Ethnicization of female labor (final reading response)

This semester, we have dealt variously with issues pertaining to fashion and feminine labor. We began with the second wavers who marked femininity as the onerous work demanded by patriarchy; we’ve oft spoken of the significance of fashion for women entering the work force after World War II; we have discussed the burden women have had to carry as homemakers and caretakers for white working class families and the boys of various subcultures; and we’ve seen the cinematic display of feminine structures of support by women of color in Clueless, Stella Dallas, Gone With the Wind, Maid in Manhattan, and Real Women Have Curves. In fact, the intersections of labor and gender have been here with us all along, riddling our discussion throughout the semester. It is why our fashionable pleasures are always contradictory and qualified.

This week we obviously have really honed in on the production side of things. I found the Nielsen article totally fascinating. What struck me most is the part where she talks about the kinds of ethnic specializations that divided the labor. Nielsen remarks, “Many of the women and men who labored to produce so many and such elaborate costumes were immigrant laborers...The various ethnic or national groups often specialized in the manufacture of the clothing of their native lands: beaders from Mexico, crochet workers from Armenia; turban wrappers from the Middle East; embroiderers from Japan and China” (168). This tiny moment in the larger arc of her article’s narrative was, for me, the most provocative and also the part that could stand to be unpacked a bit more. Indeed, she talks about the division of labor between men and women in the costuming department, as women were expected to work on the intricate-- and more labor-intensive-- details of the costume, whereas men made suits and dress coats (167). But, I really wanted her to spend more time with the ethnic divisions among the women, or the ways in female bodies were raced or ethnicized based on the specialty of their craft. I couldn’t help but look to the “The Myth of Nimble Fingers” essay in No Sweat, where Elinor Spielberg dispels the myth that children, or Asian children, have more nimble hands for the kinds of meticulous work required specifically by the garment industries. She notes, “Nor are the fingers of Asian children any more agile than the fingers of other children. The often heard statement, ‘but things are different over there,’ as if certain workers have a special capacity for suffering, is just another rationalization for child labor, promoted by businessmen” (118). This made me think about the tensions between how much the ethnicization of female labor vis-a-vis “craft” is mythologized not only to justify the exploitation of labor, but to compartmentalize exploitation itself to more efficient ends, and how much of it actually speaks to certain specificities of national culture. Maybe we can go into this more during discussion?