Kanchana N. Ruwanpura

Mundane heroines: Conflict, Ethnicity, Gender, and Female Headship in Eastern Sri Lanka

For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of womens lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways in which gendered relations of dominance and subordination are maintained. With its co-existing Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala groups, eastern Sri Lanka facilitates the exploration of ethnicity as a source of variation. The households included in this study share a common structure and face the same economic problems, yet ethnic differences divide them. The paper charts the problems, strategies, and partial triumphs of these lone mothers and proposes policies to help them in their mundane but heroic struggle.

Multiple identities, multiple-discrimination: A critical review

Abstract The concept of multiple-discrimination, particularly as found in the labor market, is fast becoming common parlance among policy-making circles. Understanding discrimination is no longer about uncovering simple and dualistic links between two social groups: it is increasingly apparent that the nature and dynamics of discrimination are complex because the multiple positions occupied by people are shaped by numerous social attributes. Economic theory and economists, however, have hardly addressed issues of multiple-discrimination or intersectional discrimination. By surveying the economics literature, from orthodoxy to heterodoxy, this article shows how economists are lagging behind legal and human rights theorists in tackling the issue. A couple of contemporary cases from the UK, those of Aishah Azmi and Nadia Eweida, are used in this largely critical literature survey to show the value of utilizing a multiple-discrimination framework to acknowledge the complexities and nuances of labor market reality.

Awareness and Action: The ethno-gender dynamics of Sri Lankan NGOs

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the modus operandi in the development arena at this juncture. Many, including feminists, place much faith in these actors for creating a progressive space for social, political, and economic activities to be undertaken. This article employs fieldwork evidence from eastern Sri Lanka, carried out in 1998–1999 and early 2004, to challenge this simplistic reading. The primary social group that was studied during the fieldwork period was female-headed households. This article argues that there are different types of NGO working in multiple ways in the region, and it is important to distinguish between these differences. NGOs that primarily execute development-oriented projects without considering the ethno-nationalist and gender politics are culpable of the violence of development. It is only when NGOs are in local communities for the long haul that they are able to develop a commitment to reassess and evaluate the social transformative potential of their activities. Using a feminist political economy perspective this article argues that it is important and necessary that NGOs confront social, political, and economic structures, including ethnic identity politics, if their activities are to lead to transformative feminist politics. In other words, NGOs would have to do more than pay lip service to gender mainstreaming, as is more often the case. These actors need to recognize and understand the potency of ethno-nationalist politics, social structures, social exclusion, and social injustice in order to create social spaces that are enabling of womens agency in the local communities within which they work and operate.

Symbolic Gestures: The Development Terrain of Post-Tsunami Villages in (Southern) Sri Lanka

Abstract This article analyses how rituals and ceremonies were deployed in the post-tsunami rehabilitation process in Sri Lanka to ‘incorporate’ development projects into the habitus and social reality of local communities. It argues that even though the aid delivery process is represented as a gift, in reality it is more concerned with strengthening the social capital of the local and foreign donors. Through this process there is an expectation and an implicit demand for acquiescence from the beneficiaries, which leaves them with a social debt. This, in turn, compels them to participate in the game of development rituals and ceremonies, in order to express their (ambivalent) gratitude and thankfulness. Through two case studies, we explore how the good intentions of donors to provide aid and alleviate suffering and the acceptance of this aid by the local communities, results in an asymmetric relationship where both become accomplices of Bourdieuian notions of subtle and gentle violence.

The weakest link? Unions, freedom of association and ethical codes: A case study from a factory setting in Sri Lanka

Academic debates on union politics in the Global South have tended to focus on effective union and solidarity campaigns. Labour struggles, however, do not always yield beneficial outcomes for workers. Three decades of neo-liberal policies in Sri Lanka suggests complexities that labour rights advocates would potentially prefer to shy away from. Efforts to re-politicize union rights of labour in an era of economic liberalization require us to sharpen our gaze on these ruptures too. Using workplace ethnography in Sri Lanka, this article details the interactions of management and labour during a struggle over union formation. It suggests that paying detailed attention to the political economy of labour highlights a complex situation in which fostering unionization, despite its importance for the collective will of labour, may require hard work.

Women workers in the apparel sector: a three decade (r)-evolution of feminist contributions?

