Labor, technology and markets - thinking through some of the connections.

Annie brought up Far From Heaven, for me it's a more pop-culture association. Reading Lipsitz, I am reminded of Julia Roberts' feminist art-teacher's angry outburst in Monalisa Smile at the images of women used to advertise consumer products ranging from domestic appliances to girdles. And her culminating question about, "How will the coming generations remember us?" Both Lipsitz and Berry make similar revelations about the intoroduction of more technologically advanced apparatuses into both, the precincts of the home in the 1940s-50s, as well as into the factories producing garments around the turn of the century. In both cases, appliances understood to (a) drastically reduce the labor of production and (b) make possible a greater variety and 'customization' of the product - whether clothes or dinner, in fact lead to more exploitation of the producers. Of course, while the immigrant, diffusedly-placed sweat-shop workers were disabled by an alienated relation with their actual employers and kept completely out of view, the market-forming 50s' middle and working class wives had to be ideologically interpellated by sitcoms. Berry's discussion of these nearly century-old production practices as precursors of today's 'mass-customization', also radically altered my earlier understanding of the dynamics of today's outsourcing-to-the-third-world-based global economy and the challenges that precisely this diffused production base (with minimised over-production and near-instantaneous response to new trends) presents to any possibilities of a collective labor alliance and politics. In Threads, Jane Collins works with two case-studies of changing production practices, and the corporate textile houses under focus are - the very successful Liz Claiborne and the eventually unsuccessful Tultex Corporation. The former survives because it is able to anticipate cuts in labor costs as being the area where the greatest profitability would lie - and eventually develops a loose, well spread-out, outsourced manufacturing base (in countries like Mexico) where the individual workers who sew discrete tags onto finished garments have virtually no idea of who their employers are.
I am also wondering what the co-existence of resistant readings of the televisual narratives (seeking to co-opt viewers to the ideologies of self-realization) as well as consumption and enjoyment of the same may ultimately amount to. I am reminded here of the reference to Modleski's idea of the intellectual pleasure of 'getting the joke' but not laughing with it, that had come up in an essay we read a few weeks ago, as one model of ambivalent reception. I am also thinking whether the presentation of particular kinds of gender steriotypes (the inept husband and the tolerant, thrifty wife; or the sardonic husband and the twittering, zero financial quotient wife) all of whom seem to still be enjoying an after-life, may also not be read as articulating dissatisfaction with existing codes of pecuniary responsibleness and compulsions while also enacting dysfunctionalities.