Section II: Spatialities
(c) Embodiment and Identity
25 Economic Geographies of Race and Ethnicity: Explorations in Continuity and Change
Beverley Mullings
26 Gender, Difference, and Contestation: Economic Geography through the Lens of Transnational Migration
Rachel Silvey
27 Labor, Movement: Migration, Mobility, and Geographies of Work
Philip F. Kelly
28 Making Consumers and Consumption
Juliana Mansvelt
29 The Rise of a New Knowledge/Creative Economy: Prospects and Challenges for Economic Development, Class Inequality, and Work
Deborah Leslie and Norma M. Rantisi
30 The Corporation as Disciplinary Institution
Joshua Barkan
31 Social Movements and the Geographies of Economic Activities in South Korea
Bae-Gyoon Park
32 Subalternities that Matter in Times of Crisis
Sharad Chari
Editors’ Introduction: Embodiment and Identity
Of all subsections in the book, maybe this one best exemplifies the far-reaching changes that have occurred during economic geography’s previous long decade. 30 years ago the two nouns forming the title of this introduction would have been meaningless to economic geographers, likely greeted with charges of gibberish and pseudo-intellectualism, or, given the pervasive masculinism of the subdiscipline, met by some choice Anglo-Saxon words. By the year 2000, the terms had gained traction, yet still that same year one of the editors of this volume was told both by referees reviewing his paper and the journal editor handling it to “downplay embodiment” in his article about the “cultural turn” in economic geography. But now everyone seems to get it, which is amply evident in the varied and impressive contributions constituting this volume’s subsection.
As discussed in the Introduction, for much of its history economic geography strove to ignore the bodies of the people it represented. Economic geographers didn’t so much deal with people as de-corporealized “agents,” “actors,” and “entities.” Discussion of bodies was thought an unnecessary distraction, a needless complication, best carried out behind closed doors in a doctor’s office. The term identity was similarly disregarded. Economic geographers ascribed an identity to the actors they represented, of course, but they didn’t use that term. Further, the kind of identity they ascribed, made up of fixed, stable, independent characteristics, was quite different from the fluid notion of identity that contemporary economic geographers subsequently came to deploy, including our present section contributors. Earlier location theorists, for example, defined the identity of actors with (literally) mathematical precision. Identity was a series of numbered abstract assumptions set out on page 1, logically flawless, mathematically tractable. Or again, political economists later defined identity by a set of unswerving, objective class interests: the identity of the capitalist, “Mr Moneybags” (Marx 1976: volume 1, ch. 6) was to exploit workers in order to accumulate capital (“Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” Marx 1976: ch. 24, section 3); while the identity of workers was defined by their exploitation at the workplace, eventually galvanizing them to revolution (“the expropriators are expropriated” (Marx 1976: ch. 32, section 2).
From the early 1980s, especially under the influence of feminism then entering the wider discipline of geography, issues of the body and identity became increasingly important, making their way on to the subdiscipline’s agenda. This project initially ran alongside political economy, sometimes joining, other times bumping against, but within a few years it was progressively diverging, moving onto a different track. Its theoretical sources were different. It drew especially on post-structural theory, Foucault’s work in particular, which emphasized that identity was shifting, rather than stable and fixed; constructed from overlapping, conflicting, and changing discourses that were inescapable. There was no constant “Me, myself, I” beneath such discourses. We are subject to continual discursive contortions and moldings, producing subjects whose identities are set by the discourses and their institutional instantiations to which we are ineluctably exposed. Our bodies, and this was the rub, are key sites where discursive contortions and moldings leave their mark. To see the kinds of marks left, researchers pursuing these issues adopted distinctive research methods and ethical codes of inquiry. This was yet another way in which research done under the rubrics of embodiment and identity differed from research carried out in the rest of economic geography. In the former there was careful consideration of methods, producing rigor and sparking creativity, as well as moral and political scrutiny of the effects of research on subjects (Barnes et al. 2007). In contrast, the rest of the subdiscipline at least from the 1990s was generally uninterested in method talk, preferring don’t ask, don’t tell, which sometimes produced banality, sloppiness, or both. In the rest of the subdiscipline while moral and political concerns were mouthed, they tended to motherhood and fatherhood judgments on which everyone could agree. They were different from the more interesting, contentious concrete and personal judgments characterizing work on embodiment and identity.
