Economic fundamentalists, free spirits and serial killers
By Mona Ahmad Ali
Made in India, Patricia Plattner, 1998, 52 minutes, color.
Performing the Border, Ursula Biemann, 1999, 42 minutes, color.
Distributed by Women Make Movies 462 Broadway, Suite 502H,
New York, NY 10013.
In the mind of the westerner, the terrorist is an Islamic fundamentalist. It is equally possible that for a factory worker in the Third World, the terrorist is a man in a business-suit. Say, an economist from the World Bank.
So when the World Bank president James Wolfensohn announces that the Bank's new mission is to fight terrorism by fighting poverty, we may be forgiven for attending to the lush irony of his statement. Liberalization (the collaborative masterwork of the International Monetary Fund, the Bank and transnational corporations) has resulted in severe and long-lasting economic 9/11s across the globe. International financial deregulation, trade liberalization, and the accompanying monetary and fiscal discipline imposed on governments, have devastated the lives and livelihoods of millions from Brazil to Russia.
After September 11, John Le Carre asks, "Does anyone remember any more the outcry against the perceived economic colonialism of the G8? Against the plundering of the Third World by uncontrollable multinational companies?" It is in this context, that we discuss, as an antidote, two documentary films about women laboring under globalization, one from India, the other from Mexico.
"Made in India", a production with little visual conceit, documents the evolution and successes of SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association), India's most renowned and perhaps most successful non-traditional trade union.
Liberalization - which arrived in India in 1991 - brought with it increases in inequality, the informalization of labor markets and the expansion of low wage female employment. SEWA's members are female and working class. They are gum pickers, paper recyclers, vegetable vendors, artisans and "health sisters". While one would classify them as informal sector workers, Ela Bhatt (SEWA's founder) argues against that nomenclature with its undertones of unorganized and marginalized labor. Bhatt prefers the term "self-employed" that also fits most SEWA members. Politics aside, these women workers contribute to the dazzling vibrancy of India's huge and burgeoning informal economy.
At times the film appears in danger of boring its audience by idolizing its subject (both the organization and its members), but the viewer's interest picks up when director Patricia Plattner's camera shadows four SEWA members through the working day. Each of these women is charming or persuasive in their own way. Through them, we are shown the fine arts of picking gum from trees, calculating the price of used cardboard, embroidering the back-less blouses that adorn female desert dwellers and western fashion models. And we see the evolution of a workers' solidarity association into a mini-government of sorts with its own bank, rural development scheme and educational institute.
Indeed SEWA's policy mandate for its constituents - which include the right to employment, income, nutritious food, health care, child care, housing, ownership, organizing, leadership and self sufficiency for its members - vies with that of any reputable democracy and beats the Indian government's own goals for its citizens.
In a sense, one can hardly blame Plattner for fawning, for among all its other remarkable accomplishments, SEWA is a model community bank (with $4 million in assets). Members get to set the interest rate with little concern for the competitive market rate. When one SEWA sister says, "Times have changed . . . The problems we used to have no longer exist" we feel uplifted. Not only do these women, because of their involvement with SEWA, have more power in their working and sexual lives, but their entire sense of self, of their own accomplishment and possibility has been transformed.
There is one shot in the film that is particularly evocative. Three women in a desert landscape are using water roaring out from an above-ground pipe. Two of them are washing clothes and one is washing her hair. SEWA serves such a multiple role in the lives of these women and it is accurate, if cliched, to say that its role in their lives is as revitalizing as water in the desert landscape.
Unfortunately, Plattner does not explore how liberalization has changed the lives--or even the TV habits--of SEWA members. We are told in passing that SEWA recyclers were threatened by the Ahmedabad municipality's decision to privatize city cleaners but nothing else.
With news of BJP's (the right-wing Hindu party) sweeping electoral victory in Gujarat, one might also wonder about the effects of the communal massacres earlier this year on the lives of this multi-religious, multi-caste organization based in Ahmedabad, the state capital and epicenter of the religious riots. Where is Badrunissa (the single Muslim among our four SEWA sisters) now? Does she live in a Muslim refugee camp, half her family intact, or was she saved by a Hindu sister from SEWA?
