Globalization is a phallocentric “sex machine” that generates surplus value through the reduction of Asian women into disposable mechanical appendages ---that materializes in real-world violence and perpetuates patriarchal capital.

Women’s Bodies as the Engine of Globalization Specialized systems of military control loop back into gendered techniques for labor management. In the global economy, sex does not only mean cop-ulation or libidinal acts but the categorization of females as a “sex” quite apart from men in all spheres of life. The myth of the sex machine not only denotes prostitution but designates sex-specific forms of labor, such as microchip assembly or garment piecework, predicated on the myth that women are just better at these types of jobs. In the throes of the Cold War, the United States had a hand in the exploitation of Asian women, the racialized feminization of labor and the uneven development between countries that exploits poor women of color as an “accumulation strategy” of transnational capital.85 According to political scientist Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, the crooked path of Vietnam’s modernization first under the aegis of American anticommunism and later under globalization spurred a silent war on local women, turning them into the “collateral damage” of military-assisted market ventures.86 The long march of militarism abetted the implacable advance of global capitalism and its lust for labor by “locating new sources of cheap labor to become the new producers of surplus value.”87 Surplus value turned on the merits of laborers’ use value as machines with particular sex traits. Globalization itself can be viewed as a phallocentric “sex machine” that hardens women’s bodies to be durable for work, while increasing service demands for feminine “soft skills.”88 Asian women, along with other women of color, enter the high-tech industry as data-making human “computers” or “wetware,” as they are referred to by their superiors, since they provide the biological material needed for operating the men’s “hardware.” In this location, women are “reduced to machine components whose claim upon an essential personhood is reduced to their sexuality; that is, their otherness to the electronic machine lies in their sexual function.”89 This sexual function is not always recognizable given the technical facet of their work. Such sex-determined digital work does not mean only women handling metal objects like microchips, since it also applies to the garment industry as evidenced by a 1971 American handbook on needlework and crafts: “In speaking of some far eastern workers one feels like saying ‘rule of eye.’ These embroiders are such by inheritance. No improvements are introduced among their tools—they themselves are human machines.”90 In this handbook, the knitting work of Asian men became evaluated as superior and more human derived than those performed by Asian women, given the latter’s mechanical anatomy and work in a gendered economy of things. In the 1970s, the falling rate of profit for commodities in many developed nations spurred the outsourcing of manufacturing, thus leading to the a “high-tech underclass,” designed to finish putting touches on textiles, semiconductors, and microtechnology, such as silicone chips. To make these chips, workers strenuously place fine gold wires onto small data planes, peering through a tiny microscope all day, for all the new consumer elec- tronics on the market: computers, laser videos, calculators, tape recorders, portable radios, televisions, and watches. U.S. companies dominated world production of integrated circuits in 1976, manufacturing 71 percent of them. 91 By the early 1980s, close to 90 percent of U.S. semiconductor assembly factories were found in Asia.92 Chip bonding by American high-tech firms and Japanese competitors like Hitachi and Toshiba moved to cheap-labor countries such as Indonesia to avoid higher expenditures in more developed Asian nations like Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They sought to find the “cheapest” female workers around.93 By 1980, the electronics industry had become the largest employer of Asian women in the world.94 Economic competition between the United States and Japan and Europe brokered the rise of Asian women as the optimal form of labor for the global conveyer belt. Beginning in the 1970s, shortages in cheap domestic workers in North America and intensifying market competition led U.S. and Japanese multinational firms to transfer their base of operations. Many went to Southeast Asia, given real wage differentials between host countries and exporting nations. A lack of a real transfer of technology from Global North to Global South fed into an international technological barrier, making South and Southeast Asian women stand-ins or proxies for the robots or machines predicted to automate work and replace human labor.95 Manufacturing companies mostly hire men as supervisors, which further ingrains the social construct of women as unthinking slaves and men as organized human planners. Special export-processing zones and supply chains reproduce patriarchal forms of authority by marrying Taylorism with its stringent motion techniques and systematized timed work to the treatment of female “workers as appendages of the machine.”96 This gendered workplace schema plays out in production systems full of human risk. Multinational American companies like Nike hire subcontractors in places like Bangladesh, where corrupt factory owners put mostly women garment workers in hazardous buildings that end up killing thousands of them. With no regard for their humanity, and valued for their mechanized labor, Bangladeshi women are “turned into sewing machines,” and men “turn on” the machines.97 As objects of male conservatorship, the bionic woman (of color) signified the best breed of workers under global labor regimes that made little attempt to “humanize not-yet-modern others” and sought instead to “reaffirm Euro-American humanity.”98 The sex machine trope appeared beyond the factory space to include migrant female workers from former U.S. colonies like the Philippines, who came to be seen as “maid-machines” and “domestic technologies,” in a neocolonial war to be human and independent.99 Per feminist theorist Neferti X. Tadiar, the “equivalence of the Oriental woman and a sexual machine” emerged from the development of colonies into political appendages and economic depen- dents of developing nations. Their laborers “now operate as sexual machines for their developed ‘master.’”100 Crucial to maintaining the scattered