The 1990s was an especially productive decade at the end of which the work on embodiment and identity had become a disciplinary research tradition. It coincided with the larger claim that economic geography was experiencing a “cultural turn,” shaking up disciplinary methods, theory, and the very object of investigation, the economy – now taken as constructed, heterogeneous, impure, and vulnerable. The exuberance around the cultural turn subsequently deflated, but the substantive work completed during those 10 years, exemplified now by four classic monographs, remained significant. Empirically detailed and theoretically informed, each demonstrated that embodiment and identity were fundamental to economic geography. Doreen Massey and David Wield’s (1992) High-Tech Fantasies showed that the ceaseless application of apparently disembodied rationality by male high-tech workers in the Cambridge (UK) research triangle was made possible only by the embodied labor of female partners at home and female support staff at work. Male abstract rationality was achieved by female physical labor. Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt’s (1995) study of labor markets in Worcester, MA, in Gender, Work, and Space, focused on micro-geographies of employment. It showed that labor markets are shaped and operationalized, shot through, by local institutions, connections, and knowledge, which vary markedly by gender. Consequently, the kind of local labor markets in which men are enrolled are quite different from those women join. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s (1996) influential and far-ranging The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Smith this volume), again made issues of the body and identity central. They used both issues, along with field work interviews with men and women in Queensland mining communities: first, to argue that economic geography is (mis)practiced (as masculinist, as offering a God’s eye view, as politically distant and hands-off); and second, to show that the academic research process could be reconceived to facilitate progressive political change on the ground. Finally, Linda McDowell’s (1997) Capital Culture drew on the feminist theorist Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, showing how merchant bankers in the City of London offered moments of resistance to Foucauldian disciplining through subtle transgressive bodily acts of dress and comportment. Admittedly there wasn’t a lot of transgression, and it certainly didn’t bring the financial system tumbling down, but its mere existence demonstrated that embodiment and identity mattered even within the Citadel of capitalism. More generally, each of these works proved, if proof were needed, that embodiment and identity should be part of the bread and butter vocabulary of the discipline, on par with accumulation and value, and governance and regulation, as we confirm in this volume.
This quartet of works provided an important basis for the subsequent extension of the tradition, exemplified by the chapters that follow. Partly that extension reflects a desire to expand the range of topics in economic geography to which notions of embodiment and identity apply. The four monographs of the 1990s were concerned primarily with the substantive issue of work. Of course, work remains germane but there are other important substantive topics to scrutinize as these chapters demonstrate. Beyond work, for example, there is international migration, consumption, corporate governance, labor organization and action, and the operation of new industrial sectors like high tech and the creative economy. Such topics are never set in isolation, of course, but cross-cut and intersect with one another and with the issue of work. This enlargement in substantive focus has been accompanied by an interest in widening the social characteristics that are embodied beyond gender. Receiving most attention has been race, a direct concern of half the chapters in this section. Just as the body is disciplined, regulated, and defined by discourses of gender so it is similarly inscribed by racial discourses. Again, different social dimensions are not orthogonal to one another, but work together, producing combinatorial and emergent effects. These extensions result from economic geographers continuing to mobilize a broad contemporary set of theoretical literatures. Primary among them remains writings within a post-structural tradition but which also includes postcolonialism, that is, the critical theorization of colonialism and its successor projects. These theoretical literatures allow new forms of talking and self-knowledge, providing a vocabulary that enables economic geographers to represent relationships, to formulate empirical claims, and to derive conclusions not possible to conceive before.
The importance of these new literatures is vigorously argued in the first chapter by Beverley Mullings (this volume). Partly she provides an original historical review of economic geography’s often fraught relationship with race; partly it is an exploration, illustrated by Mullings’ own research, of the disciplinary usefulness of post-structural critical race and gender theory. The first half century or more of economic geography’s Anglo-American institutional existence, unlike Allen Scott’s judgment about the second half century, was not so great. Race was treated as a biological characteristic, fixed and irrevocable, and correlated with behavioral attributes (thus fulfilling the formal definition of racism). Slowly, though, Mullings argues, a combination of political changes on the ground, such as the 1960s American Civil Rights movement, as well as changes in theory that increasingly emphasized the social part of social science, have prepared economic geography for appropriately dealing with race (and gender). Using her own work on Caribbean sex trade workers, and drawing like McDowell (1997) on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, Mullings argues that sex trade workers use their bodies to perform that version of race expected by their European-origin (colonial) clients. Her example shows as well as any how race, like gender, is socially constructed and pliable, ever responsive to the economy with which it is utterly entangled.
