PAPER:Gendered Morality Tales: Discourses of Gender, Labour, and Value in Globalising Asia
Gendered Morality Tales:
Discourses of Gender, Labour, and Value in Globalising Asia
Important quotation:
1. Aim: this paper examines the links between
these globalising dynamics and provocative local depictions of Asian women as
active, desiring, and immoral. I
explore the significance of these and other scandalous images of ‘bad’ girls
and women across globalising Asia.
2. a type of morality that
is gendered (e.g. it is immoral for women to have sex outside of marriage but
not men).
3.
these
moralising narratives offer insight into the localised negotiations through
which marginalised and gendered citizens confront their subordination within
the region’s hierarchically ordered political economies.
4. Gendered morality is locallised phenomena
5. Gendered morality is “a
localized phenomena”
6. Gendered morality is
“locally meaningful and highly visible ways to stigmatise autonomous, mobile,
and desiring women” (Mills, 2017, pp 316).[1] However, most
public only concern on “individual responsibility and away from broader
structural conditions and inequalities” (Mills, 2017, pp. 318).
7. Tales of Juki Srilanka
8. Tales of Single parasite
in Japan
9. Tale of Widow Ghost
10. the stigma of gendered morality tales may constrain but cannot stop men’s and women’s lived engagements with and desires for global connection
Reference:
Mary
Beth Mills (2017) Gendered Morality Tales: Discourses of Gender, Labour, and
Value in Globalising Asia, The Journal of Development Studies, 53:3, 316-330,
DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2016.1184251
ABSTRACT
Across Asia, the pursuit of national and
global capital accumulation has relied on flexible, feminised work forces and
patriarchal models of social reproduction. These gendered patterns of
production and reproduction, while central to Asia’s neoliberal ‘miracle’
economies, have also generated powerful discourses that devalue women and their
work. Drawing on case studies from across the region, this paper examines the
links between these globalising dynamics and provocative local depictions of
Asian women as active, desiring, and immoral. These ‘gendered morality tales’
reveal the complex cultural and ideological work that sustains neoliberal
models of national economic development. At the
same time, these moralising narratives offer insight into the localised
negotiations through which marginalised and gendered citizens confront their
subordination within the region’s hierarchically ordered political economies.
IMPORTANT QUOTATION
Pp
316
Across contemporary Asia, diverse
representations of immoral women attract social censure. Some are longstanding
figures of moral blame, such as the Sri Lankan ‘juki girl’, a stigmatised label
applied for more than three decades to young women factory workers, whose
employment outside the home leads to suspicions of sexual promiscuity (Lynch, 2007, pp.107–108). Others inspire recurring moral
panics, as in Japan’s concerns about ‘parasite singles’, young women whose
selfish consumerism is blamed for dangerously delayed marriage rates and a
looming crisis of national reproduction (White, 2002,
p. 23). And at other times and places, feminised figures of danger have been
the focus of intense but more short-lived public attention: as in Thailand’s
‘widow ghost’ scare of early 1990, during which reports of marauding female
spirits in search of husbands fostered fear and anxiety across much of the
nation’s rural Northeast region (Mills, 1995).
Aim: In the following analysis I explore the significance of these and other scandalous
images of ‘bad’ girls and women across globalising Asia.
Arising alongside and often in direct
response to gendered transformations of labour, these ‘gendered morality
tales’, as I will call them, work in locally meaningful and highly visible ways
to stigmatise autonomous, mobile and desiring women.
I argue that these gendered figures of
moral blame condense and put on display (albeit in distorted ways) the
conflicts generated by new configurations of productive and reproductive labour
and their varied but real effects on the everyday lives of many Asian citizens
Pp 362
Given the constraints of a short article
I make no claims to provide an exhaustive review of all possible instances of
gendered morality tales; rather, I offer some productive ways of thinking about
public narratives of feminine immorality in the hope of prompting new attention
to related imagery and possible parallels in other settings.
Gendered
morality tales are deeply localised phenomena.
