Brining Fantasies to Life: Panoptimex

By Leslie Salzinger

What is Panoptimex?• Panoptimex is a factory she calls

Electroworld—an enormous electronics transnational company

Docile Women Workers• “Rows of them, smiling lips drawn red,

darkened lashes lowered to computer boards, male supervisors looking over their shoulders—monitoring finger speed and manicure in a single glance

• Apparent embodiments of availability—cheap, malleable labor, willing flirtation—these young women make flesh the image of productive femininity upon whose existence an entire global political economy claims to have staked its success”

Questions• Where have all these icons of

paradigmatic femininity come from?

• If no one else has been able to find them in the Juarez streets, how have the Panoptimex managers done so?

Answers• The answer lies in reformulating

the question• “These paragons have not been

found, they have been made • As Panoptimex workers respond to

managerial descriptions of how they always were, they come to incarnate these images in the here and now”

Why Panoptimex?• Panoptimex represents the

expectations embedded in the stereotype of the preconstituted, passive, nimble-fingered assembly worker

• If we can expose the process through which feminine productivity is created, we can then take apart the mechanisms through which production produces, rather than relies on, the (in)famously docile and dexterous “third-world” woman

Characteristics of Panoptimex

• Remarkably successful at producing televisions

• Rivals competition with other factories

• “This success is directly related to the extreme feminization of the plant's basic production tasks and the concomitant sexual objectification of its workforce”

The Male Gaze as Objectification

• Visually oriented managers have created a structure of labor control in which everything is designed to produce the right look

• In the process, they have designed a machine that evokes and focuses the male gaze in the service of production

• The panoptic shop floor is full of high-heeled young women

• Around them stand critical, attentive male supervisors whose eyes invite both performance and self-vigilance

• Labor control processes that are un-related to gender and imported docility of feminine workers can not account for the quiescence of workers in this plant

• To the contrary, it is through addressing workers' gendered subjectivities that managers fulfill their own desires, building TVs among them

Attitudes of Managers• Focus on cost and profit and impressing

headquarters• Top (hence foreign) managers'

nationalist chauvinism toward the Mexicans they supervise further incites their tendency to see workers as children to be conditioned, rather than as intelligible adults

• Focus on the “look” of the factory leads to a highly gendered and sexualized pattern of hiring and labor control

Attitudes Toward the Author• She met with Dave Jones,

Electroworld’s regional personnel manager

• He immediately launched into a critique of her “radical ideas”

• He allowed her to observe the factory workers to show how good work conditions "really are" in the maquiladoras

• “Unlike his counterparts in other plants, however, he refused to allow me to work on the line, even for a day

• In explaining this decision, he emphasized that he is concerned neither for the quality of the TVs I might produce nor for my personal safety

• He is concerned that, in a context where watching is power, a worker might "look back," see me, and report me to the Mexican department of labor”

Appearance is Everything• Appearances are as much the currency as

dollars• Management is more concerned with

making the budget than with making a profit

• The company is more subject to managers at corporate headquarters than to external competition

• The tendency to make headquarters approval a primary goal is particularly seen at Panoptimex

Eyes are Everywhere• Managers watch workers from glass

windows high above the factory floor• Cameras are installed in the walls

and ceiling to catch people stealing• Color-coded clothes make

it easy to see who is in what position and what job they are supposed to be doing

Be Seen and Not Heard• Top Managers speak very little Spanish, if

any, and can not communicate with workers

• They refer to the “Mexican-mind” when workers or supervisors make a complaint

• “The actual inability of most top managers to communicate with their employees, combined with a venerable U.S. tradition of assuming Mexican cultural and racial inferiority, adds a final element to the labor control logic in which listening to workers makes no "sense" and watching them thereby becomes imperative”

Hiring for Looks• Percent of female workers is usually

around 70-75%• Average age of women workers is under

20• Irene Perez, the head of personnel in the

plant, details criteria for most line jobs, beginning with being female and young and continuing with being slim and having thin hands and short nails

• The criteria also include not being pregnant, using birth control, and being childless, or, if absolutely necessary, having credible childcare arrangements

• The most basic of these requirements is being female, and as a result, on hiring days guards admit all the women applicants who come to the maquila gates, but only a previously specified number of men

• The few men hired for what are known as the line "heavy" jobs are not subject to the bodily strictures required of their female counterparts

Hiring Women at All Cost• “In Panoptimex they don't look for

workers, they look for models—short skirts, heels, beauties

• Not that Panoptimex workers are more beautiful than young women in other maquilas—at least not to my eye. However, Panoptimex workers are hired as "models” hired to look the way managers expect workers to look”

Hierarchy of Seeing• Male managers watch male

supervisors who watch female workers

• Men watching men watching women

• They ignore the few male workers• “The women are central objects of

supervisory attention, whereas the men are peripheral objects of supervisory disregard”

Hierarchy of Supervision• “The Americans”—top managers• Supervisors—all Mexican men• Group Leaders—all women who

have been promoted• All other women workers

Competition is Huge• Charts above each women’s head

represent the quality of her work…gold stars for perfection, red dots for trouble and green dots for errors– “A woman whose chart is full of

green and red dots commented, "I feel ashamed. It's all just competition. You look at the girl next to you and you want to do better than she does even though it shouldn't matter”

• Lines pick up speed at 3:00, an hour before shift end because no one wants to be on a line that “doesn’t make it”– “When I asked a woman generally

notable for her jaundiced attitude what's going on, she shrugs: "When they start congratulating the other lines for having finished and we haven't, you feel bad. Competition makes you work harder”

Male Workers• The few male workers are relegated to

the periphery—at the end of the assembly line—and are actively ignored

• When addressing the mixed-gender group, they are referred to as “todas” (feminine pronoun)

• One man said, “I already feel bad, after all, I’m here!"

• Marginalization undercuts male workers' capacity to assert a legitimate local masculinity

Conclusions• “In an arena peopled primarily by male

supervisors and female workers, this objectifying modality of control constitutes a highly sexualized, and productive, set of gendered subjectivities

• For both supervisors and women workers, laboring and sexual identities merge on the shop floor

• Supervisors revel in their location. Young women workers take pleasure in the experience of being desirable and in their use of this delicious, if limited power”

• Thus, Panoptimex owes its success to a set of meaning-imbued labor control practices in which workers are constituted and incorporated into production primarily as women and men and only within that framework as workers

• Workers are literally engendered—they come into being as workers in the same moment in which they come into being as "women" or "men" within the shop floor's terms

Gender Matters• Gender matters, but not because

young women enter ready-made for managerial purposes

• Gender matters because women workers are addressed and constituted within the confines of a particular set of gendered meanings—made anew on the shop floor in the transnationally produced image of nubile pliancy