Exactly that same entanglement is found in the chapter by Rachel Silvey. She focuses on one of the “servants of globalization,” as she calls them, women domestic workers from the global South who endure indentured servitude as temporary migrant workers in the homes of the wealthy in places like Singapore, Dubai, and Los Angeles. Sometimes experiencing working conditions of “neo-slavery,” the bodies of these women are physically marked by the grueling labor they perform and harsh treatment they receive, and discursively marked by their positions as “Third world” and female. Silvey uses her own research on Indonesian women to demonstrate that race, gender, and economy (migrant worker remittances are second only to oil revenues as a source of foreign exchange in Indonesia) are inextricably enmeshed in the construction of the foreign domestic worker. Those entanglements, in turn, are written literally on the body. Silvey’s chapter shows why embodiment and identity must be key terms in economic geography’s contemporary conceptual lexicon. Now the only justification for the use of choice Anglo-Saxon words is for writing that does not refer to embodiment and identity.
Philip Kelly’s chapter sets the experience of Silvey’s Indonesian domestic workers within the larger frame of global labor migration (at 210 million migrants, now about 3% of the world’s total). Issues of embodiment and identity are central at every register, but Kelly’s important point is that those registers are multiple. There is not just one type of global migrant worker, but many. Migrant workers come in all social shapes and sizes, each defining a type of identity both by race and gender, and associated with a particular kind of bodily work. At the top, and there is a clear top as defined by status, material rewards, working conditions, and migratory security, is the elite migrant, often white, highly credentialed, high salary, working in one professional career or another – the law, academia, business management, finance, accountancy, medicine – effortlessly entering and leaving a country at will. Then come non-elite workers granted permanent immigration status in a country. How they fare, argues Kelly, is determined by racialization processes in the host society determined inter alia by the particular country chosen, where the immigrant lives in that country, and the external and internal processes of interpellation that shape how immigrants think of themselves racially in relation to the country’s economic division of labor. Silvey’s temporary migrants are at the bottom of the international migrant labor pack. Often from the global South, visible minorities, disenfranchised from citizenship rights, they are inhaled and expelled at will from the host country.
Embodiment and identity are reworked in a quite different form in Juliana Mansvelt’s chapter on consumers and consumption. Consumption is another topic in economic geography that was turned up-side down and inside-out over the last long decade. Gone is the old hedonistic utility maximizing consumer, distance minimizing calculator, for whom more is better, goods are good, and happiness is shopping until you drop. Instead, as Mansvelt deftly illustrates, economic geography’s new consumer is socially trained and constructed, engages in cultural performance, is morally aware (e.g. making ethical judgments about which coffee to drink and which 100% cotton apparel to buy), is seduced or deterred not so much by distance but by semiotic signs and signifiers embedded in the retail landscape, and is a dedicated reader of global material culture (e.g. knowing the difference between heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, red, yellow, and green papayas, and jalapenos and habañeros). The new consumer might be savvy and sophisticated, but Mansvelt also shows that they still remain inviolably implanted within a capitalist economy that continues to be burdened by inequalities, social divisions, and chronic instability.
Savvy, sophisticated, and chronically unstable are also good descriptors of the knowledge or creative economy discussed in Deborah Leslie and Norma Rantisi’s chapter. Fueled especially by technological developments around computerization (both hardware and software), the high-tech, “knowledge,” or “new” economy has redefined both the nature of work (“casual Friday” is every day), and the nature of the urban processes in cities where that work occurs (producing chronic, rampant gentrification). Richard Florida (2002), the most well-known and up-beat spokesperson for these changes aggregately labels them the creative economy. It is defined primarily by the talents of the workers constituting it (who form the creative class). Further, it is the urban residential choice of “cool” inner city sites by the creative class that determine where the creative economy is located. But Leslie and Rantisi note a “dark side.” While the creative economy may produce something different from earlier eras, capitalism has not yet changed its spots. Leslie and Rantisi argue that it remains the same old capitalism in which workers still go where jobs are located (and not the reverse) and where capital continues to go where profits are highest. The creative economy is lodged in former warehouse and industrial areas within the inner city because this real estate is cheap, rather than because these are hip locations for the creative class. City administrators, in conjunction with developers and a neoliberal environment of (non)regulation, have been seduced by Florida’s theory to actively bring about gentrification. Richard Florida’s theory is being performed, but not necessarily to rave reviews (Peck 2005).
