Negotiating sexual meanings: Global discourses, local practices, and Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zone (FTZ) factory workers

Abstract

Utilizing extensive ethnographic research in Sri Lanka’s Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ), this article analyzes women workers’ engagement in sexual banter on city streets. It argues that these acts and the sexualized vocabulary associated with them are contextually negotiated and, by challenging the dominant mores of respectability, also empower its practitioners. The article further argues that by uncritically adopting Western notions of sexual harassment to condemn sexual banter NGOs have unintentionally colluded in the capitalist global scheme to produce docile working-class women and thereby ensure an ideal assembly line workforce. The article comments on how women workers refused to be governed by technologies of self, which were disseminated by the media and NGO workshops as appropriate for modern, educated, and urban women, and how this refusal not only marks their difference from the middle classes but also represent one way in which they participate in subaltern politics.