On No Sweat/Real Women Have Curves

"No Sweat" immediately evoked comparisons with another book I had read sometime ago on the same subject - "Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry" by Jane L. Collins. "Threads" offers a dispassionate study of the insensitive, profit-oriented manufacturing arrangements followed by two US-based corporate firms retailing garments - Tultex (a mass-producer of knitwear) and Liz Claiborne Inc., and the ways in which the latter adapts successfully to global labor flows while the former fails since it continues working with an older model of directly owned manufacturing units within the country. "No Sweat" is methodologically different in its use of testimonies - of workers working in sweatshops, the 'defenses' of corporate firms (through the use of an interview) and the varying strategies of activism (ranging from covert investigation, to legal battles, to open letters) employed to revolutionize the working terms and conditions in these spaces around the world. It also does a great job of debunking the masculinization of labor that is corroborated by most Marxist studies of specific production and labor practices. While both the works try to explicate the profoundly exploitative and inegalitarian principles of the current 'globalized' economy by showing how '[it] has complicated the issue, at a time when the apparel industry is increasingly dominated by a few giant retailers, all of whom consign production to independent, offshore contractors. they do not own these companies or hire the workers',"Threads" stops at explaining how these diffuse conduits of manufacturing and retailing make labor unity and agitation difficult since often the workers have only a very dim idea of who the ultimate employer is. "No Sweat" on the other hand, presents a more optimistic picture by focusing on the specific organizations and strategies that have been forged to combat the rampant exploitation. The chapter titled "The Global Resistance to Sweatshops" refers to the 'wide array of citizen movements that are seeking to reshape globalization by rendering it more "socially and environmentally responsible', it also talks about 'the growing alternative trading movement that bypasses large corporate channels to deliver products made under more humane conditions from cooperatives directly to consumers' (page 49). I thought some of the chapters also did a good job of giving us a sense of the kind of tight-rope activists have to walk keeping in mind the possible repercussions that the media-exposures, negative publicity and consumer-boycott might have on the employment of poverty-ridden workers. The more militant approach toward Kathie Lee Gifford, Global Fashion & Wal-Mart can be juxtaposed with the more negotiatory 'open letter' to Walt Disney stating that '[we] want to join the Walt Disney Company in an attempt to improve conditions in these Haitian factories' (page 95). I particularly liked the way in which going beyond its specific focus on exploitative production practices and conditions of labor, many chapters of the book also displayed an awareness of the ways in which the mediascape as well as the public space within which the legal and ethical tussles between the firm, the laborer and the activist unfolded, were in themselves gendered so that a Kathie Lee Gifford had ins one ways less room to negotiate the 'horrific' revelations, and could succeed in doing so only by playing up particular feminine roles, while Michael Jordan, as an endorser of an exposed brand, could get away by displaying complete nonchalance.
Having read such a comprehensive analysis of the workings of the global apparel economy, I am intrigued by the kinds of questions the film "Real Women Have Curves" that also addresses the same terrain opens up. Keeping in mind the understanding "No Sweat" has provided of the industry, I am wondering about the kinds of consumers these workers themselves might be. The film helps the viewer get a tactile sense of these sweatshop-like spaces, and also perceive how these often inter-generational working spaces are riven by cross-identifications on the basis of class, race and culture. Ana's liminality due to her contradictory location in both the factory and the classroom is depicted very well. Interestingly, the male figures within her family are shown as being more supportive of her educational ambitions. By contrast, her relationship with her mother is shown to be the most fraught and the emotional center of the film. This dynamic of overt hostility and silent resentment seems to be structured by disidentifications of class and gender, which are often complex and contradictory, though on the whole Ana's is the voice that is adopted and politically/ethically avowed as the voice of the film, while the mother is sympathized with. While Ana has a very bourgeois disgust for factories and spouts disdain for the work the women have to perform there, she resists her mother's demand that she 'walk like a lady' and lose weight. Yet I am intrigued by the way in which the mother's obstinate disapproval of Ana's decision to move away and study, remains unresolved and 'excessive'. Returning to my question about garment-workers as consumers, the final scene of the film when where Ana walks the streets of New York, liberated, having transcended her destiny as a garment-worker, already acquiring sartorially the sophistication of a 'city-girl'/student, seems evoke a certain degree of ambivalence.