FEMST 185BP
TR 9:30 — 10:45 AM
Gender & Culture:
HSSB 1236
Empire and Labor Regimes
SPRING 2015
Professor Teresa Figueroa
What can we learn from examining women’s labor
markets? What is the relation between empire building and labor? From an interdisciplinary perspective,
this course ANALYZES the construction of Empires
and their incorporation of male and female labor at
home and abroad. Working class women struggle to
reconcile the labor mobility of their husbands
THROUGH transnational separation and eventual
abandonment, having young households, AS WELL AS
motherhood and social stigma. Because poor women
have precarious livelihoods in the Third World, they
increasingly join global capitalist markets in the First
World. In this context, Third World women become
transnational nurses, domestic employees, and farm
workers providing intimate care or contributing to the
social AND ECONOMIC reproduction of society.
Through the ethnographic lens of Mexican and Filipino women (and male) workers in the United States
and Israel, this course will comparatively analyze the
relation between empire and labor and assess its social implications for ourselves writ large.