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Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott
Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott
everal years ago, Catherine Lutz posed what for me became a profound
and troubling question, "Does theory have a gender?" (1995). At the
ftime, I was designing a course called "Globalization and Culture" and
was consistently struck by the two distinct categories into which the texts
for the course fell: macroanalysesof the history, structure, and expansion
of economic forms of globalization and microanalyses of women's inser-
tion into the global economy as workers and members of third-world
countries. Why have so many of the major treatises of globalization in the
social sciences been systematicallybereft of gender analysiswhen we have,
by now, so many excellent accounts of the central role played by gender
in the configuration of global production and global consumption when
addressed at the "local"level?' In grappling with the implications of these
I wish to acknowledge my students in this course for their crucial role in shaping my
thinking on these matters and for convincing me of the necessity of an integrated feminist
approachto globalization, both theoreticallyand methodologically. Close readings by Margot
Finn, Robert Goddard, Cory Kratz, Bruce Knauft, ViranjiniMunasinghe, Gul Ozyegin, and
Jennie Smith have sharpened my ideas on these themes immeasurably,and I gratefully ac-
knowledge their input. Portions of this article have been presented to the Emory Women's
Studies Colloquium and two conferences, "Re-ThinkingTransnationalTheory,"organized by
Karen Fogg Olwig and Ninna Nyberg Sorensen in Santo Domingo, and "Migration and
Development," organized by Alejandro Portes at Princeton University; I thank the organizers
and participantsfor engaged readings and helpful responses. The comments and suggestions
of two anonymous reviewers as well as the special issue editors of Signs have been invaluable
in further revising and rethinking globalization across the disciplinaryboundaries of anthro-
pology, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and international political economy. I thank
them for their generous insights, constructive criticism, and extraordinarysupport and pa-
tience as I revised the piece. Also patient have been TaheyaAhmed and baby Alice, who have
allowed me to squeeze writing into these early precious months. This article is based on
researchthat has been generously supported by grants from the Fulbright, the Wenner Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, the Organiza-
tion of American States, and Emory's University Research Committee.
The primary texts for the course that led me to this observation include
Harvey 1989;
Appadurai 1990; Featherstone 1990; Sklair 1991; Robertson 1992; Waters 1995; Hannerz
1996.
patterns we might extend the critique made by Lutz about the more gen-
eral "gender of theory" to argue that not only has globalization theorybeen
gendered masculine but the very processes defining globalization itself-
the spatial reorganization of production across national borders and a vast
acceleration in the global circulation of capital, goods, labor, and ideas, all
of which have generally been traced in their contemporary form to eco-
nomic and political shifts in the 1970s - are implicitly ascribeda masculine
gender. Indeed, two interconnected patterns have emerged: the erasure of
gender as integral to social and economic dimensions of globalization
when framed at the macro, or "grandtheory,"level and an implicit mascu-
linization of these macrostructuralmodels. One outcome of these prob-
lems has been the implicit, but powerful, dichotomous model in which the
gender of globalization is mapped in such a way that global: masculine as
local: feminine.2
This article asks what appears to be a simple question: What are the
implications of a divide between masculinist grand theories of globaliza-
tion that ignore gender as an analyticallens and local empirical studies of
globalization in which gender takes center stage? How might alternative
analyticalapproaches give rise to new understandings of globalization? As
feminists have argued for some time, taking gender seriously not only adds
to the analysisat hand but produces a different analysis (Enloe 1990; Mas-
sey 1994, 181). By taking up one empirical local case, the example of con-
temporary "higglers" (or marketers) in the Caribbean, I hope to illustrate
that globalization works through many economic and cultural modes and
is effected both through large powerful actors and institutions as well as
by "small-scale"individuals engaged in a complex of activities that are both
embedded within and at the same time transforming practices of global
capitalism.3The particular case I will describe of contemporary transna-
tional Caribbean higglers demonstrates quite literally that not only do
2
Recent feminist critiques of globalization discourses and theory demonstrate the need
to forge closer links between disciplines whose methodological and theoretical approaches
have often made such connections strained. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for
drawing my attention to recent work by feminists in political science and internationalpoliti-
cal economy and geography whose criticalperspectivesare resonant with those I am engaging
here from the base of cultural anthropology.
