Description

The dissertation analyzes the situation of migrant workers from Bolivia in the Argentinian fashion industry from an anthropological perspective with a focus on gender relations, taking into account theories of transnationalism and intersectional inequality and employing ethnographical fieldwork with narrative interviews. The situation of migrant garment workers in Buenos Aires is shaped by inequality that displays on local, transnational and global levels. The global garment industry is characterized by especially precarious working condition and tendencies towards subcontracting. Argentina’s garment sector has been shaped by these global tendencies but also by transnational aspects of mobility that link Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru in a ‘transnational space of fashion’. The border-crossing mobility of involved social actors has constructed transnational social networks nourishing the demand for cheap migrant labor for the local fashion production in São Paulo and Buenos Aires. While the precarious working conditions and exploitation within the fashion industry has been emphasized in previous academic research, the ethnographic research at the core of this investigation aims at detecting possibilities of agency as well as social- and spatial mobility within this particular context and across national and imaginary borders. Gender relations are further focused for their relevance in both, migration and work at the “global assembly line” that construct an intersectional scheme of inequality shaping the specific situation of female migrant garment workers from Bolivia in Buenos Aires.

Project Details

Project Type

Dissertation

Subject Group

Law, Economics and Social Sciences

Start

2018

Organization

Faculty/Central Institute

Institute for Latin American Studies

Institute/Seminar

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Field/Work Area

Cultural and Social Anthropology of Latin America

Project Team

Director

Karlotta Bahnsen (WiMi)

Researchers

• Karlotta Bahnsen (WiMi)

  Current