Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh

Description

Dispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industry Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh. Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women’s aspirations for the “good life” not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital. Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women’s wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles. Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward an Ethnography of Older Factory Women Chapter 1. The Disorder of Work and Life Chapter 2. The Age of Excitement: The Rise of the Garment Industry in Bangladesh Chapter 3. The Arc of Change: Factory, Family, and Class Chapter 4. Changing Norms of Romance, Marriage, and Sexuality Chapter 5. After Work: Life in the Shadows of Capital Conclusion: Politics of the Precariat Epilogue: After Death: A Body without a Home Appendix I: Sixteen Garment Workers in 2017–2018 Appendix II: Follow-up on Sixteen Garment Workers in 2020 Notes Index About the Author