3
The term higglersis used first in the literature by Mintz 1955 and Katzin 1959 in their
studies of Jamaica'sinternal marketing system. Its common usage in the Caribbean refers to
people, primarily women, who trade in agricultural foodstuffs, transporting agricultural
goods from the countryside and manufactured and imported goods from town. I use the
terms transnationalhiggler,suitcasetrader,and informalcommercialimporter(ICI) to distinguish
the more recent rendition of this long historical occupation from its original, agriculturally
based version, and the subset of this group I am particularlydescribing are those women
whose entry into higglering is tied directly to their employment in the offshore informatics
sector in Barbados.
4
See, e.g., Rouse 1991; Malkki 1992; Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994;
Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 1999; Massey 1994; Ong and Nonini 1997; Sassen 1998.
The point here is not merely to note the absence of gender in many
grand treatments of globalization but to probe the ways in which this ab-
sence limits our overall understanding of globalization's forms and mean-
ings. A gendered understanding of globalization is not one in which wom-
en's stories or feminist movements can be tacked onto or even "stirred
into" the macropicture; rather, it challenges the very constitution of that
macropicture such that producers, consumers, and bystandersof globaliza-
tion are not generic bodies or invisible practitionersof labor and desire but
are situated within social and economic processes and cultural meanings
that are central to globalization itself Some of the strongest examples of
such an approach have been made within feminist critiques. However,
achieving the weight of macrotheory that is embedded with local actors,
culture, and a keen sense of the gendered, raced, and sexed qualities of
these processes is a tall order.
5 Scholte 1996; Youngs 1996; Chang and Ling 2000; and Marchand and Runyan 2000
all articulatea simpler frameworkwithin which globalization studies can be characterized.
6 Other broad theoretical accounts of globalization that suffer from similar unmarked
masculinization include Appadurai 1990, 1991; Robertson 1992; and Hannerz 1996.
7 These discussions raise
significant questions about particularmodes of inquiry or meth-
odologies and their bearing upon how we conceptualize social phenomena. In a sense, global-
ization presents social scientists with an increasingly complex field of study that is at once
10Gibson-Graham make a similar point when they say "localization, it seems, is not so
much 'other' to globalization as contained within it, brought into being by it, indeed part of
to
globalization itself.... A space can be made for thinking globalization as many, as other
itself, as inscribing different development paths and economic identities" (1996, 145-46).
" See Ong 1987; Enloe 1990; Massey 1994; Gibson-Graham 1996; Kofman and
Youngs
1996; Chang and Ling 2000; Marchand and Runyan 2000.
12
In more recent work, Wallerstein has focused on the household and its role within
wider economic relations; as such, he has engaged gender. However, the more general point
here is that "world-systems"approaches tend to map with a broad brush pictures in which
local experience and sociocultural dynamics can be attributed largely to the workings of
higher level cross-national political and economic relationships.
On transnational industries, see Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Ong 1987; Ward 1990; Wolf
13
1992; Safa 1995; Pena 1997; Freeman 2000; on media, see Abu-Lughod 1995; Das 1995;
Mankekar 1999; on transnational fashions, see Freeman 2000; Hansen 2000; MacGaffey
and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000; on migration, see Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Sore-
nsen 1998; Mahler 1999; Pessar 1999.
14
J. K. Gibson-Graham is a pen name for Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, feminist
economic geographers who author jointly under this amalgamatedname.
15Runyan 1996 also uses the analogy of global restructuringas "date rape.' This analogy
has long roots as well, dating from early discussions of imperialism. See also Tiffany and
Adams 1985.
