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Where are the Women?余华活着
Doreen J Mattingly Department of Women’s Studies, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA,如何补阳气
USA;******************.edu
京剧介绍
Reviews of books often reveal more about the reviewer than about the book. We bring to books, especially meaty new monographs in our own fields, the hope that we might find either some insight into the questions that preoccupy us or an elaboration of our own analys.When our expectations are met, we write a glowing review, and when they are not, we range from the charitable to the disparaging. That said, my comments on Operation Gatekeeper by Joph Nevins may be less about the book than about its ufulness to me. What I liked about the book is that it helped me think about the relationship between paradoxical social situations and the emergence of social categories,but its ufulness was sorely limited by the inattention paid to rvice work and the experiences of immigrant women.
I will begin with the part of the book that I found uful: the analysis of paradoxes and social categori
es. In the book, Nevins provides a contextual analysis of the emergence and significance of the category “illegal alien” and the consolidation of the US–Mexico border through Operation Gatekeeper. I found his understanding of the paradoxical nature of the context, and the links between this context and the emergence of the meaning-laden category “illegal alien”, to be par-ticularly interesting and uful. While he is certainly not the first to make an argument about paradoxes, I was able to e his point with great clarity, perhaps becau of the careful attention he paid to the empirical context. Often when I read about paradoxes they em like abstractions; here they emerged as material realities.
Nevins discuss at least two paradoxes prent in the border between Mexico and the United States, and shows how both of them contribute to the hardening of categories and boundaries. The first relevant para-dox is the coexistence of profound difference and increasing sameness and interconnectedness of Mexico and the US. Nevins explains, “The establishment and construction of the international boundary and its associated practices facilitated increasing sameness (in the n of sharing and interacting) between M exico and the United States while simultaneously heightening the n of difference between the
Where are the Women?143‘A mericans’ and the ‘Mexicans’ on the other side” (p 39). The paradox of
sameness and difference exacerbates the importance of the bound-ary itlf and legitimates state practices, such as Operation Gatekeeper, that enforce this boundary.
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走马古镇A cond relevant paradox, this one internal to the United States, is between anti-immigrant nativism and the country’s history as a nation of immigrants. In the past, the paradox was resolved by emphasizing race as a marker of inclusion and exclusion. Nevins argues that although race continues to be important, the growing numbers of non-white citizens have eroded some of its legitimacy in resolving this particular paradox. In this context, legality has emerged as the new legitimate marker dividing insider and outsider, a marker that reinforces the power of the state.
Added to the two paradoxes is the changing relationship between an increasingly global economy and states. Whether Nevins es this relationship as paradoxical, dialectical or merely ten is unclear and maybe not important. What is clear is that the relationship between the state and the economy has specific implications for international borders, which must be porous enough to allow for the free flow of goods and capital, and, if needed, workers, yet still be rigid enough to allow different states to govern on either side of the line. In his focus on crime and the drug trade, Nevins shows how state rhetoric of pro-tecting citizens is mobilized to define the border despite its permeability to capital. The portrayal of M exican immigrants as bandits, drug-runners and gang-ban夸赞的反义词
gers has been crucial to legitimizing Operation Gatekeeper. Thus the criminalization of all immigrants and the corresponding militarization of the border region, and the u of legal citizenship to mark the boundary between insiders and outsiders is, Nevins argues, the product of the state’s respon to underlying para-doxes. That the authority of the state is itlf vulnerable, in transition, and threatened by economic globalization only intensifies the resolve of the state within this zone of ambiguity.
I am distilling a very complicated argument here with the intent of illustrating Nevins’ interesting point that paradoxical contexts contribute to the formation of social and physical boundaries. It is a point that I am grateful for; since reading this I find mylf looking at situations and tracing the link between paradoxes and ideological categories. Nevertheless, I think that this analysis, uful as it is, is incomplete. It focus on the state’s (masculine) role as the protector of its citizens from (male) invaders and ignores its (feminine) role as the provider of rvices (to women and children). In my opinion, the analysis of the construction of the “illegal alien” and the paradoxical context which has given ri to it can be strengthened by including the tensions surrounding access to social rvices, tensions felt most strongly by undocumented immigrant women.
144Antipode Throughout the book, Nevins analyzes legality in terms of crim-inality; tho in the coun
梦见火烧房子是什么意思try illegally are in violation of the law and therefore more strongly associated with criminality in general. This argument is interesting and uful, especially in discussing the lives of immigrant men, since men are most viewed and treated as criminals. Still, the analysis neglects a cond important distinction between citizens and “illegal” immigrants: access to state rvices. Operation Gatekeeper was initiated in October 1994, one month before California voters overwhelmingly pasd Proposition 187, which sought to deny many public rvices, including education, to undocumented immi-grants. Nevins does discuss Proposition 187, particularly in terms of its political relationship to Operation Gatekeeper, but is unable to analyze its significance, perhaps becau he does not consider the lives of immigrant women and the changes in the political economy of caring work.
Proposition 187 was officially about the rights of non-citizens to state support for social reproduction. Access to rvice became politicized at that time for a number of reasons: more women were immigrating and raising their children in the US so the demand for rvices was greater than it had been previously, the state was reducing its overall commitment to social support, and there was a growing market for low-wage personal rvice workers. In Disposable Domestic, Grace Chang makes a compelling argument that Proposition 187, together with changes in the welfare system, reduced the number of immigrants receiving aid and had the effect of increasing the ability of the Uni
ted States to “capture the labor of immigrant men and women parate from their human needs or tho of their dependents”(2000:11). Seeing this aspect of recent anti-immigration legislation requires a gendered analysis in two areas. First, the kind of labor “captured” from men and women is different; immigrant women are often employed providing caring labor (childcare, elder care, hou-keeping) for citizen families. This means immigrant women must live very near their employers, often working in their homes. Second, parating the labor of women, especially mothers, from caring for their dependents, takes a different form than does the paration of men from their dependents. The costs of childcare mean that all working mothers, even immigrants, have an economic incentive not to work for extremely low wages. Social rvices, especially welfare, make it possible for poor women to avoid paid work and be with their children, in effect increasing women’s rerve wage.
Illegality, then, marks the border between tho who can have some support from the state with social reproduction and tho who must rely completely on their own resources. It also marks a boundary between tho who have the option to turn to government anti-poverty programs and tho who must rely on earnings, however meager. Creating a
Where are the Women?145 category of “illegal aliens” ineligible for social rvices also creates a group of super-exploitable women workers, just in time to be hired to fill needs created by a restructu
ring state.
In sum, I think that Joph Nevins has written a smart analysis of the paradoxes that have given ri to the US build-up of its southern border and the creation of the category of “illegal alien”. And while he mentions gender, immigrant women, and Proposition 187, it is the experience and reprentation of male immigrants that are at the heart of his analys. It is an unfortunate oversight and in my opinion a significant one, since the conditions of immigrant women and the market for their labor is a central part of the formation of categories in the borderlands.
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Reference
Chang G (2000) Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press
