Presenter
M Madhuvadhani - South Asian University, South Asian University, New Delhi, IndiaPanel
40 – Temporal Orders of Household: Past and PresentAbstract
The Global assembly line of the Garments industry possessed ‘home’ as a parallel site of production through the outsourced work arrangements with a feminized labor force in the Global South. Existing literature helps understand women’s entry from the Global South into the circuits of Global capital through the ‘flexibilization and despatialization’ of the production process relying on gendered ideologies and deciding which bodies are suitable for specific tasks. In the context of home-based work, home becomes the space for inseparability between the rhythms of production and reproduction; capitalism colonizing the entire life of a woman worker. Unpacking the dynamics of time is highly complicated as it links the temporalities of production and reproduction, shaping distinct forms of labor circulation that always regenerate the Indian Garment workforce as mobile, precarious, vulnerable and transient and the labor experience as temporary, exhausting and depleting. Hence, the departure of capitalism starts from home, not from the factory, where the laboring bodies are reproduced and tagged based on caste, gender and other attributes; hence analyzing social reproduction is quintessential to understand the process of production. Against this background, I would like to analyze how the Capital has formed relations with home to perpetuate the accumulation and critical gaps of social reproduction theory in addressing the skill acquisition and positioning home-based workers in the circuits of global capital. With the data gathered in my fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, India among the women home-based workers, I would like to examine ‘despite the existing uncertainties, how does Capital sell an imagination of ‘hope’ to the workers?’