16
Though provocative, the metaphor of capitalism as rape ironically risks reinscribing an
equation between capitalism and masculinity without imagining an alternatively gendered
model in which femininity and victimhood are not necessarilylinked. Despite their attempts
to imagine breaking the "victim role" through alternative rape scripts, the analogy breaks
down when Gibson-Graham assert that "penetration of Asia by foreign MNCs has borne
unexpected fruit. Both upstream suppliers and downstream users of semiconductors have
sprung up in a regional complex of indigenous firms in south-east Asia, including technical
training facilities, centered in Thailand. This development counters the image of the sterile
branchplant in poor countries, which repatriatesprofits and contributes only to underdevel-
opment ratherthan industrial growth. Thedevelopment of the locally-owned
semiconductor indus-
try in south-eastAsia has beenextremelydynamicand reliesincreasinglyon high skilledlocalworkers.
It appearsthat the economic'rape'wroughtbyglobalizationin the ThirdWorldis a scriptwith
many
differentoutcomes.In this casewe might read the rapeeventas inducing a pregnancy,ratherthan
initiating the desruction and death of indigenouseconomiccapacity" (1996, 131; emphasis
added). Although their point is a vital one-that globalization is not predictable-it is also
difficult to imagine any woman made pregnant from a rape considering that
pregnancy a
creative act.
18For this
reason, Ong adopts the language of transnationalismto analyze these move-
ments, their underpinnings, and their effects and meanings rather thanglobalization, which
she uses to refer to "the narrow sense of new corporate strategies" (1999, 4). Although I am
persuaded by Ong's characterizationof transnationalismas a means to capture "the transver-
sal, the transactional,the translational,and the transgressiveaspects of contemporary behavior
and imagination that are incited, enabled and regulated by the changing logics of states and
capitalism" (4), I am also struck by the hegemony of the more structural models over the
concept and treatment of what has widely been discussed as globalization. Globalization, like
transnationalism,its equally problematic close relation, is a macroconcept likely to continue
to gain currency rather than lose favor in the wider arena of social science, news media, and
popular culture at large. Indeed, all indications point to its persistence in precisely the manner
I have sketched thus far. Rather than limit its usage, as Ong suggests, I propose here that the
model itself be tackled and redefined in ways that make explicit not simply nation and class
formations but also the gendered and often racial matricies in which these processes are em-
bedded. As such, I have opted not to abandon the term; instead, through the case of the
Caribbean higgler, I hope to begin to challenge the structural binarisms (global
economy/
local culture; global men/local women; and global theory/local lives) on which the
prevailing
macromodels of both globalization and transnationalismhave implicitly been anchored.
19Beck
2000; Marchand and Runyan 2000, 15; and True 2000 draw our attention to
ways in which feminist critical theorizing about public and private spheres is not applicable
within transitional or postcommunist states of Eastern Europe, in which the
private realm
for many women offers a larger space for agency
(entrepreneurship,consumerism, individual
expression) than the public, which is associated with surveillance and mistrust. Clifford 1998
more generally has noted that the binary oppositions between
local/global, like those of
home/abroad and staying/moving, need to be more thoroughly interrogated. He writes,
"These oppositions have often been naturalized along the lines of
gender (female, domestic
space versus male travel), class (the active, alienated bourgeoisie versus the stagnant, soulful
poor), and race/culture (modern, rootless Westerners versus traditional, rooted 'natives')"
(84-85).
and labor. As such, these forays are considered anomalies bound up in the
demands of global capitalism, where global forces realign local cultural
practices and norms, sometimes inventing whole new gender profiles that
equate young women with ideal workers (and migrants). In the realm of
global production, as both Ong's and Patricia Fernandez-Kelly'sethnog-
raphies demonstrated over a decade ago, women were recruited out of
the realm of ruralcommunities and patriarchalhouseholds and wooed into
the alien world of the multinational factory and urban free trade zones.
