Utilizing extensive ethnographic research in Sri Lanka’s Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ), this article analyzes women workers’ engagement in sexual banter on city streets. It argues that these acts and the sexualized vocabulary associated with them are contextually negotiated and, by challenging the dominant mores of respectability, also empower its practitioners. The article further argues that by uncritically adopting Western notions of sexual harassment to condemn sexual banter NGOs have unintentionally colluded in the capitalist global scheme to produce docile working-class women and thereby ensure an ideal assembly line workforce. The article comments on how women workers refused to be governed by technologies of self, which were disseminated by the media and NGO workshops as appropriate for modern, educated, and urban women, and how this refusal not only marks their difference from the middle classes but also represent one way in which they participate in subaltern politics.
BarracloughR (2006) Tales of seduction: Factory girls in Korean proletarian literature. Positions. 14(2): 345–371.
2.
BenderD (2004) ‘Too much of distasteful masculinity’: Historicizing sexual harassment in the garment sweatshop and factory. Journal of Women’s History. 15(4): 91–116.
3.
BularzikM(1983) Sexual harassment at the workplace: Historical notes. In: GreenJ (ed.) Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A Radical America Reader. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 117–135.
4.
CaldeiraT(1999) Fortified enclaves: The new urban segregation. In: LowSM (ed.) Theorizing the City: The New Anthropology Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 83–110.
5.
Dabindu Collective (1997) A Review of Free Trade Zones in Sri Lanka. Boralesgamuwa: CRC Press.
6.
De AlwisM(1997) The production and embodiment of respectability: Gendered demeanors in colonial Ceylon. In: RobertsM (ed.) Sri Lanka Collective Identities Revisited. Colombo: Marga Institute.
DomoshM (1998) ‘Those gorgeous incongruities’: Polite politics and public space on the streets of nineteenth century New York City. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 88(2): 209–226.
9.
EhrlichSKingR(1996) Consensual sex or sexual harassment: Negotiating meaning. In: BergvallVLBingJMFreedAF (eds). Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. London: Longman. 153–172.
10.
EnstadN (1999) Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.
11.
Giuffre PA (1997) Labeling sexual harassment in hospitals: A case study of doctors and nurses. Presented at the Sociologists Against Sexual Harassment Meeting, Toronto.
12.
GiuffrePAWilliamsCL (1994) Boundary lines: Labeling sexual harassment in restaurants. Gender and Society. 8: 378–401.
13.
GruberJ (1998) The impact of male work environments and organizational policies on women’s experiences of sexual harassment. Gender & Society. 12: 301–320.
14.
HewamanneS (2008a) Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
15.
HewamanneS (2008b) ‘City of whores’: Nationalism, development and global garment workers of Sri Lanka. Social Text 95. 26(2): 35–59.
16.
JensenB (2005) Bawdy bodies or moral agency? The struggle for identity in working class autobiographies of imperial Germany. Biography. 28(4): 534–557.
17.
LerumK (2004) Sexuality, power and camaraderie in service work. Gender and Society. 18(6): 756–776.
18.
LoeM (1996) Working for men: At the intersection of power, gender and sexuality. Social Inquiry. 66: 399–421.
19.
LowS (2000) On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.
20.
LowS (2001) The edge and the center: Gated communities and the discourse of urban fear. American Anthropologist. 103(1): 45–58.
21.
MacKinnonCA (1979) Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sexual Discrimination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
22.
NarayanK (1993) Banana republics and V.I. degrees: Rethinking Indian folklore in a postcolonial world. Asian Folklore Studies. 52: 177–204.
23.
OsellaCOsellaF (1998) Friendship and flirting: Micro-politics in Kerala, South India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4: 189–206.
24.
PeissK (1986) Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
25.
SalzingerL (2000) Manufacturing sexual subjects: ‘Harassment’, desire and discipline on a maquiladora shopfloor. Ethnography. 1: 67–92.
26.
SalzingerL (2003) Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley: University of California Press.
27.
SchillerH (1989) Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
28.
SmartA (2001) Unruly places: Urban governance and the persistence of illegality in Hong Kong’s urban squatter areas. American Anthropologist. 103(1): 30–44.
29.
UggenCBlackstoneA (2004) Sexual harassment as a gendered expression of power. American Sociological Review. 69: 64–92.
30.
WilliamsCGiuffrePDellingerK (1999) Sexuality in the workplace: Organizational control, sexual harassment, and the pursuit of pleasure. Annual Review of Sociology. 25: 73–93.
31.
YelvingtonK (1996) Flirting in the factory. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institution. 31: 119–165.
