Review of Caitrin Lynch's 'Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka’s Global Garment Industry'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under familiar pressure to liberalize the economy, in 1977 Sri Lanka established an export-oriented garment industry, locating factories mainly in urban areas near to the capital Colombo.In 1992 the government pushed industrialization into rural areas under a program called 200 Garment Factories Program (200 GFP).Caitrin Lynch's well argued and ethnographically rich study shows how and why the program was promoted by the state, how it was received and contested by different segments of Sri Lankan society, and especially, how the women who came to work in rural factories attempted to live and actively negotiate their identities as respectable women.Many studies have detailed the lives of women in global factories.Lynch's ethnography is distinctive in its attention to national debates over the use of women's labour for economic development, showing how contested ideas about women's morality can be used to advance nationalist agendas.Taking factory jobs presented contradictions for rural women.They provided critical resources for poor families.But women also ran the risk of being viewed as Juki girls; the term for garment workers that became derogatory shorthand for urban women workers reputed to engage in behaviour morally inappropriate for Sinhala Buddhists.Insightful autobiographical essays by women workers, commissioned by Lynch, interleave the chapters and show women's complex agency in navigating difficult terrain.The 200 GFP was initially promoted by United National Party President Premadasa to dispel unrest among rural youth.In the context of extremely violent political conflicts, especially in rural areas, the program was put forward as a way to reduce the chance of revolts like those of the 1970s and late 1980s by young Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, People's Liberation Front) supporters.Though seen by some as fiercely nationalist and anti foreign investment, these revolts were widely viewed as due to young people's 'frustration' with growing disparities between urban and rural Sri Lanka.Lynch analyzes the discursive strategies used to promote a program that, by shifting women's place in village society, was as likely to provoke dismay as applause.As part of a broader nation-building and nationalistic agenda, the President invoked 'glorious village traditions' that romanticized the pre-colonial period, advancing a version of capitalism consistent with Sinhala Buddhist values.Within months of being established the program turned attention away from youth problems and toward the behaviour of rural women.The contradiction that the JVP was composed primarily of men while it was women employed in the factories was explained by state representatives and factory owners and managers as due to women's greater suitability
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".