The early 1980s lead to a flurry of analysis regarding the role of women workers in the apparel sector. These incipient feminist interventions tended to hone in on the economic status of women workers to the exclusion of understanding the multiple ways in which their social and cultural lives was also transformed through this process. This research lacuna was primarily filled through the works of cultural and social anthropologists. The past three decades’ academic debates then have witnessed an intellectual and scholarly transition from the economic to the cultural, alongside strident calls for ethical corporate codes in the apparel sector. This journey, however, has not necessarily had an abiding focus on feminist concerns to do with the gendered nature of work itself.

Empowered spaces? Management articulations of gendered spaces in apparel factories in Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract Feminist scholarship has often focused on gendered workspaces within the apparel sector, where it is taken for granted that it is work conventionally attracting neophyte women. Within it, the task of managers is to discipline these young women to become docile and malleable workers. While this may have held to be the case temporally and regionally, South Asia’s experience has exhibited country-specific facets. This article focuses on these gendered workspaces in three factories in Karachi, Pakistan, in which we undertook research. In this context, there was a deliberate change in place facilitated by a United Nations Development Program’s Gender Promotion (GENPROM) initiative – to recruit and retain women workers, even though they acknowledged skilled workers were men. The factory managers we interviewed and spoke with used discursive tropes of gender equality and culturally appropriate women’s-only spaces as ways of justifying their labor recruitment strategy. However, digging deeper through interviews with managers at various levels suggested that their recruitment tactic had similar undertones to that revealed by early feminist research – although articulated via different mechanisms. We argue that this creation of empowerment spaces in particular Pakistani apparel sector factories requires careful tracing because it suggests how management interpellations reconfigure worker subjectivities. We also want to suggest that attentiveness to these practices is important because they may have specific bearings on temporal and spatial realities faced by Pakistan.

Exploring “Underachievement” Among Highly Educated Young British-Bangladeshi Women

Abstract Current mainstream wisdom portrays the young British-Bangladeshi community as underachieving in education. However, this study suggests that young British-Bangladeshi women tend to be high achievers in education. This research interrogates the multifaceted experiences of British-Bangladeshi women students to better understand the contested nature of their transition from educational achievement to labor market participation. The analysis draws on a combination of fieldwork done in two colleges in East London and Leeds in 2007 and secondary data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency on students who graduated from British higher education institutions in 2006. Although it focuses on the reality of young British-Bangladeshi women, the study shows that – especially for certain ethnic minorities – the absence of social resources, social networks, and egalitarian class relations can hamper the process of making good on educational achievements.

Separating spaces? Ethno-gendering social networks

Abstract The ways in which gendered processes of identity construction have been deployed in formal spaces, such as work and education, have been closely examined by feminist and postcolonial theorists. They have highlighted the need to consider the ways in which historical and socio-political contours mark womens subjectivity in these spaces. There is less work done on the ways in which ethno-nationalist (read: patriarchal) discursive strategies permeate across ethnic communities to configure everyday cultural practices in informal spaces. Using fieldwork done in eastern Sri Lanka during a one-year period (1998–99) and with follow up study during January–April 2004, this paper foregrounds the material and social spaces, namely networks, within which women exercise their everyday agency. I focus on womens narratives to show how networks are simultaneously supportive and oppressive because of ethno-nationalist practices produced in and through these informal spaces. Since the spatiality of networks perform both a private sphere activity, namely caring work, and yet control and monitor womens behaviour, a marker generally associated with the public sphere, I argue that networks located in a denaturalized and historically specific context may help blur the binary positioning that has been a hallmark of modernist thinking.

It’s the (Household) Economy, Stupid! Pension Reform, Collective Resistance and the Reproductive Sphere in Sri Lanka

In December 2010 during one of my field visits to Sri Lanka, I had called a worker to make an appointment to see her and her mother-in-law at home, both of who worked at the same factory. Chammi1 requested that I visit during the late afternoon hours of a Friday, despite being on night shift because her mother-in-law was going to be at the Department of Labour that morning. Latha had gone to the Department to claim her Employee Trust Fund/Employers Provident Fund (ETF/EPF) and obtain the necessary forms for claiming back her gratuity. She pointed out that she felt the need to claim her pension because of the impending changes to the pension system. She said: Don’t know what kind of changes they would introduce — poor we will also lose out on these scanty profits. This is the only real incentive for us to work and that too they may be taking away. I thought I would play it safe, take my funds out and put it in a savings account. Then when there is a need, I can always dip into it without the possible fear of losing it — or waiting until I am 60 years old to claim my pension. I may be dead by then for all I know!