hegemonies of patriarchal capital, the sex machine myth has served as a critical site for construing the lives of so many toiling women around the world as not just dehumanized machines but also as hybridized cyborgs.101 The labor-intensive facet of global manufacturing from South Korea and Japan incorporated other parts of the world beyond Asia, such that women in countries like Mexico and Latin America came to be seen as “cyborgs” within parts-assembly plants that globalize/Orientalize the local brown female workers.102 Insofar as Asian export-processing techniques have spread to parts of Latin America, the management style of Japanese and South Korean multinationals are expanding the global myth of the sex machine.103 For Asians specifically, there is a historical switch from being basic automatons to being complex cyborgs. Cyborg is a postmodern concept for imagining a new social identity made from an amalgam of human and machine parts. As higher-grade machines, cyborgs are an improvement over the bionic human since it suggests more of a complete fusion of man and machine, describing an enhanced human with some inorganic parts. But as media studies scholar Jennifer Gonzalez writes, one must examine the social form of this composite subject position as “the cyborg thus is not necessarily more likely to exist free of the social constraints which apply to humans and machines already.”104 In other words, a cyborg may be a cooler updated version of the automaton-machine robot, but it comes with all the same trappings. As social theorist Mimi Nguyen points out, we must excavate “the technological imaginary” to rend the untrammeled form of domination that “manifests across free trade zones and troublesome histories of colonial fantasy.”105 The myth of the sex machine camouflaged the exploitation of female workers even if it simultaneously extended the practice of treating women as “throwaway cyborgs, used as servants, laborers, or toys.”106 The enduring impact of the Cold War on poor women of color problematized the utopian wish for a body politic “divorced from assigned or ascribed characteristics or social location.”107 Cyborg subject formation puts a spotlight on views of “the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine.”108 The ties between sexuality and machinery remain close, even in the world of cyborgs. Scrutiny of this sexual myth is pivotal given the all-too-convenient lure and trap of thinking of women of color as the ultimate cyborgs. In a 1985 influential essay entitled “A Cyborg Manifesto,” theorist Donna Haraway popularized the concept of the cyborg, envisioning it as a new feminist mythology.109 She writes that female reproductive labor is central to “high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of person and social possibility” and cites the Southeast Asian female worker as “real-life cyborgs.” Haraway later apologized for her imperializing remarks, admitting a failure to recognize the human experience behind those “cyborg women making chips in Asia.”110 The relationship between women and the machines is complicated, if also simplified, by cyborgization. While companies promote beauty contests like “Miss Motorola” and “Miss National Semiconductor,” confusing consumer objects with women’s bodies, one assembly worker in Hong Kong named Mae-fun said: “We girls are cheaper than machines. A machine costs over $2000 and would replace only two of us. And then they would have to hire a machine tender, for $120 a month.”111 Despite predictions since the 1960s of an automated robotic future, one can sense the tension found in mechanized workers who operate as a cheaper substitute and supplement to expensive factory machines. The Malaysian government even advertised the mechanized labor of Malay women to foreign companies: “The manual dexterity of the Oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small, and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a benchassembly production line than the Oriental girl?”112 Automated industrial production enabled one worker to produce ten times as much as before, but this scaled-up productivity did not always entail a move to other high-paying quality jobs. Local human machines were considered sometimes more expedient than the real machines. Long before the development of modern Asian economies, the Asian female’s legendary dexterity was cited a century earlier by Thomas Ewbank, U.S. commissioner of patents. From 1849 to 1852, he discussed the Oriental woman’s body as a form of mechanized labor able to balance heavy pots on her head to transport public water. Her sturdy anatomy was fashioned in such a way as to produce an “adhesion to ancient customs which forms so prominent a feature in Asiatic character.”113 By patenting Asian women as property, the commissioner engages women of color as property, not intellectual creators.114 When Asian nations later industrialized similarly to the United States and Europe, this mythological sense of Asian women as superbeings that can do so many incredible things with their bodies continued. The exploitation of women by developing nations was almost tantamount to “pimping,” a form of state prostitution that enabled capitalist patriarchy on a global scale.115 That Filipino women are now trafficked into Korea, despite official prohibition on the practice, suggests a form of commodification that cannot be explained simply through misogyny but also must take into account model machinery. Researching women’s local experiences and “the practice of humanity” on the ground, anthropologist Aihwa Ong described the ingenious ways Malaysian factory workers would subvert corporatized work schedules with hidden acts of subversion that include foot-dragging of work, jamming of machines, and feigning ignorance of tools, all of which conveyed a reprisal to male management.116 Squelching the myth of deferential automatons, women broke down on factory floors, claiming possession by irate spirits, which introduced an otherworldly dimension into “rational” industrial systems. These revolutionary acts were not an example of “mechanical failure” but evidenced the ways women were unwilling to serve as good specimens of labor performance (robot) and postmodern life (cyborg). These challenges run counter to organizational practices that persist as a form of “industrial sexuality” for “mechanizing women” and “manufacturing the docile worker.”117 A critique of the acquiescent sex machine requires recognizing the sociohistorical conditions that give rise to its mythic aura of the sex machine, one always upended by bold acts of breakage by women.