Gender and Social Reproduction across the Sweatshop Regime: Reflections on Exploitation, Unfreedom, and Body Depletion

Dr Alessandra Mezzadri

Based on her recently published book, The Sweatshop Regime (Cambridge 2017), this seminar depicts the Indian garment sweatshop as a 'regime' of exploitation and oppression crafted by multiple actors, gendered in many ways, and crossing productive and reproductive realms. This labour-centred approach combines political economy and feminist approaches to the study of the global shopfloor, its spatialisation, and gendered traits. The story of the Sweatshop Regime contributes to key development debates on industrialization, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism. Moreover, it also contributes to the feminist literature. First, it provides useful insights to the social reproduction debate, by showing the intimate interplay between production and social reproduction in paving the foundations of processes of labour surplus extraction. Second, it genders debates on labour unfreedom, by analyzing the complex relation between patriarchal unfreedom and labour neobondage. Finally, it highlights how body depletion is an intrinsic aspect of labouring in the sweatshop, even in the absence of industrial disasters.

Dr Alessandra Mezzadri is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, London. Her research interests focus on global industrial circuits and labour informalisation; labour standards and ethical consumerism; feminist and social reproduction theory; and India’s political economy. She was the India co-investigator for the ESRC/DfID project, “Labour Standards and the Working Poor in China and India,” and sole investigator for the India-focused British Academy project, “The Global Village? Homeworking in the Global Economy.” Her research has been published in journals such as Geoforum, Third World Quarterly, Progress in Development Studies, Competition and Change, Oxford Development Studies, and Global Labour Journal, among others, and has featured in several media outlets. Alessandra is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments 'Made in India' published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

Dr Alyosxa Tudor is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS