Description
Neither representations of racialised women, migrant garment workers, nor neoliberal ideologies that fetishise work and see wages as empowering - especially for racialised and feminised peoples - are new. However, in this paper, I argue that these representations have become entrenched and morphed recently in fast fashion manufacturing in the UK against the backdrop of mass joblessness and the local industry becoming increasingly part of the ‘shadow economy’. I analyse interview data with actors in the industry in Leicester (the hub of UK fast fashion manufacturing) using Bacchi’s (1999) poststructural feminist What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) strategy to reconstruct, analyse and problematise two dominant stories, which I call the culture-specific patriarchy story and the wageless life story. These stories mirror rehearsed global stories about the garment industry and about work as a moral good, while specific localised dynamics within Leicester shape the development of the two stories and why they are so compelling.
I draw upon postcolonial and post-Marxist feminist theorising, including the frameworks of Racial Capitalism and the Coloniality of Gender, to analyse and problematise both global and localised dynamics of the stories (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Lugones, 2010). For instance, the colonial, racialised and gendered harms and pitfalls of portraying structural problems as rooted in a particular cultural setting, and how racialised stereotypes of both South Asian and Eastern European migrants in the UK as ‘hard workers’ actually negatively impact upon their working conditions (e.g. Chakraborty, 2014; Lewicki, 2023). Since stories have power by virtue of being told, local actors make meaning through them (Hall, 1997). This paper contributes empirically, showing the two local stories indeed have material effects, leading to partial solutions and policy and advocacy responses, as well as contributing to homogenising and Othering discourses that invisibilise some while making others hypervisible (Bettcher, 2007; Welland, 2017).