Pp 318
In a given context, local gender norms
delineate acceptable behaviours for women and men and police the moral worth of
those who transgress. It is important to remember, however, that this
ideological dimension of gender norms never completely defines individual
identities nor can it determine the full range and meaning of social
experiences (Butler, 1990)
Wage
Labour and Undisciplined Desires
Pp 322
No figure exemplifies this process more
clearly than Sri Lanka’s ‘juki girl’, whose
moral failings became a focus of public concern, beginning soon after Sri
Lanka’s economic liberalisation in the late 1970s, a process that relied
heavily on the availability of young rural women as a cheap labour force for
expanding garment industries. Ethnographers Lynch (2007)
and Hewamanne (2008), writing about factory
workers of the mid-1990s and early-2000s respectively, offer detailed analyses
of the stigma associated with the juki girl image. Named for a common Japanese
brand of sewing machine, the juki girl is a tainted figure of uncontrolled
desire. She spends her factory wages on fashionable clothes and make-up; an
unmarried yet independent woman, she goes out to urban sites of entertainment
seeking excitement and (potential) sexual encounters. The juki girl’s purported
sexual agency allows for an easy conflation of the factory worker with another
gendered figure of Asian modernity, the sex worker (Hewamanne, 2008, p. 22). For Sri Lankans such connections are
further underscored by common colloquial references to urban industrial zones
as ‘prostitution zones’ (Lynch, 2007, p.
107). Viewed in this light, the juki girl signifies the easy slide between the
commodification of women’s labour and the commodification of their bodies,
themes that for the past several decades have been a recurrent focus of
sensational news stories, television dramas, and even high-level political
debates (Lynch, 2007, pp. 107–108, 110–113,
117–118).
Pp
323
Transnational
Desires and Deceitful Women
While unruly servants and absent wives
offer fertile fields for moralising narratives about transna- tional labour, it
is not just women’s mobility that generates discourses of feminine immorality.
In Thailand, similar themes of gendered risk are associated with men’s overseas
labour migration. These ideas have found expression not only in the brief
episode of widow ghost fears discussed previously but also in longstanding
pop-culture motifs that censure the deceitful and selfish wife who betrays her
absent husband
Pp 324
In contrast to these shared experiences
of vulnerability, the figure of the unfaithful wife suggests that individual
failures (particularly by women) are the real obstacle to achieving prosperity
through overseas migration. Nevertheless, when viewed more dispassionately, the
‘selfish’ desires (for wealth, commodified success and autonomy) that drive
imaginary women to deceit and betrayal are the same aspirations that drive
actual migrants into the risky business of transnational labour. Much like Sri
Lanka’s juki girl, the deceitful wife of Thai songs and ballads projects a
flawed but compelling constellation of the desires that prompt many less
privileged Asian citizens to enter into exploitative conditions of globalised
labour. Yet, even as they model migrant vulnerabilities as individual risk,
stories of deceitful wives reflect the shared experiences of many men and women
whose marginalised labour and aspirational desires remain subordinated within
the region’s neoliberal hierarchies of globalised value.
Pp324
Women,
Consumption, and Failed Reproduction
Many of these same themes recur in
another set of gendered morality tales that elaborate the threat of feminine
mobility and desire in different parts of Asia. In these cases, however,
concerns about selfish or immoral women focus less on the risks and ambiguities
of globalised labour than on the threats women pose to the stability of
individual households and to social reproduction. For example, the demographic
transition in some parts of Asia has prompted moral panics that blame women’s
self- indulgent consumerism for a failed commitment to appropriate domesticity.
Pp
325
A similar kind of imagery characterises
Japan’s long-standing panic over ‘parasite singles’.
Coined by a Japanese sociologist (Yamada, 1999;
cited in Rosenberger, 2013, p. 22), the term
refers to young Japanese women and men, but especially women, who are
considered to selfishly delay marriage and childbearing. Still living with
their parents, working and spending lavishly on themselves, they are accused of
dangerously neglecting their own and the nation’s future.11 Over
the past two decades, the idea of the parasite single has sparked both academic
debates and media commentary about the moral and reproductive decline of Japan
(Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012, p. 192; and for
related discussions see Miller & Bardsley, 2005;
White, 2002, pp. 23, 189). While the term
can apply to men as well as women, it is more often the latter whose
experimental fashions, dramatic cosmetic styles, and frequently shifting
popular culture obsessions attract the attention of critics. Like the deceitful
wife of Thai song lyrics, the parasite single offers up the failed choices of a
morally suspect individual as a source of blame for a wide range of social
dislocations, including those associated with Japan’s aging population.
