Description
Book SynopsisCaitrin Lynch shows how contemporary Sri Lankan women navigate a complex web of political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces. Lynch details precisely how gender, nationalism, and globalization influence everyday life in Sri Lanka.
Trade ReviewAnthropologist Caitrin Lynch writes a provocative ethnography about women workers in Sri Lanka's 200 Garment Factories Program, a state initiative that brought international industry to rural villages. Working at the intersection of globalization, gender studies, and labor relations, Lynch discusses the localization of production, examining how transnational capitalist dynamics settle into local contexts. This engaging book is based on eighteen months of qualitative research performed in two garment factories. The pages brim with lively characters and trenchant analysis.
* Journal of Asian Studies *
In Juki Girls, Good Girls, anthropologist Caitrin Lynch powerfully displays women's ability to contest and adapt to larger social, political, and economic structures as they fashion identities that are both modern and traditional. Above all, it is about women's agency and thus challenges the victim-oriented globalization literature. Lynch illustrates how even when women enact subordinating practices, they do so on their own terms in an ongoing process of subject formation. Juki Girls is an instant classic, highly recommended to generalists, undergraduates, and graduate students for his accessibility, clarity, and significance.
* Feminist Studies *
In keeping with the best traditions of anthropology, Lynch connects individual experience to the politico-economic structures within which women act on and understand their worlds. Juki Girls, Good Girls is an empirically rich and theoretically informed account of gender as a site of struggle and change; few readers will be disappointed. It reminds us that women's empowerment, while a laudable development goal, is far more complicated than many of us suspect. There is much in this book that will interest development scholars as well as those in gender and feminist studies, and both seasoned and novice researchers.
* Pacific Affairs *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Rohini: Young Women and Garment Life
1. Globalization, Gender, and Labor
Chinta
2. Localizing Production
Mala: The Truth about Women Workers at Garment Factories
3. The Politics of White Women's Underwear
Geeta
4. Juki Girls, Good Girls, and the Village Context
Sita
5. The Good Girls of Sri Lankan Modernity
Geeta: Untitled
6. Paternalism and Factory Conflicts
Conclusion
