Please join us in Cohen Hall Room 436 for a Faculty GASWorks (Gender and Sexuality Works-in-Progress) Seminar featuring Emmanuel David from Villanova University's Sociology Department. He will be discussing his working paper, "Am I Those Names?:
Gender and Identity Work at Transnational Call Centers in the Philippines."

Faculty Respondents: Ben Singer (GSWS) and Andy Lamas (Urban Studies and GSWS)

Paper Abstract:

In 2010, the Philippines surpassed India as the country
employing the largest number of transnational call center workers. This paper
shows how the workplace experiences of transgender Filipinas pose serious
challenges to the gender- and hetero-normative  presuppositions of
existing work on the effects of outsourcing on global gender relations. Drawing
on interviews with call center workers in metro Manila and on theories in the
sociology of gender and queer studies, the paper examines how transgender call
center workers actively negotiate gender and sexuality in customer service
interactions, manage organizational hierarchies, and engage with and resist
everyday performative activities encoded with gendered meanings. This queer and
feminist analysis argues that an examination of transgendered experience opens
new perspectives on the gendered dimension of global outsourcing; and that call
center employment has the potential to shift the life trajectories and
opportunities of transgender Filipinas by creating spaces that both constrain
and enable the construction of new subjectivities.

To receive a copy of the paper and reserve a lunch, please RSVP.