Gendering the Internally Displaced: Problem Bodies, Fluid Boundaries and Politics of Civil Society Participation in Sri Lanka

In this paper I argue that the internally displaced Muslim women’s experience of displacement and their perception of new developments since the last round of peace initiative between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE are significantly different from their male counterparts in that the women find these experiences as empowering in some respects. The paper also evidence that this empowerment is differently experienced by women belonging to different social classes. Women have been identified as a problem body within the Muslim community and restrictions on Muslim women have been justified through discourses on family honor and frivolous women. The forced regional boundary crossing had resulted in Muslim women playing a different role in public space as the targeted population for NGO activities. They have become “a needed body of persons,” through a skillfully negotiated traversing among fluid boundaries, most of which are not physical. While the state, the humanitarian agencies and the urban Muslim community amidst they live now all shape the gendered subjectivities of internally displaced Muslim people the very same discourses allow women to transcend barriers they formally faced in entering public space and to negotiate positions within and against the subjectivities created for them

Global worker protests and tools of autocratization in Sri Lanka Rendering them silent

Focusing on a global factory worker protest in May 2011 in Sri Lanka’s Katunayke Free Trade Zone, this chapter highlights how the government used payments, threats, factionning and co-option to render protesting groups silent. The chapter thus argues that these psychological and cultural tools operate to suppress people’s voices especially within gendered working class struggles. Throughout history governments have used violence against their own citizenry. This took many forms—including physical, psychological, and cultural. The chapter analyzes the 2011 protest and explore follow-up research among the same group of workers in 2016 to assess how the suppression of 2011 protest affected future collective organizing, and argue that the apathy that resulted from such silencing damage workers’ political voice just as much as physical violence or destruction of property does

Crafting Social Change: Former Global Factory Workers Negotiating Identities in Sri Lanka's Villages

This article explores how former factory workers negotiate new identities in villages, as new brides, mothers and daughters-in-law, after 5–6 years of employment in an urban Free Trade Zone. I argue that their performances of self-discipline and disavowal of transgressive knowledges allow them to make use of the limited social, economic and political spaces available while gradually reshaping local understandings about the good daughter-in-law. Former workers’ strategic deployment of social conformity represents the foundation on which their entry into village social, economic, political spaces is based on. Although individual social conformity would conventionally be identified as everyday politics, I argue that former workers’ performance of self-discipline and social conformity is strategic and leads to changes in gender norms and village social hierarchies and thus represents a form of politics that is in between everyday and transformative politics – politics that creates conditions of possibility for social transformations

Sewing their way up the social ladder? Paths to social mobility and empowerment among Sri Lanka’s global factory workers

Studies on global assembly line workers showcase how gains women make are counteracted by physical, social and psychological problems stemming from long hours of working, low wages and the precarity of work. Few studies analyse these workers’ experiences after they terminate factory work. Using life histories collected over 12 years and in-depth interviews, this article highlights the different paths former workers pursue to achieve social mobility and identifies key work and life experiences that contribute to social mobility and empowerment. I argue that contrary to popular belief global factory work does lead to forms of social mobility and empowerment

Surveillance by another Name: The Modern Slavery Act, Global Factory Workers, and Part-time Sex Work in Sri Lanka.

The intensified global movement against human trafficking saw the UK Government pass the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Article 54 of the act specifically requires British companies to eradicate forced labor within their global supply chains. This essay investigates how the Modern Slavery Act affects workers at the ground level, specifically in Sri Lanka. It highlights how the onus of cleaning up supply chains was outsourced to local factory managers, who in turn placed the responsibility on workers’ shoulders, and how these developments impact a particular gray space that workers sometimes manipulate to engage in part-time sex work. The stigma surrounding factory work in some areas results in migrant workers being branded whores, and the resulting gray space is what part-time sex workers manipulate to manage their reputations. By investigating how workers play with identities and labels, this article analyzes how women navigate neoliberal aspirations and precarious, underpaid labor within competing local discourses. In doing so, the essay theorizes how gray spaces—such as the ones factory workers navigate—contain the potential for subversive politics, agency, and empowerment and how global legal narratives impinge on such spaces of play and thereby reenact old colonial power circuits even as they contribute to the imperialist character of globalized culture and policies. The essay contributes to an emerging literature on global citizen activism and highlights how resultant policies and practices may endanger complex, context-specific socioeconomic and cultural arrangements

