Chakravarti offers a thought-provoking analysis of the intersection of three discourses, namely: gender, class, and religion and their contested power-hierarchies on the shop floor of the pseudonymous Fashion Express garment factory in Port Sa‘id, Egypt (170). Basing her analysis on ethnographic research completed at the factory in 2004–05, Chakravarti illustrates the diverse roles female workers assume as active economic actors within the labor-management dynamic.
Chapter 1 situates Port Sa‘id within the context of larger temporal and spatial forces, tracing Port Said's entry into the global supply chain. Expectations of women's rights and roles also changed apace as Egypt made the transition from Gemal ‘Abdel Nasser's nationalization of industry and state socialism of the 1950s to Anwar Sadat's infitah (opening) to international trade, development, and privatization in the 1970s, and finally to Hosni Mubarak's neoliberalist policies. Sociocultural proscriptions against mixed-gender interactions were navigated with women-only factories under Nasser. While the factory floor had early been a space for female employment, under Sadat and Mubarak, and due to high unemployment rates and increased private sector opportunities, men also took factory jobs. At the micro-level, Chakravarti identifies the spatial separation between edara (management) and entag (production) within the factory, setting the stage for intersectional analysis of gender and religion within clearly defined class constraints.
Next, Chakravarti structures Chapters 2–5 thematically. Chapter 2 explores the “firm as family” concept that is unique to Fashion Express, where management employs familial control techniques to achieve production deadlines, which labor resists or complies with by evoking similar familial expectations. Chapter 3 shows how workers appropriate the workplace to pursue their own romantic and material interests: pursuing love marriages instead of traditional arranged marriages; gathering a gihaaz (trousseau), which is necessary for a young woman to fulfill the financial part of the marriage contract; and commercial activity such as services and catalog sales. Chapter 4 focuses on the kawadir (supervisors), the conduits between edara and entag, who assume gendered labor identities, such as “tomcat femininity” or “pious masculinity” (140). The mushrifat (female supervisors) exert control over junior employees by acting as gatekeepers to workers’ rise through the entag ranks. Chapter 5 analyzes the “firm as family” response to the takeover of Fashion Express by a British management team and the team's attempts to “modernize” the factory. Finally, Chapter 6 reiterates Michel Foucault's contention in 1971 that discourse is the power to be seized, demonstrating how discourse is co-opted and appropriated by Fashion Express workers. The “firm as family” mantra facilitates a mixed-gender workforce while improving the material and financial stability of workers (201). The mushrifat are integral liaisons in the Marxian struggle between the edara and entag and the women “contested, accommodated, and appropriated the patriarchal discourse of the firm's management to their own advantage” (206).
Chakravarti's book is the first ethnographic survey to probe the intersection of gender, class, and religion within Egypt's public sector. To this end, Chakravarti's female protagonists are active economic actors, challenging traditional stereotypes of female workers as weak and docile (4). Chakravarti sidesteps essentialist narratives to explore the discursive means through which women structure their lived work experience and tailor their discourse to accommodate and contest sociocultural expectations.
Theoretically, Chakravarti contributes to the literature that problematizes essentialist notions of patriarchy, while extending patriarchal relationships from literal to metaphorical kinship within the “factory as family” setting. Chakravarti substantiates Suad Joseph's assertion that in patriarchal hierarchies, “each person. . .is caused and causative of the relations of inequality” (Intimate Selving in Arab Families, 13–14) as well as Deniz Kandiyoti's concept of “bargaining with patriarchy,” which asserts meanings and definitions are “multiple, contradictory, fluid and contested” (“Bargaining with Patriarchy,” 137). Chakravarti further problematizes patriarchal relationships as constrained by a person's haqq (right), which dictates one person's entitlement and requires another's obligation. Chakravarti's elaboration of this reciprocal relationship strengthens prior efforts to provide alternatives for over-simplistic understandings of patriarchy as a unidirectional exercise of power.
When Chakravarti depicts the firm's recruitment practices as an extension of kinship ties rather than as nepotism, she shows her ability to apply a sensitive cultural lens as opposed to relying on common western biases. These practices allow women to transgress mixed-gender workplace boundaries, while maintaining their own personal, and the factory's local, reputations. Nevertheless, the all-male British management team's attempts to remedy these questionable practices and establish a factory run expeditiously using “modern and scientific” principles ultimately fail due to the British team's inattention to the underlying significance of such recruitment practices. Furthermore, the social insurance and benefits package the team promises new recruits disqualifies them from pursuing coveted civil service posts (186). Consequently, the British team's attempts at reform backfire. To complicate matters further, the British team places female university-graduates and direct hires into supervisory positions instead of requiring them to work their way up as was the factory's tradition. This breach of factory tradition, coupled with the women's violation of standards of ihtiram (respect) by wearing knee-length shorts and low-cut t-shirts to work, assures their short-lived employment.
In terms of potential weaknesses, methodologically Chakravarti's assessment of the “firm as family” structure as unique to Fashion Express draws into question the extent to which her findings are generalizable across a larger population. This weakness undermines Chakravarti's ability to link her findings as representative of the labor unrest that brought down the Mubarak regime in 2011. Moreover, it calls into question whether her observations of the intersectionality of gender, class, and religion in this factory are an anomaly or demonstrative of a larger trend in Egyptian society. One additional weakness is the lack of clarity concerning Fashion Express and whether it is indeed a public-sector enterprise and not the privately-owned asset of the Fahmy family. The fact that “crucial decisions are made elsewhere – in the government offices in Cairo” (52) and the proprietor's close association with Sadat lead one to believe that this factory may answer to the state. This point, however, is not made explicit enough and Chakravarti's “firm as family” analogy makes Fashion Express appear to function like other private family-run businesses.
Despite these slight concerns, Chakravarti's highly detailed, fascinating glimpse into gender dynamics within this patriarchal factory setting challenges essentialist notions of patriarchy and women's position in public sector employment, highlighting the fact that meaning is not fixed. Chakravarti's book would fit well into an undergraduate or graduate course in Women and Gender Studies, a graduate qualitative methods course in ethnography, or as “recommended reading” to illustrate some of the key theoretical advancements within the field of Middle East Women and Gender Studies that problematize essentialist notions of patriarchy and the inferior position in which it places women.