Where traditional femininity may entail nonwaged family-based labor,
marriage, and motherhood, new forms of global femininity demanded by
transnational corporations, for example, introduce the primacy of wage
earning (still for the family, but enjoyed individually as well) and often
spawn suspicion and wariness toward women's increasing physical inde-
pendence. Such autonomy for women is closely associated with accusa-
tions of sexual promiscuity20and has been accompanied by rising rates of
violence against women. Travel,with its embodiments of worldliness, ad-
venture, physical prowess, and cultural mastery, is widely constructed as a
male pursuit.21The circulation of women within the global arena as mi-
grant domestic workers, factory workers for transnational corporations,
and "entertainment" workers is viewed in many parts of the world as a
recent challenge to the traditionally gendered configuration of space and
motion.
What distinguishes the gendered mapping of Ong's and Chang and Ling's
cases from that implicit in earlier masculinist models of globalization is
their very interrogation of the empirical circumstancesat the local level. At
the local and regional levels of Asia Pacific, they criticallyexamine the con-
figuration of stasis and movement as feminine and masculine practices, and
they criticallyengage the relationships between space, movement, and gen-
der. Each of these feminist approachesdemonstrates in different ways that,
Femrandez-Kelly1983 and Ong 1987 note this pattern of wariness and suspicion sur-
20
Amitav Ghosh and his characterizationof every man in the Egyptian village he studied as a
traveler,"drawing attention to specific, largely male, experiences of worldliness, intertwined
roots and routes" (4). Clifford goes on to ask, "Do the women in Ghosh's village-cum-transit-
different
lounge travel? If not, why not? What is the mix of choice and compulsion in the
mobilities of men and women? Are there significant class, racial, ethnic, or religious factors
What
cross-cutting gender? Does a focus on travel inevitably privilege male experiences?
counts as 'travel, for men and women, in different settings? Pilgrimage? Family visiting?
-
Running a stall in a market town? And in those cases common but not universal-where
women stay home and men go abroad, how is 'home' conceived and lived in relation to the
practicesof coming and going?" (1998, 6).
1989, 1996; Trouillot 1992).22The country higgler was the key bearernot
only of produce and other consumer goods between country and town but
of news, information, and gossip (Katzin 1959). Her style of banter and
prowess over modes of negotiation are well-known and admired traits of
West Indian womanhood. Indeed, this particular expression of feminin-
ity-of strength, size, and autonomy-has formed a powerful counter-
point to that of a more middle-class, European model denoted in the re-
gion's well-known concept of "respectability."23 This figure has been one
of the most highly commodified images of West Indianness generally.
The colorful country higgler, wearing a head tie and printed skirt, proudly
balancing her bountiful tray of fruit atop her head or nestled beneath
her generous bosom, has become a synecdoche for Caribbeanwomanhood
and even nationhood. Her image is produced for touristic as well as local
consumption, on postcards, key chains, tea towels, as well as finer artistic
renderings. She signifies a femininity that is at once that of a mother and
a worker, a provider and a consumer, at one and the same time the defini-
tion of locality and of movement.
Today, a new form of higglering has expanded in the region, in which
women travel on commercial airlines, rather than on trucks, buses, or ba-
22
Further, where in the Chinese case emigration to locales across the Asia Pacific region
and the United States has been markedby a pattern of "localizing the women at home, where
they care for their families, thus freeing the men to work abroad" (Ong 1999, 20), patterns
of migration and travel within the Caribbean have been gendered differently. Caribbean mi-
gration history does include mass movements of men seeking work abroad, most notably
during the building of the Panama Canal. However, in the past half century there have also
been large numbers of West Indian women recruited for domestic labor, nursing, and other
services to Britain, Canada, and the United States.
