The Ideal Sweatshop? Gender and Transnational Protest

Abstract

This article explores the role of women in transnational labor organizing. It examines the extent to which transnational protest, based in global cities like New York, Amsterdam, and San Francisco, grants agency to women employed in garment factories throughout the world. It analyzes how the cognitive and material spaces of sites of production are transformed through their connections with other sites—through flows, shifts, and concentrations of capital, bodies, commodities, and in this case, political activities. Throughout, it examines the ways in which women garment workers, garment factories, and sweatshops are employed, defined, and reproduced as a category in varlious contexts of transnational production and protest.