Some thoughts on Nakamura

 Just a last minute post to say that I really enjoyed the Nakamura reading for this week. The narrative construction of Navajo women as “inherently flexible” and thus well suited to work on Fairchild’s semiconductors reminds me of contemporary discourse surrounding the gig economy. In this ad for gig platform, Fiverr, a young woman is presented as a superior worker because she doesn’t need sleep or a proper lunch. She is a “doer”. Much like the narratives deployed by Fairchild, this ad attempts to glamourise millennial precarity and justify poor working conditions.

On another note, at least 159 Indian women were hospitalised recently for food poisoning at a Foxconn manufacturing plant outside of Chennai, which is enrolled in the production of the iPhone. Of course, this speaks to the persistence of racialised and gendered labour in the production of technology, but also to their relative invisibility from the global market. The fact that inhumane working conditions are only spoken about in times of crisis (such as mass hospitalisation) highlights that they are otherwise taken for granted, and soon to be forgotten. However, in contrast to the presentation of Navajo women as having "nimble fingers and passive personalities”, over 1,000 female workers from the Foxconn factory have started a protest to fight for their working conditions.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/24/foxi-d24.html