The maquila workers. Subjectivity, labour and domination.

BORGEAUD GARCIANDIA NATACHA

Shanghai

Simposio; « Subjects and Subjectivity in Era of the Neoliberal Globalization »; 2015

The Center for Contemporary Marxism Abroad (Fudan, Shanghai) and Actuel Marx (Paris),

Abstract: My intervention is based on one of my works, published in 2009, entitled Dans les failles de la domination, an approach to concerns that existed then and still are an actual and unsolved topic, generated by the relationship between the domination coming from work and the subjects who are submitted to it. The reflexion rises from a research undertaken in Nicaragua among workers from the international textile factories known as maquiladoras, men but mostly young women, working and living in particularly difficult conditions. The constraints of work and of domination invade each recess of their existence and their power is such that it even seems to cancel any proper subjectivity. However, if it is easy to locate the effects of the domination through work in the very intimacy of the subjects? lives and the impossibility, for the latter, to release easily from it, it also appears that they are not solely "dominated". An observation command attention: it appears in their narratives, as they dwell on what they are and what their life is, that part of themselves remains unsubdued, as if they could somehow stand back from that overwhelming dominance. Dominated, subjectivities can only rebel for failing to do it would be to condemn their beings to inexistence. They make a stand, re-producing the gap to domination even though the domination imperturbably proceeds with its own work. What sense can be given to this gap? Does it preserve the domination by preserving the subjects from the invasion in their own beings by this very domination? When the fear is latent, is it only a resource of the submission, or even of the "voluntary servitude"? Those are, between domination and subjectivity, some of the aroused interrogations.