Assembling Women

Despite the massive influx of women into the labor force as a result of globalization, the gender inqualities at work have remained largely unchanged. This book addresses two related questions: What has prompted the feminization of manufacturing work in developing countries, and why has it failed to significantly erode gender inequalities at work? Teri L. Caraway offers case studies and in-depth analysis of employment changes in Indonesia combined with cross-national data to show that the feminization of the workplace produced by industrialization policies has reconfigured and reproduced, rather than overturned, gender divisions of labor at work. Caraway challenges the conventional wisdom that export-oriented industrialization and women's cheap labor are the driving forces behind feminization. Instead, she argues, the answers can be found in weak unions and current social practice. Caraway employs information about a wide range of industries--capital-intensive, male-dominated, non-export firms as well as female-dominated, labor-intensive, export-oriented industries--in arriving at her conclusions. Her findings will prove discouraging to anyone who hopes that globalization has become a positive force in improving the lives of women workers.Caraway's multilevel methodology for analyzing changes in gendered patterns of employment and her introduction of "gendered discourses of work" as a major explanatory variable will make Assembling Women a valuable resource for women's studies scholars, development economists, political scientists, and sociologists as well as all with an interest in Southeast Asian Studies and labor and industrial relations.

Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.