Joshua Barkan’s chapter examines another stubborn continuity of the capitalist economy, the corporation. He does so by also drawing on the Foucauldian post-structural literature used by other authors to make sense of bodies and identities. He can do this in part because at least in the United States the corporation was given the legal identity of a person in 1886, and in part because corporations operate as an institution precisely through capillary forms of power to organize, discipline, and regulate human bodies, both employees and clients. Yet Barkan suggests that economic geographers should not seek a self-consciously disciplinary approach to the corporation; academic disciplines are part of the problem, continually caught in the same capillary relations of power that they seek to disclose. Instead, he recommends that economic geographers pursue a genealogical approach, attending to “the ways corporate power has been conceptualized within places geographers have looked, such as firms, their employment and accounting practices, and their managerial discourses” (Barkan this volume). The progressive political hope for this project, Barkan concludes, ironically comes from another corporation, the university, and in which that genealogical project is carried out. The university’s very structure, according to Barkan, provides at least the possibility of progressive collective response and action. The political (and economic geographical) task is to turn possibility into reality.
The concerns of Bae-Gyoon Park’s chapter are not the legal intricacies of corporate personhood but the complexities of real, live, breathing people as they participate and struggle in different social movements to improve themselves and their larger community. By social movements Park means civic forms of collective membership and action that might include participating in an oppositional political party, an environmental group, or a trade union. Those movements are not just civic froth, peripheral players, only there to give life background color, but can be enormously powerful, materially shaping the economic geographical landscape, fixing space. To substantiate the argument Park turns to Korea’s recent history. As a result of its developmental state strategy, until the 1980s the Korean government attempted to extirpate social movements, producing conflict and fracture. The very rationale of the developmental state, after all, was that it knew best, and consequently it brooked no opposition. But opposition nonetheless persisted, both in open protests and in underground resistance groups. Despite sometimes brutal repression, including a military coup, by the late 1980s social movements finally loosened the Korean state’s vice grip. As Park compellingly narrates, this subsequently enabled other forms of change facilitated by various social movements.
Sharad Chari’s chapter concludes the section with a discussion of the subaltern. The subaltern as an idea first arose in the work of the early twentieth-century Italian political economist Antonio Gramsci for whom it meant a subordinated social group. Those who were subaltern were not only part of an underclass (and consequently dominated) but even how they thought of themselves was subaltern, outside the official hegemon, and represented by their espousal of “disqualified” knowledge (Gidwani 2009: 67). For Gramsci the very difference represented by the subaltern raised the revolutionary question of how subaltern groups could ever achieve solidarity to change the system. This theme was reworked 60 years later in the context of the global South, particularly India, producing Subaltern Studies. Subaltern Studies historians argued that, because of their subalternity, because of their difference including a racialized difference, large numbers of Indian (mostly rural) peasants did not fit into European based accounts of Indian colonial history. Such accounts thus effaced the subaltern from history. But the subaltern did exist, and was able to play a political role in transformation. Whether in Gramsci’s Italy or in the Subaltern Studies’ India, the trick was to find a way to unite subaltern differences. Gramsci devoted himself to this task, believing that with enough effort subaltern difference could be overcome, creating sufficient solidarity to effect progressive change. Chari’s point, drawing on the substantive works of a large number of geographers writing about the global South, is that the political process of bringing together subaltern groups and knowledge is a spatial and, also sometimes an explicitly, economic geographical process. Mobilizing economic geography to achieve such an end is another audacious hope for the discipline.
References
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Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. And How it is Transforming Work, Leisure, and Everyday Life. Basic Books, New York.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
Gidwani, V. (2009) Subalternity. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier Publishing, Boston, pp. 65–71.
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