23 First
proposed by Peter Wilson (1969), the duality of respectability/reputationhas held
wide currency in scholarship of the region. His formulation proposed that two cultural mod-
els have framed Caribbean societies: one modeled on white European norms of respectability,
in which propriety and decorum are emphasized through practices of marriage, monogamy,
and the tenets of Christianity,and women are described as the main bearers and arbiters of
respectabilityresiding largely in the interior realms of home and church; the second, reputa-
tion, refers to those African-derivedcultural practices and beliefs that foster comunitas,or a
leveling of social hierarchy.Forms of verbal jousting and of display, in which small groups
gather in exterior, public spaces, are said to be practiced more by men. Numerous critiques
of this formulation have been articulated (e.g., Sutton 1974; Barrow 1986; Besson 1993;
Miller 1994; Yelvington 1995; Freeman 2000) challenging various dimensions of the stark-
ness of this proposed duality. Nonetheless, virtually every ethnography from the region takes
is
up this paradigm in one form or another. As such, its heuristic value has been great, and it
in this spirit that I engage it here to counterpose Wilson's version of feminine respectability
with another equally strong version of powerful, black womanhood embodied in the figure
of the higgler. See Freeman 2000 for an expanded discussion of competing feminine ideolo-
gies and portraits in the context of the transnationalinformatics industry in Barbados.
24
Although women are known to predominate in this form of higglering, like in its agri-
culturally based antecedent, men represent an active minority in the trade. Some women in
my study reported that men are more likely to import electronics than housewares and to tie
their trips to other forms of migrant labor, such as temporary agriculturalwork in North
America.
25
See Witter 1988; French 1989; Quinones 1997; and Ulysse 1999.
26
During the early period of my fieldwork, in 1991, the then minister of trade made a
desperate plea asking "patriotic Barbadians"to boycott illegal suitcase traders. His call was
made in support of local clothing manufacturersand store owners who claimed that the over-
seas trade by ICIs was severely curtailing their businesses. More recently,in an interview with
a local boutique owner, this complaint was echoed with despair.This shopkeeper has had to
shift her market exclusively to tourists, selling Barbados t-shirts and related beachwear,facing
the simple fact that "Bajans could get their clothes and shoes cheaper from the suitcase
traders."
27 A wide
arrayof people perform informal importing in the Caribbean,in varying degrees
of intensity and aimed at varying markets. Flight attendants on the airlines are one
group,
e.g., who have long utilized their access to frequent travel to buy and resell goods within local
networks. Middle-class women may perform occasional shopping
trips abroad with lists for
relatives and friends, covering the cost of their travel and accommodation
by charging addi-
tional small fees. Others, keen to identify themselves as entrepreneurs,and
earning substantial
income from their sales, sometimes specialize in particulargoods such as shoes or children's
clothing. The local government increasinglypressuresthose higglers who travel regularlyand
perform these trips as the basis for their livelihoods to "regularize"their trade by selling in
stalls in central marketsin Bridgetown. In the latter case, the Barbadiangovernment has made
attempts to regulate this trade by setting up market areas in Bridgetown and thereby provid-
ing mechanisms for taxing these entrepreneurson their businesses.
a complex set of factors including foreign and local modes of discipline and
surveillance, gender ideologies, and aesthetics (Freeman 2000).
The fact that these high-tech working women juggle formal and infor-
mal sector work is not in itself remarkablein the history of Barbados nor
the region more generally (Comitas 1964; Carnegie 1987; Senior 1990).29
However, the particularlinkages, both structural and symbolic, between
the formal transnationalexport sector and the emergent trade in consumer
goods by suitcase traders remains unexplored as a dimension of (simulta-
neously) globalization, local culture and development, and identity.
29
Carnegie 1987 extends Comitas's earlier concept of "occupational multiplicity" in the
Caribbean by arguing that "strategicflexibility" is a more general cultural model with which
West Indians approach most aspects of life. This is rooted in a history of movement and
expressed in numerous ways across the life course (e.g., migration, kinship, occupation, etc.).
30 As Finn 2000
points out in a fascinating account of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century English diaries, there has been an undertheorizing of male consumers (perhaps re-
lated to the implicit mapping of femininity onto consumption) as well as of
consumption
more generally.
for jeans, children's clothes, and casual leather shoes, an excursion to see
the famous Pitons and dramatic waterfalls, and evenings out at popular
nightclubs. They speak about being off on their own and out at night with
an air of excitement, for these are activities they would be less likely to
carry out at home. In the shops, Danielle straddles the roles of consumer
and eventual broker and balances the requests on her list against prices,
availability,and the new styles she ventures her customers will like. In her
display of snapshots from this trip, which followed the familiarconvention
of posed portraits in front of national sites as well as inside the stores, one
would be hard pressed to decipher this higglering journey as anything but
a long weekend tourist excursion away from Barbados.
