Forms of Resistance Against the Capitalist Discipline: Female Factory Workers in Batam

Abstract

This thesis aims to deconstruct gender and sexuality with regard to female migrant factory workers in Batam by acknowledging the discursive formation of gender, which affects `doing gender¿ when dealing with the issue of women and work. The thesis is largely centred on the theme of gendered work and labour control. Firstly, based in a literature review, I summarize and argue that the feminization of labour in Indonesia is facilitated by institutions at three different levels: the state¿s ideology on labour as well as its discourse on women, gendered recruitment practices at the factory level, as well as supply factors that mobilize women that make them appealing towards employers as ideal workers. In the above analysis, I take on the Foucauldian view that `discourse¿ produces its subjects, and also discuss how gendered subjects are constructed relationally through discourse, where male and female workers are produced relationally through a series of binary oppositions. To capture this idea, I will illustrate how the Indonesian discourse on women, via the kodrat filters affects the management discourse on recruitment practices. My interviews with various factory managers show that the management themselves have internalized taken-for-granted notions that there are certain innate traits that women possess that make them ideal factory workers ¿ careful, disciplined, docile, diligent and embodying the tasks traditionally carried out by women; as compared to men who are careless, lazy, and undisciplined. What then are the implications of such stereotypes?