‘Productive female’ tropes reaffirm the patriarchy and remove their agential capacity.

Beginning in the mid-sixties, a new round and form of capitalist expansion shifted the epicenter of production from Fordist factories in the rich countries to assembly plants in the poor, prequel to the neoliberal era. An integral element in this process was a concomitant shift in the privileged subject of exploitation, from a putatively breadwinning patriarch in the global north to a pin-moneyearning, docile young woman in the global south.27 Since then, much of global production has been organized around the expectation of and search for a paradigmatically feminine, “cheap, docile, and dexterous” worker.28 Thus, what I came to term the “trope of productive femininity”29 has become a defining feature of managerial hiring and labor control strategies in plants in the global south, even in periods and areas in which men are incorporated into these feminizing structures. Within these discursive frameworks, masculinity remains very much part of the story. In classic fractal form, this exploitable feminine subject emerges in contrast to men on both sides. Before her, we find the endangered, first world, unionized breadwinner. Her objectification is counterpoised to his capacity to operate as an active subject, her passivity to his action on his own behalf, the essential triviality of both her productive and household contribution to the centrality of his. Nonetheless, it is she who is the danger, destroying him, taking his job. Under neoliberalism, the breadwinners of the global north are a dying breed. At the same time, her image is recursively juxtaposed against a less successful masculinity nearer by. Productive women workers are contrasted to their unruly brothers, local young men who have no access to breadwinner masculinity but nonetheless fail to meet the standards of true feminine exploitability.30 Coded as unruly, undisciplined, inappropriate workers of last resort by transnational managers, these young men, like their counterparts around the globe, become excess, categorically unfit. And it was within these contrasting gendered discourses that the maquila labor force was constituted and in the context of that market that the struggles over production itself took place.