The particularmeanings of Danielle's ventures are significant precisely
in their multiplicity--they are opportunities for generating income but
equally for seeing new sites, enjoying themselves, feeling fashionable and
adept at finding "good deals,"and in constructing forms of femininity that
defy some traditional boundaries that are both gendered and formulated
along the lines of class. Danielle and her friend Marcelle are both married
women, mothers, and working women -one in a high prestige industry
in a position with responsibility, the other now having quit her job in in-
formatics and running a bar/convenience store out of her home. They go
to church with some regularity,and they could generally be described as
straddling the upper-working/lower-middle classes. Their higglering pur-
suits when seen amid their wider relationships and responsibilities power-
fully exemplify the false dichotomy of the persistently gendered paradigm
of respectability and reputation. They are neither the "uptown ladies" nor
the "downtown women" of Gina Ulysse's Jamaican paradigm (1999).
They move easily between "proper,""respectable"etiquette of middle-class
family life and work, facilitated by new modes of consumption they now
enjoy, and the "reputation"-likepractices of foreign travel, nightclubbing,
bold bodily display, and self-fashioning formerly construed as masculine
practices (Wilson 1969). The special combination of economic goals along
with social desires (profit making and cost saving with pleasure seeking)
gives these trips a dimension of both credibility as well as suspicion in the
eyes of the women's husbands and boyfriends, and women are known to
capitalizeon the former to allaythe latter.In short, they challenge the repu-
tation/respectabilitydichotomy in many of the ways critics have asserted-
by simultaneously enacting behaviors previously imagined to be the pre-
serve of either men or women, middle or lower classes, white, brown, or
black. Through modes of dress and travel that are tied both to their role
as producer (higgler/informatics worker) and consumer, they are engaged
in global processes that are locally distinct. They are incorporated into the
Conclusions
The case of the informatics worker/higglers helps to illustratehow through
changing modes of production and consumption these social actors have
become multiply "territorialized"across a global arena and, in the process,
have become agents of globalization. They are local subjects living across
and within a globalized terrainboth within Barbados (as informatics work-
ers as well as in numerous other forms of consumption and contact with
global goods and culture) and on their higglering sojourns abroad (as con-
sumers and marketersof goods and as "tourists"engaged in the consump-
tion of other languages, people, and cultures). In a sense, they are rooted
in Barbados, and their Barbadiannessis increasinglydefined and sharpened
though new modes of production, consumption, and travel in ways that
link Barbados with numerous other sites along the global terrain. Their
notions of themselves as feminine, sexual subjects- as women, as members
of the working/middle classes, and as Barbadian,West Indian, Caribbean,
and black-are, not surprisingly,increasingly defined in relation to others
they encounter through their travel and their relationships forged as hig-
glers. Higglering, then, as a form of labor and consumption and as such
the nexus of social, economic, and cultural relationships, becomes a realm
in which identities (national, regional, class, racial,gender, and sexual) are
articulatedand redefined.
While the activities of the Caribbeanhiggler, straddling production and
consumption through the medium oftravel, might transgressgender norms
in many parts of the world and even other parts of the region, for Barba-
dian women, these travelsmight be seen as quintessentiallyfeminine. First,
very simply, travel and physical mobility in general have never been off-
limits to them. Second, the purchasesthey make work both to reinforce as
well as to challenge notions of traditional or respectable
femininity. The
consumption practices in which the higgler engages are directed toward
the feminine body (clothing/fashion), children'sneeds
(clothing and toys),
as well as the domestic space (curtains, sheets, small kitchen
appliances,
and clothes) - all reinforcing her roles (and her female customers'
roles) as
mother and homemaker. Thus, if some of the fashions and materials she
purchases transgress respectable femininity at home in Barbados, others
are the very foundation upon which conformity to codes of
professional
style is constructed.
