apostolidis feminist theory, immigrants, counterhegemony

8/11/2019 Apostolidis Feminist Theory, Immigrants, Counterhegemony

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P a u l A p o s t o l i d i s

Feminist Theory, Immigrant Woricers Stories, and

Counterhegemony in the United States Today

he aywithout mmigrantsand o the r ma rches and rallies in the spring

of 2006 massively disrupted ordinary business in schools and offices

across the country. Event organizers, among whom union officers

and staff took the lead, had wagered that a general strike of immigrants

and their sympathizers would shock the population at large into feeling

the extent to which social institutions in the United States rely on im-

migrants in order to function. At the same time, they aimed to sensitize

immigrants, particularly the undocumented, to their power as a collective

force. Accordingly, novel, temporary spaces of political engagement took

shape. For a brief time, people normally driven into the shadows to protect

themselves from surveillance and deportation, and compelled to submit

to severe exploitation, created an array of sites where they could begin to

develop their ow n styles of opp osition a nd visions of an altered Am erican

future. Yet before long these transient spaces had dissipated. The familiar,

heg em onic surfaces of everyday life reap peared the public parks and m ain

streets once again free of susp icious con greg ations of brow n faces

while business as usual reassumed its normal rhythms. Activists, too,

turne d tow ard advancing their agenda thro ug h regular, insti tutional mean s

such as legislative and policy-making processes rather than broadening

the attempt to fashion innovative political spaces as a way of provoking

chang e. M eanwh ile, the protest coalit ion began to fragment along ethnic-

national lines. Asian participants in a national follow-up con ven tion voiced

dismay that the event had been held mainly in Spanish, while the media

aggravated tensions by dwelling on some protestors waving Mexican flags

(Avila and Olivo 2006).

Following the l ines of argu m ent d eveloped by W endy Brown and Linda

Zerilli, one could interpret the swift reassertion of hegemony in the af-

termath of the 2006 immigrants ' r ights protests as the result of activists '

I am grateful to Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, Jeanne Morefield, and Ella Myers for their


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5 6 I Apos tolidis

choices to prioritize securing new legal rights and policy reforms over

inventing new forms and spaces of political engagement. For both these

theorists, waging activism through conventional institutional channels

tends to extinguish serious challenges to hegemonic configurations of

gender, class, and racial power while stimulating identity politics that re-

inforce norms. In this essay, however, I interrogate that contention both

by critically rereading Brown's and Zerilli's texts and by employing their

theories to interpret the achievements and the missteps of a sustained,

local movement of immigrant unionists that predated the 2006 immi-

grants' rights protests. Part of my goal is to show the prodigious potential

of both Brown and Zerilli to illuminate contemporary political struggles,

including activism in the domains of labor and imm igration, where neither

theorist has intervened in a specific way previously. Yet I also demonstrate

that efforts aimed at securing and enforcing legally codified rights need

not lure activists into the trap of

resentfiil identity politics that Brown

associates with such endeavors. Nor does such regular, institutional politics

centered on rights necessarily constrain the ability of activists to inaugurate

new forms of politically significant relationships for themselves, sZerilli

argues (Zerilli 2005, 94), To the contrary, engaging in struggles that

navigate juridical processes and use legal levers to generate the kinds of

benefits tha t unions often seekan end to employer abuses, the fulfillment

of contractual obligationscan cultivate the terrain where the more far-

reaching aspirations to freedom that animate Brown and Zerilli take root

and begin to grow.

Brown and Zerilli undervalue the potential of rights-based, institu-

tionally channeled struggle to forge such critical terrain, I argue, because

neither makes sufficient room in her critique for what Antonio Gramsci

calls the common sense of ordinary people. Another key point in this

article, then, is methodological: I argue that for critical feminist theory

to assess as perceptively as possible the mechanisms of hegemonic power,

the comm on sense of subaltern people has to migrate into the very com-

positional structure of critique, Gramsci defines common sense as those

conceptions of self and world that encode practically efficacious notions

of how power works and contain at least an anticipatory sense of how to

contest it (Gramsci 1971, 323-24, 330-31), In a spirit resonating with

Gramsci's emphasis on the capacity of common sense to hone theory's

critical edge, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua have decried the dis-

tance between academic critical theory and the narrated experiences of


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S I G N S Spring 2 8 I 547

the ory by juxtap osing Bro wn s a nd Zerilli s analyses with excerpts from

the personal life stories of several Mexican immigrant women who helped

build a recent, highly unusual union movement among meatpackers at a

Tyson Foods beef-processing plant in Washington State.

