  
Class Distinction

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

scholarly journals A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidra Kamran
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Hegemonic Femininity ◽  
Class Distinction

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts or in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capitals at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Further, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, this article explains the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

Anthropology, Class and the ‘Big Heads’: An Ethnography of Distinctions between ‘Rough’ and ‘Posh’ amongst Women Workers in the UK Pottery Industry

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hart
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Pottery Industry ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Global Corporation ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
The Way

In the context of the take-over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family-owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke-on-Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re-structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives. I was the first one in our family to go in decorating end and they thought I was a bit stuck-up. My sister was in clay end as a cup-handler and I had used to walk off factory without her, or wait for her to leave before I left, though she said, ‘If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have anything to paint!’ They were much freer in the clay end – had more to do with men – we thought we were one up. 1

Class, Gender and Cold War Politics: The Union of Australian Women and the Campaign for Equal Pay, 1950–66

2019 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Katherine Keirs
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The 1960S

The confluence of social and political forces during the Menzies era stalled the progress of wage justice for women workers until the end of the 1960s. Nevertheless, women’s organisations and the progressive trade union movement advocated equal pay for the sexes throughout this period. This article examines the contribution of the Union of Australian Women (UAW), which represented the interests of working-class women, to the campaign for equal pay from 1950 to 1966. It discusses the ways in which the mixture of women’s culturally accepted domestic roles and widespread anti-communism muted enthusiasm for the UAW’s message. The article argues, however, that the UAW made an effective contribution to keeping equal pay in the public consciousness, redressing the inattention to working-class women’s role in their economic emancipation.

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

scholarly journals “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Eva Peron ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Key Resources

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

scholarly journals BISNIS SENI KERAJINAN PERAK

KRITIS ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-96
Author(s):  
Yerik Afrianto Singgalen ◽  
Titi Susilowati Prabawa
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Migrant Populations ◽  
Tourism Sector ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
The Difference

The silver handicrafts industry in the Celuk Village is growing rapidly along with the development of Bali's tourism sector. The number of tourists visiting Bali has increased from time to time and it affects the increase of souvenir purchases number, including silver-crafts. Celuk Viillage is a traditional Balinese village that has changed into a tourist attraction with its trademark in the form of gold and especially, silver. The sustainability of the silver handicraft industry in Celuk Village is supported by the harmony of the collaboration between entrepreneurs and craftsmen in running the business. This research found that the Celuk Village silver handicrafts industry shows ability to develop and maintains its business, also to face many different challenges. The entrepreneurs and craftsmen in Celuk Village not only from local residents but also include migrants from outside Bali. This paper describes the habitus, realm, capital (social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital) and practice through Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective. The explanation is based on the empirical experience of local and migrant populations as craftsmen and entrepreneurs when pioneering, developing, and maintaining silver-craft business in Celuk. The research found that different from the locals, who can utilize social capital and cultural capital when pioneering, use economic capital when developing business, then symbolic capital in sustaining business, the access of the migrants to economic capital and symbolic capital is very limited. Therefore migrants use social capital and cultural capital when pioneering, developing and sustaining their business. Regarding to Bourdieu, the difference findings between local and migrants in Celuk Village shows that there is a fight over resources (capital) in the realm, and it forms a new habitus which is differentiation in social stratification between locals as dominant and migrant entrepreneurs as subordinate entrepreneurs.

“Beneath Our Dignity”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Theater Program ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Fair Wages ◽  
Working Class Women

Chapter 5 analyzes the initial rocky years of black working-class women’s entry into the needle trades, boot and shoe, and laundry factories and their unions during the early to mid-1940s. Black working-class women exposed the fault lines of the American racial liberalism espoused by civil rights and union progressives who worked to establish “interracial good-will” in unionism and the industrial workforce. Women’s resistance on the shop floor and in the union hall, demanding respect and fairness, challenged and altered community leaders’ programs. Black working-class women were less interested in breaking the color barrier than in earning fair wages, establishing fair standards, organizing work hours around other commitments, and working and organizing in a hospitable climate. Focusing on black women’s work with the ILGWU, this chapter examines their work and union experiences in the union’s worker theater program to consider why conflicts over historical memory; black women workers’ long demands for dignity, autonomy, and respect; and social reformers’ interracial experiments produced intense battles.

“American Matrons and Daughters”

2018 ◽  
pp. 198-219
Author(s):  
Judith Giesberg
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Window Of Opportunity ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Formative Stage ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Federal Contracting ◽  
American Labor

Judith Giesberg explores the intersection of national loyalty debates and the labor activism of Philadelphia seamstresses in war industries. Women workers understood the vital service they performed sewing military uniforms and equipment but were largely exploited and vulnerable in a system of federal contracting reliant on middle-men and “outwork.” Giesberg argues that the exploitation of women workers, and the denigration of their labor activism, rested on an idealized depiction of female patriotism in supporting roles, as soldiers’ wives and family. Working class women turned the rhetorical tables by laying claim to their own service and patriotism, legitimizing their protests in a republican language of rights and tyranny. In examining seamstresses’ protests at the Schuylkill Arsenal, Giesberg uncovers a forgotten chapter in American labor history, connecting antebellum activism with Gilded Age strife. The author depicts a brief window of opportunity where women challenged the formative stage of the sweatshop system drawing in part on professions of their own loyalty.

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