Cynthia Enloe - Main Post for 10/25/10

In "The Globetrotting Sneaker," Enloe discusses the inequalities women face in the shoe industry, especially overseas. She argues that even though shoe factories are reporting increasing profits, they are still finding ways to reduce costs of labor which means that many of their workers - usually women living in third-world countries - are still kept in poverty. To support her claim that women workers are sacrificed for big corporations' desires to make money, she delves into this world. She first asserts that trade agreements like NAFTA and WTO really aren't all that great because they allow companies to skirt around giving their workers promises of fair, healthy working conditions with right to assembly and free speech (45). Since these trade agreements vastly broadens these companies' markets, they will try to create a divide between working women in developed and developing countries (45). She uses South Korea as an example of shoe industry exploitation of women - South Korea's military government alliance with America, the heavy sway of Confucianism in determining proper gender attitudes, and the rise of male South Korean entrepreneurs were all tools of these companies to decentralize responsibilities to these new foreign entrepreneurs and unions. However, once these female workers had had enough of low pay and dangerous conditions, their protests were brutally put down through governmental police sexual assault because South Korea's "emergence as an industrialized 'tiger' had depended on women accepting their feminized role in growing industries like sneaker manufacture (47)." Thankfully, these disgusting tactics did not silence them since feminist organizations like the KWWA gave these women places to organize and talk about the major issues, which led to women unions, pay increases, and finally helping topple the military regime in 1987 (47-48). Once these women became empowered, these shoe companies hopped from authoritarian-governed country to authoritarian-governed country because they knew they could get cheap labor from women because these countries "shared the belief that if women can be kept hard at work, low-paid, and unorganized they can serve as a magnet for foreign investors (49)." Sadly, women have to balance potential job loss with standing up for themselves because they have to provide for their family and certain industries can afford to move elsewhere; however, recently more women have been standing up, making it increasingly more difficult for companies to cut corners on working conditions and pay. Then she focuses on the hypocrisy of these companies in that they proclaim to work for the good of the people and world, but really they are just concerned with higher profits and thus indirectly support harsh, censorial governments since these governments prevent independent labor organization like in Indonesia. Truly "'free trade as it is actually being practiced today is hardly free for any workers - in the United States or abroad - who have to accept the American corporate-fostered Indonesian, Chinese, or Korean workplace model as the price of keeping their jobs (53-54)." To keep "free trade" from disappearing, companies pit women against each other by moving to other countries where labor costs are lower, which create the illusion that other women are stealing their jobs and lower women's ability to organize, trust each other, and force companies and male bosses to address their concerns.

In "Daughters and Generals in the Politics of the Globalized Sneaker," Enloe maintains that one needs to have a feminist curiosity when asking questions about globalization and politics because both of them deal with power dynamics. She begins with an example - the connection between these shoe companies competing for contracts with American universities with the globalization of this shoe company competition. The history of how sneakers became globalized is a long one which jumps from place to place, as the shoe companies did; women are central effectors and "affected-ees" of this globalization because as long as the sneaker industry depends on cheap labor often by females for its profits, it also is dependent "upon local constructions of femininity (60)." Everyone who would gain from female cheap labor - corporations, male bosses, governments - tried to influence these women's constructions so as to make their labor inexpensive, aka "cheapened labor." In South Korea in the 1970s, the government lured women to work in the cities to become industrialization patriots and tried to rework the definition of "respectable" and "marriageable" women to allow this migration to occur (60-61). By re-envisioning what it meant to be a good daughter - meaning a daughter that worked in the name of patriotism - the government eventually made parents allow their daughters to leave their watchful eyes while reinforcing or even heightening their filial duty to provide for their parents and secure a good dowry for marriage; because these South Korean women saw themselves first as daughter and potential wife over worker, companies were and still are able to exploit women identifying themselves this way. Therefore, women were hesitant to rise up against injustices because she could lose her job, thereby ruining her reputation as a good daughter, disappointing her parents, losing a source of income for her dowry, and losing her opportunity to rise up the class hierarchy. (Since men who would adequately support and help women rise up looked for decent dowries in potential wives, losing that money severely lowered her chances of getting a suitable husband.) Governments and companies knew how factory women thought and what their priorities and stresses were, so they were able to take advantage of them because these "good daughter, suitable wife"-oriented women would not rock the corporate factory boat with strikes and the like. One such example of this tactic was the set up of dating services in these factories to keep women focused on marriage, not citizenship as well as to increase turnover to keep costs low. However, once women began focusing on their citizenship in the 1980s, the factories in South Korea shut down and the government encouraged women to be good patriots and return to the former ideal of womanhood. Because most of these factories were located in militarized states like South and Korea and Indonesia, "our understanding of women's participation in industrializing processes, so central to globalization, should generate more questions about the process of militarization (66)." Generals were everywhere as political allies to facilitate business and decision makers on factory committees - "[c]ombining women-as-daughters sewing the sneakers with generals-as-board-members opening the right doors proved to be a winning strategy for certain sneaker companies in Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s (67)." Indonesia and South Korea followed the same patriarchal pattern of using daughterly patriotism to cheapen female labor! Enloe concludes by saying that shoe companies do not want patriarchy to be challenged because then their strategy of exploiting the "good daughter, good wife" view and pressures of Asian women would no longer work and they could no longer cheapen their labor.