Ultimately, the failure of the Japanese
state to increase fertility rates despite more than two decades of moralistic
complaints about parasite singles underscores another important aspect of
gendered morality tales: their reception is neither stable nor uniform.
Conclusion
Whether you find them provocative,
amusing, outrageous, or disturbing – Asia’s diverse gendered morality tales
direct our attention toward the cultural work and ideological effort that is
required to sustain neoliberal projects of national development and global capital
accumulation. While always rooted in distinctive local narratives and
histories, each of the feminised figures of blame discussed above resembles the
others in at least this one fundamental way: they all articulate a vision of
contemporary life in which it is the failures of specific individuals – and not
the exploitative conditions of globalised labour or the inegalitarian
structures of neoliberal states – that spoil the promises of modern success and
undermine social well-being. In so doing, images like the juki girl or parasite
single promote the discursive normalisation of Asia’s exploitative and
stratified political economies. As icons of disorder they serve to uphold and
to validate existing hegemonic orders. By offering a vision of norms and values
under threat, gendered morality tales focus popular attention on individual
failures and away from the structural conditions that underlie shared
experiences of marginality and social distress. In their different ways figures
like the widow ghost and the deceitful wife or the failed mother justify
compliance with existing patterns of inequality and marginalisation in
different Asian societies, positioning both men and women as desiring but
disciplined subjects eager to provide the productive and reproductive labour
required by global capital and the neoliberal state.
Nevertheless, as with all hegemonic
processes, it is important to assess both the efficacy and the limits of these
normative effects. More than simple vehicles of biopolitical discipline, gendered
morality tales also dramatise the ongoing contradictions of Asia’s neoliberal
economies and hierarch- ical social orders. Rooted in the disruptive effects of
globalised labour relations and indicative of the anxious desires and
unsettling conditions of consumer modernities, figures like the juki girl or
the mia farang illuminate the volatile boundaries of the region’s stratified
and gendered regimes of graduated citizenship. In their very visibility, Asia’s
‘bad’ girls and women provide a public representation of the transformations
and conflicts that many people are living every day.
Consequently, gendered morality tales
occupy a slippery cultural terrain: between the hegemonic and the subversive,
the normative and the transgressive. It is a terrain shaped by locally specific
meanings and hierarchies, as well as the
often conflicted efforts of ordinary people to navigate their particular
society’s demands and constraints. Yet it is exactly these slippery and
contested dimensions that make gendered morality tales so apt for comparative
and critical analysis across contemporary Asian modernities. Viewed from one
angle, feminised figures of immorality and disorder showcase the powerful and
subtle ways that neoliberal states and global capital seek to mould the
expectations and compliance of stratified citizenries. At the same time, as
focused expressions of anxiety and ambiva- lence, gendered morality tales
highlight localised experiences of inequality and marginalisation and the ways
in which these are rooted in globalised transformations of gender, labour, and
social aspiration.
In other words, the stigma of gendered
morality tales may constrain but cannot stop men’s and women’s lived
engagements with and desires for global connection. As dramatic characters in
moralising narratives, figures like the Thai widow ghost or the Japanese
parasite single shore up and sustain existing regimes of authority and power
but they also encode revealing portraits of change and challenge in the making.
If figures of feminine immorality promote the formation of disciplined
citizen-subjects, they also crystallise dominant discourses of gender, labour,
and value in ways that point to potential and sometimes active fault lines
within these hegemonic models of authority. While serving as ideological tools
of neoliberal governance and self-regulation, moralising images of the
sexualised factory worker, the selfish housewife, or failed mother also depict
the real if conflicted efforts that actual people can and do make to escape
marginalised and subordinated subject positions. Or to put it another way,
Asia’s gendered morality tales offer productive insights into the locally
diverse and contested ways that women and men are always already confronting
and, at times, even transforming the inequitable and uneven dynamics of
neoliberal globalisation in their own lives.
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