"Performing The Border" is a much more intellectual, stylish and darker video-essay.
In dull light, to an electronic beat, we are driven along the U.S-Mexico border. White letters on the screen spell "gliding spaces/soft monies/hard realities/circulating goods/passing people". We have entered (as diasporic artist and critic Berta Jottar informs us) "highly performative space".
Perhaps because this is Quixotic terrain even relatively ordinary folk like Angela Escajeda sound like postmodern critics. Describing someone called Concha, a pregnant woman who turned from cigarette to human smuggling, Angela says, "Her strategies were multiple and various in all her trajectories to pass to the U.S. She was confronted by the militarization of the border."
There is nothing natural about the border, adds Jortar. As discursive and material space, it is continually "reconstituted through the passing of people" and re-articulated through the power relations -
US passport holders, middle-class immigrants, tourists, domesticas -
of those who pass.
While the postmodern flourish might make the border seem fantastical and fluid we are confronted by its weighty physicality in Ciudad Juarez where U.S. multinationals have set up electronic assemblage plants in the export processing zone. The EPZ is a site of contradiction and excess. As the voice-over tells us, "A technological cultural of repetition, registration and controlling was introduced in this desert city." Well-lit modern buildings, perimeters studded with palms and security guards, lie adjacent to slums where workers have recycled materials discarded by the `golden mills' into walls and roofs. Slums, street vendors and family values coexist with state of the art production facilities, a female-intensive labor force and prostitution driven night life.
Among Biemann's interviewers, all of whom are women, is a worker who has been fired for rallying for a cafeteria to be built at her plant. A community service leader rails against the absurdity of the Mexican government that spared no expense in accommodating the leisure needs of the transnational employer. All the while the working population, which produces millions in value added products, is not provided housing, water or a women's shelter. An aging sex-worker explains how intensified competition in her industry has led to her loss of wages. And a mother grieves her missing daughter, last seen in a red sweater.
The heart of the film's lies in its exploration of the ways in which the Northern digital economy's profit driven preference for a Southern female workforce produces all kinds of skewed relations, productive and reproductive, public and private.
In the blue light before dawn, a school bus herds bleary eyed workers to their shifts. As a precursor to all the violations of the oncoming day, loud rock music blares "I love you, I love only you" from the vehicle's sound system.
The shift of buying power to young women produces contradictions
in the lives of local women. On the one hand, a feminization of buying power in the EPZ means that male strippers cater to female customers in the local bars and dykes and femmes openly cruise the streets. On the other hand, less than minimum wage labor necessitates that many women work double- or triple-shifts: factory work, homework, sex work.
The transplantation of assembly line production - where labor is fragmented into its smallest particles - has meant, for the female Mexican worker, that her "monthly cycle, [is] controlled to the minute by white male management". Assembly line production with its disassemblage of production into its smallest components dehumanizes the female worker. The violent logic of disassemblage finds a frightening parallel and intensification in the serial killings at Ciudad Juarez. When the dead are recovered, their body parts are missing or detached or they have been reassembled in clothes worn by other missing women.
Biemann makes a provocative argument about serial killing as a pathology proper to machine culture: "There is a connection between repetitive sexual violence and the form of production of a high-tech culture; between the technologies of identification, reduplication, simulation and the psychological disposition of a serial killer . . .
In his mind, there is a closed circuit between individual desire and collective information, between intimacy and technology".
While the latter part of the argument where Biemann ventures into the mind of a serial killer seems dubious, her earlier argument about the form of sexual violence mimicking the logic of economic production is compelling.
In short, Biemann has produced an excellent work of art that forces us to wrestle with its complexities and provocations as it steers between a community rootedness and high-theory ambition. For students of free trade, border culture and urban pathologies alike, this is a film well-worth watching.
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