Ultimately, this essay issues a qualified reaffirmation of the insights

Brown and Zerilli supply as they probe the dynamics by which political

projects seeking to resist core modes of class, patriarchal, and racial dom-

ination ironically end up reinforcing their own subordination. On the one

hand, the eventual failure of the Tyson workers rank-and-file mobiliza-

tion , like the trajectory thu s far of the m ore rece nt imm igra nts rights

movement, suggests that immigrant workers struggles are indeed vul-

nerable to these self-undermining processes. On the other hand, immi-

gran t wo m en s stories of their union ist activities indicate tha t even in th e

context of legally defined struggles to make juridical institutions enforce

codified rights, ordinary people can begin to articulate fundamental chal-

lenges to hegemony. Most importandy, these individuals words signal

that critical theorists can discover unsuspected kernels of counterhegem-

ony by paying focused attention to the accounts of subaltern people who

have engaged in these kinds of activism.^

Th e remarks of the imm igran t wo m en labo r activists qu ote d in this article derive from

a series of interviews that I co ndu cted in 200 2 w ith twenty-four wo rkers at Tyso n s plant

in Pasco, Washington. My purpose in carrying out these interviews was neither to conduct

ethnography nor to assemble evidence that would substantiate an empirical argument ex-

plaining these wo rkers decisions to wag e resistance. Instea d, as I discuss in the secon d section

of this essay, the goal was to generate narrative material from participants in the rank-and-

file movement and thereby to provide a basis for methodological innovation in critical feminist

theory. The workers we interviewed included women and men, and among those we inter-

viewed there were reformers as well as participants in the counterreform group, along with

some nonaligned persons. I focus below on the comments from the four most important

wo me n leaders of the un ion, leaving consideration of the other w om en unionists, the activist

men , and the counterreform and non aligned g roups for a different v enue, because realizing

the theoretical benefits of this exercise requires close reading. My assistant (a Mexican un-

dergraduate at the college where I teach) and I conducted all the interviews together and

almost all of them in Spanish, including three of the four discussed in this article. The

conversations lasted

1.5 2.5

hours, following a half-hour session on an earlier day to get

acquainted and discuss the interview process, and usually too k place in the w orker s hom e

or at the public l ibrary. We asked ope n-en ded questions a bou t the individual s experiences

growing up, deciding to immigrate, crossing the border, confronting racial discrimination

in the United States, working in the fields and factories, and becoming involved in the

struggle at Tyson.


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548 I Apostolidis

Politicized identity practices of political freedom and the effective

terrain of politics

For Brown, the politicization of identity, especially through struggles for

identity-based rights, represents the major hegemonic strategy today by

which popular impulses toward greater freedom are channeled in ways

that reinforce the very structures of power they attempt to con test. Brown

develops her account of this self-negating political tendency by drawing

on Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of the disposition of

ressentiment

Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of

the injured, it delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by con-

stituting sovereign subjects and events sresponsible for the injury

of

soci l

subordination. It fixes the identities of

the

injured and the

injuring as social positions, and codifies swell the meanings of their

actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and

struggle for resignification or repositioning. This effort also casts

the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters

of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure.

Thus, the effort to ou tiaw social injury powerfiiUy legitimizes law

and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts in-

jured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors.

Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this project seeks

not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but

the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the suf-

ferer does, (Brown 1995, 25)

The subject of r ss ntim ntthus develops a mode of political activity that

is wholly determined by her status as a wounded being and tha t, in tu rn,

consolidates her identity ssomething essential and unalterable. This iden-

tity, moreover, takes shape in necessary opposition to the equally fixed

identity of the perpetrator in relation to whom the subject seeks both

protection and vengeance. In addition, the self-identified victim demands

these things from the supposedly impartial state and thereby both cloaks

and antiracist activism. Readers interested in more social scientific examinations of, e,g,, the

promotion of gender equality in the family among Latina union activists should consult the

influential earlier studies by Ruiz (1987), Zavella (1987), and Lamphere et al, (1993), as

well as more recent writings by Louie (2001) and Deutsch (2002), In general, this literature

documents the tenacity of gendered relations of inequality even when working women of

color organize militant confrontations with employers and negotiate barriers of racial dif-


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S I G N S S prin g 2 8 I S49

and reproduces the disciplinary power of the law and the state, as well as

the social forces that have produced the injury in the first place.

Part of the ingenuity of Brown's theory lies in her welding of a Marxist

appreciation for the mystification of power that ideology produces to a

Foucauldian concern with the constitution of subjectivity by power. In

line with the former tendency. Brown reaffirms Karl Marx's insight that

political rights ironically depoliticize whole sectors ofsoci lexistence, in

the sense of removing them from exposure to public contestation and

reconstitution through popular democratic action. Liberal orders con-

struct a form of political life in which people are supposed to confront

one another deliberately in abstraction from the material conditions of

their lives, as though the social forces that made their lives deeply unequal

to one another simply did not operate. This, Marx argues and Brown

underscores, no t only leaves social domination intact but also bolsters and

obscures it by making the order of domination appear natural, inevi-

table, and outside the proper domain of political struggle (Brown 1995,

111), At the same time, the political culture ofrightsconfers on the state

its own 'right' to governto legislate and to adjudicate, to mobilize and

to deploy force, removing it, as well, from the purview of critique and

popular democratic action (Brown 1995, 109). From a Foucauldian per-

spective, in turn. Brown argues that by engaging with the law in efforts

to win the establishment and enforcement of rights, the subject develops

a desire for rights that supplants any desire to change the relations of

social power that generate the injuries of subordination in the first place.

