ABSTRACT
The disposable third world woman’s body is not the same as the one that women workers bring into the workplace. Rather, it is a body manufactured during the labor process via discourses that combine bits and pieces of workers’ bodies with industrial processes and managerial expectations. As I intend to show here, this discursive production of the materially disposable third world woman’s body does not, however, focus exclusively on the manufacturing of solely female bodies. It is a discursive process in which material entities cohere around an array of differences, such as first world/third world, female/male, valuable/disposable, and other traits often paired as binary opposites. In the context of the factory I present here, these oppositional pairs figure centrally, along with another coupled around American/Mexican differences, in the daily operations of a Mexican television factory owned by a highly
diversified global firm I call “COSMO.” As I attempt to show here, these binary pairs are central to the discursive production of the disposable third world woman’s actual corporeality. This productive process begins always with a destructive one that entails a disassembling of workers’ bodies into distinctly oppositional parts, such as male/female, third world, first world Mexican, American, and so on, such that COSMO employees represent a supply of an array of body parts, like unattached limbs and free-floating heads, that are then discursively reassembled into the bodies that meet corporate specifications, outlined in engineering and managerial offices. Prominent among these bodies is that of the disposable third world woman.
