Standing for all instances of problematic workplace sexuality, the notion of ‘sexual harassment’ illuminates but also obscures the role of desire in work relations. It spotlights isolated individual interactions at the expense of structural processes and stresses choice and blame rather than the way in which a given workplace evokes particular sexual subjectivities in the service of production. An ethnography of shopfloor relations in a Mexican export-processing plant shows how labor control operates through the interpellation of both workers and supervisors as sexual subjects. In this plant, panoptic architecture evokes and focuses the male gaze in the service of ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’, and desire emerges as a force of production. Male supervisors are located as voyeurs and young female workers as sexual objects to be consumed. Worker efficiency and desirability are conflated and workers become subject to management for the affirmation of both. In such a setting, framing shopfloor sexuality as aberrant distracts from its primary, and equally problematic, function as a shopfloor discipline. © 2000, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

Global restructuring is a gendered process. In transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms of tropes of gendered personhood, and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its implications for workers themselves. The paper explores this process through narrating the evolution of a local labor market in Mexico's export-processing (maquila) industry. In so doing, the account reveals globalization to be less linear, obdurate and inevitable than many theories suggest. In this context, managers gendered commitments, desires and understandings prove to be literally counterproductive, undermining industry-wide shop-floor control.

Neoliberalism is produced on and through the terrain of gendered meanings. Gender naturalizes capitalist relations and addresses and constitutes subjects across economic arenas. As the unmarked side of the pair, masculinity is too often overlooked in these processes, thus obscuring both the masculine character of elite performances and the growing relegation of non-elite men to the margins of the economy. Ethnographic immersion in two pivotal sites of neoliberal emergence at the nexus of the Mexican and global economies—one in production and one in finance—provides a window onto the enactment of the post-Fordist global economy and into the role of gendered subjectifying processes in propelling it forward. This analysis reveals the role of gender in the global dispersal of production and the incitement and legitimation of transnational finance, thus throwing empirical light on the routine functioning of actually existing capitalism.

Scholars frequently recount the ups and downs, the purportedly embarrassing – although always heroically turned to account – mishaps of research. However, acknowledging that one has rethought an analysis in the absence of new data makes explicit that social science is an interpretive project, and as such is rarely discussed in print. In this article I break that taboo, analyzing how I began to doubt my claim that a global shop floor was organized around an ungendered shop-floor subject. I then detail the more contextually sensitive reading of my fieldnotes that allowed me to grasp the fundamental masculinization of the shop floor in question. In the process, I theorize the aspects of gendered structure that enabled the error at the outset. Thus, the discussion reconstructs the life history of an argument – tracing the shifting development of analysis in a particular ethnographic case. In so doing, it follows epistemic problems back to their ontological roots, looking at how the tricky, obdurate situatedness of meanings – gendered and ungendered alike – requires an ongoing analysis of context in interpreting even our most minute and focused observations.

What does feminist theory have to offer sociology? Defining feminist theory as work that problematizes the gender binary and the relations of domination that constitute and emerge from it, we explore four key aspects of feminist scholarship. We begin with work that explores gender as a structuring trope. We then turn to how gender is coconstituted with other structures of power and domination. Next, we survey how feminists have theorized the relationship between nature and the social through the body. Finally, we examine feminist epistemological claims. We conclude by demonstrating the inextricability of feminist conceptual work and feminist politics. As we move across these bodies of work, we show how they are linked with one another and suggest some of the ways in which thinking like a feminist would help sociologists better grasp the dynamics of the social worlds we study.