31
The informatics workplaces were feminine spaces not only by virtue of hiring predomi-
nantly women but also in the particular modes of incorporation and discipline utilized in
the labor process itself. Young men were typically located in special work areas designated
for
appropriate either because of the physical strength (lifting heavy bags of airline tickets,
instance) or higher skills (computer programming) they required. Even without higher levels
of education or skills, the few men who were hired as data-entryoperators were often quickly
which
promoted out of the data-processing floors and into special and less visible areas in
they were trained to perform specific jobs. In some of the same ways as the women workers,
they too adopted aspects of respectability and professionalism that are coded as feminine
in the Barbadian context--their dress was conservative (slacks, buttoned and usually white,
unembellished shirts, optional ties, and "hard"shoes) and their hair worn short. The dis-
course of the workplace as a whole was geared toward a particular set of prescriptions for
and
femininity and emphasized dress, comportment, and professionalism through workshops
demonstrations on makeup, dress, office demeanor, talent shows, and forth, well in
so as as
the ordinary,highly disciplined labor process, which requiredprecision, punctuality,and high
levels of surveillance, in which maleness, masculinity, and "reputation"were largely written
out. As I describe at length elsewhere (Freeman 2000), young women's competitive sartorial
dress
display was a source of tension for the industry managers, and official newsletters and
codes emphasized more conservative, understated, and "respectable"modes of attire and
comportment.
mates), and this image reflects not only corporate demands but also the
creation of a new pink-collaridentity she works hard to maintain. On buy-
ing trips to San Juan and Miami, the purchase of clothing and accessories
is not only an act of consumption but of production - of new images, new
modes of comportment, and new subjectivitiesin a transnationalsymbolic
order. This production of self, while symbolic rather than material, has an
economic value as well as a cultural one, as it is a vital dimension of the
successful marketing of her goods back home. Through these complex
practices, she is simultaneously imbricated in a dialectic of shopfloor pro-
duction (albeit in an officelike setting), the consumption of clothing and
style, and the production of new feminine selves. At each node of this im-
brication, there is an exchange of economic as well as symbolic value. Sig-
nificantly, in this process, she is transformed from being primarily instru-
mental in the forces of globalization (as an employee of a MNC) to
becoming agentivewhen others pay for her privileged knowledge and at-
tractivegoods. In other words, disciplined and remade in the formal work-
place of informatics, she further embellishes this new sense of self on her
buying trips, through which she becomes a new agent of globalization.
Her agency challenges us to rethink models of globalization more gener-
ally in which the local is construed as a space in which the heavy hand of
the global makes its marks.
The informatics worker-cum-higgler is embedded within processes of
globalization in multiple ways that are not unidirectional,just as Marchand
and Runyan observe more generally (2000, 7). She demonstrates not only
that local actors are resilient in respondingto the demands of global capital-
ism (i.e., not only coping with low wages and a highly disciplined labor
process but also redefining transnationalprescriptions for "ideal"labor in
light of local historical traditions of women's simultaneous expectations for
wage work and motherhood) but also that they are involved in crafting
multiple modes of global capitalism itself. Ironically, perhaps, she is in-
volved not in "countering" global capitalism, as Gibson-Graham'smodel
might be inclined to hope, but in intensifying its reach and, in a sense,
democratizing its rewards.She gives a new shape to a long-standing female
tradition of Caribbean marketing, and yet she continues its particularex-
pression of femininity in which movement, sharp wits, and business acu-
men are vital ingredients. She capitalizes upon her formal
wage-earning
(and often exploited) status in the global informatics industry by turning
productivity inducements (travelvoucher rewards) into profit-makingven-
tures and by utilizing her networks of workmates as a
captive market for
her imported wares.
In what way might we derive generalizable lessons from the
story of
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