Beyond 'Déjà Vu All Over Again?' Women's Work in the Global Economy

• Published in: Journal of Women's History Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 222 - 231
• Main Author: Gabaccia, Donna R
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2007
• Subjects: Academic departments; Anthropologists; Asian cultural groups; Chinese languages; Cultural identity; Departments; Discourse analysis; Economic conditions; Gender; Global economy; Globalization; Historians; Interdisciplinary aspects; Labor movements; Labour relations; Literary translation; Maoism; Migrant workers; Migrants; Migration; Neoliberalism; Nonfiction; Photography; Political economy; Postmodernism; Professional training; Qualitative research; Review articles; Scholars; Studies; Women; Women's work; Working conditions; Hong Kong China; Nicaragua; China; Latin America
• ISSN: 1042-7961; 1527-2036; 1527-2036
• DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2007.0056

In our postcommunist, postsocialist, post-Maoist, postmodern, neoliberal era, the changes associated with globalization-which include rapid, longdistance movements of capital, labor, images and ideas-seem capable of radically transforming the lives, identities, options, and desires of laborers everywhere. The popularity of such new concepts as globalization and of global economy, thankfully, make a review like this one possible, for these concepts assume connections among workers in the far-flung parts of the world that earlier area-studies paradigms or historical work on national economies often rendered invisible. (Three of the five authors reviewed here-Ngai, Ghodsee, and Jacka-work in interdisciplinary academic departments; Mendez and Oishi are sociologists.) The benefits of such interdisciplinary training and professional life are beautifully illustrated in these publications: readers will see in them the benefits of a dialogue that has developed between theorists of culture and identity on the one hand, and, on the other, sociologists and anthropologists who adopt qualitative methods (ranging from ethnographic field work to discourse analysis) to explore women's work.\n To Jacka's credit, she has also made available on the Web translations of the full stories written by Chinese women for a contest, "My Life as a Migrant Worker," sponsored by a magazine for rural women.2 Fewer speaking individuals-and more subject positions-populate the pages of Ngai's Made in China, although in the case of this book, too, photographs and even the account of "Yan's displaced self" (Yan is the screaming woman of chapter 6) establish the humanity of her worker subjects.