From Global Workers to Local Entrepreneurs: Former Global Factory Workers in Rural Sri Lanka

Working in Sri Lanka’s urban free trade zones (FTZs) introduces Sri Lanka’s rural women to neoliberal ways of fashioning selves, which subsequently not only shape village entrepreneurial activities but also initiate negotiations in kinship, marriage, domestic arrangements, and community relations. The knowledges and networks that they develop while at the FTZ allow former workers to connect with global production networks as subcontractors, making them part of the cascading system of subcontracting that furthers the precarity of regular FTZ work. This article explores how these former workers manipulate varied forms of capital – social, cultural and monetary – to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders, while simultaneously initiating changes in rural social hierarchies and gender norms. When neoliberal economic restructuring manifests within local contexts it results in new articulations of what it is to be an entrepreneur and what it is to be a worthy, young, married woman. Overall, the paper sheds light on the fragmented and uneven manner in which neoliberal ethos take root in rural South Asia

Respectable Gentlemen and Street-Savvy Men: HIV Vulnerability in Sri Lanka

In this article, I investigate how particular discourses surrounding class specific understandings of sexual behavior and female morality shape awareness and views of the disease and personal vulnerability. Although both groups belong to the working class, those employed by the transportation board consider themselves government servants and, therefore, ?respectable gentlemen.? Construction workers identify easily with their class position, recognizing and sometimes trying to live up to the stereotypes of free sexuality. These different perceptions directly affect their concern and awareness of risk factors for sexually transmissible infections and safe-sex practices. While the ?respectable gentlemen? consider themselves invulnerable, the ?street-savvy men? learned about risks and took precautions to prevent STIs

Surveillance by another Name: The Modern Slavery Act, Global Factory Workers, and Part-time Sex Work in Sri Lanka.

The intensified global movement against human trafficking saw the UK Government pass the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Article 54 of the act specifically requires British companies to eradicate forced labor within their global supply chains. This essay investigates how the Modern Slavery Act affects workers at the ground level, specifically in Sri Lanka. It highlights how the onus of cleaning up supply chains was outsourced to local factory managers, who in turn placed the responsibility on workers’ shoulders, and how these developments impact a particular gray space that workers sometimes manipulate to engage in part-time sex work. The stigma surrounding factory work in some areas results in migrant workers being branded whores, and the resulting gray space is what part-time sex workers manipulate to manage their reputations. By investigating how workers play with identities and labels, this article analyzes how women navigate neoliberal aspirations and precarious, underpaid labor within competing local discourses. In doing so, the essay theorizes how gray spaces—such as the ones factory workers navigate—contain the potential for subversive politics, agency, and empowerment and how global legal narratives impinge on such spaces of play and thereby reenact old colonial power circuits even as they contribute to the imperialist character of globalized culture and policies. The essay contributes to an emerging literature on global citizen activism and highlights how resultant policies and practices may endanger complex, context-specific socioeconomic and cultural arrangements

Pandemic, Lockdown and Modern Slavery among Sri Lanka’s Global Assembly Line Workers.

This article explores how the COVID-19 pandemic and the lock down had increased global assembly line workers’ vulnerability to several forms of modern slavery. It focuses on two groups of women workers associated with global production in Sri Lanka. First, the daily-hired workers in the Katunayake and Biyagama Free Trade Zones (FTZ) and second the former global factory workers now settled in villages and operating as home subcontractors. The COVID-19 forced lockdown caused factory shutdowns and curtailed production, leaving FTZ workers with no work and income. The global lockdown has clearly affected both groups, despite their differing work and life cycle positioning. Yet their shared experience of losing hard won decision-making powers along with their income make it crucial to investigate their lockdown experiences together. In doing so, this paper argues that the pandemic and the lock down had increased marginalized women’s vulnerability to several forms of modern slavery, and that the state outsourcing it’s responsibility in providing livelihood security and labor rights to corporate sector has resulted in certain invisibilities that aid such vulnerability. The paper calls for developing contingency livelihood safety mechanisms and contends that any such plans must take into account gendered insecurities given that women’s income is closely intertwined with decision making abilities, social status and physical safety