Reproductivity, the Workplace and the Gendering of the Body (Politic)

Abstract

The 25th of January 2002 saw the global launch of Tezuka’s Metropolis. Based on “The Father of Manga,” Osamu Tezuka’s 1949 comic, the Ž lm is a groundbreaking fusion of traditional Japanese animation and photo-realistic digital technology. Whilst clearly a comic book reworking of Fritz Lang’s dystopian 1926 Ž lm Metropolis, Sony Picture’s slick website erases this genealogy. Rather, the only reference to Lang’s work is obliquely in a claim that Tezuka’s inspiration was “a magazine photo of the ‘birth’ of Maria, a humanoid robot.” To younger fans of japanimation or of Tezuka’s work who are unaware of the Ž lm’s origin, maybe Maria is imagined as a humanoid existing independent of celluloid, and in some ways these visitors to Sony Picture’s website are correct. Maria — or at the very least the fears that she embodies — lives without Lang’s classic and in uential Ž lm. Sidestepping Sony’s erasure and returning to Lang’s innovative and  awed masterpiece, in this paper I want to consider the idea of social/ industrial bodies. In doing so, I want to engage with the construction of gendered bodies within the industrial landscape. More speciŽ cally, I want to understand the place of these bodies in the gendering of workplace (and other) communities. In seeking to understand this, and whilst understanding that workplaces and other spaces are gendered through an array of gendering technologies, I also want to start to locate the costs of this system of deŽ nition both for those excluded and those who “belong.” In considering the gendered bodies that help to construct the boundaries of workplace communities, I intend to focus on the toxic workplace and responses to reproductive hazards. Whilst much work has been done on the discriminatory nature of (euphemistically titled) foetal protection policies, I want to develop this further. Elsewhere I have considered the constitutive nature of these policies, that is, the way in which they act to constitute particular female bodies and subjectivities. Here I