Indeed , the subject comes to desire the state's exertion of repressive power

through the legal system (126), The politics of identity-based rights thus

not only inhibits the subject from perceiving the operations ofsoci land

political power but also constitutes the subject through the disciplinary

processes that legally oriented struggle entails.

Thus, for Brown, thereisno dialectical progression of history according

to which domination necessarily calls forth the social forms that conquer

and succeed it, since the subject is shaped by power rather than only

having the true nature of power hidden from her. Neither, however, does

a relentiess logic exist by which power always resubordinates the moments

of resistance that arise against it. Instead, human beings concerned with

realizing freedom must engage in a project for discursive struggle whose

parameters are invented rather than secured in advance and whose out-

come is never guaranteed (Brown 1995 , 134), Mediating between Marx


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55 I Apostolidis

techniques of dom ination , Brown thus ends up with som ething very m uch

like a Gramscian conception of the struggle for hegemony.

Gramsci 's concept of hegem ony deno tes a historically conting ent struc-

ture of social and political power that is sustained through processes of

everyday life, such as work routines, hahits of political engagement, and

modes of cultural expression. These processes combine to generate pop-

ular co ns en t to leading social institutio ns, especially capitalism and th e

state. Consent, in this view, is as much a matter of practical activities as

the ideological forms of thought that derive their capacities to make sense

of everyday life under conditions of domination from that practical con-

text. In contrast to more orthodox Marxist thinkers, Gramsci stresses that

neither habits of consent nor modes of critical consciousness emerge au-

tomatically from social or economic dynamics per se. Rather, both are the

products of contending political forces seeking to exercise hegemony

w ithin society. Like Gram sci, Brow n envisions a form of struggle th at exerts

itself against structural capitalist power even as it musters class-heteroge-

neous political coalitions; that confronts historically variable constructions

of state authority and instrumentalities; that strives to reconstitute terrains

of everyday life where ideology is both a mode of consciousness and an

effect of habitual practices operating on the body and the affects; and that

requires de liberate, sustained, and historically attu ne d political m obilizations

(Gramsc i 1971 , 144-53 , 180-82 , 323-25) .

Nevertheless, Brown's suggestions about the forms of political action

that would stage and nurture the more robust form of freedom she en-

visions freedom of the kind that seeks to set the terms of social exis-

tence are more gestural than well elaborated (Brown 1995, 25). Her

thinking in this regard also evinces a distinctive and excessive wariness

about the prospect that involvement in concrete projects to change in-

stitutional structures and policies could assist the materialization of such

freedom. Brow n sees institutionalization as such as a threa t to freedom ,

asking tha t we recognize th e tens ion, if no t the antinomy , betw een free-

do m and inst i tut ionalization (8). Th us, Brow n argues, freedom 's ac-

tualization would appear to be a frustratingly indeterminate matter of

ethos ,

of bearing toward institutions, of the

styl

of political practices,

rather than a matter of policies, laws, procedures, or organization of po-

l it ical ord ers (8 -9 ). O ur polit ical spaces, she con tends , m ust be het-

erogeneous, roving, relatively noninstitutionalized, and democratic to the

po int of exh aus tion (5 0) . W hen Bro wn does discuss political practices


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S I G N S S pring 2 8 I 551

in turn, seem mainly to include deliberative discussions. Thus she stresses

the nee d to learn ho w to have public conversations with each other,

arguing from a vision abo ut the co m m on and enjoying the pleasures

of doing so (51). Brown likewise emphasizes the representational aspects

of rights over and above their institutional contexts. Brown contends that

the political potency of rights lies not in their concreteness . . . but in

their idealism, in their ideal configuration of an egalitarian social, an ideal

that is con tradicted by substantive social inequ alities (1 34 ). Rather th an

seeking a po ten tial to en han ce freedom in efforts t o enforce specific, leg-

islated, or contractual rights, that is. Brown underscores the negative,

critical capacity of rights as ideals vis-a-vis institutiona lly co ord ina ted flows

of power.

What are the consequences of these moments of withdrawal, where

Brown pulls back from theorizing political practices that would aim to

establish and

fijlfi

he p romises of con crete, institutionally codified rights

while still emboldening the radically democratic style or ethos she prizes?

The problem is that engaging in systematic, collective efforts to change

or enforce policies, laws, and procedures can do something other than

discipline peop le into bec om ing the kinds of no rm al individuals tha t

the law and capital want them to be. Such activity can instead enable

peop le to begin rewo rking the desires, interp retation s, and practices b ou nd

up in their common sense in more ambitious directions, deepening their

refiisal to accept the self-concealments of power and spurring a more

urgent need to create a new world rather than just reacting to the existing

order. Gramsci sheds light on both the existence of this possibility and

the conditions of its realization. The latter pivotally involve the presence

of an organized m ove m ent th at provides a con text for calling into que stion

the boundaries of action and aspiration demarcated by policy and law.

Gramsci insists, in something like the Nietzschean spirit that animates

Bro wn , that the active politician is a creator, an initiator bu t the n qual-

ifies this th ou gh t as follows: bu t he neither creates from no th ing no r

does he move in the turbid void of is own desires and dreams. He bases

himself on effective reality. . . . If on e applies on e's will to th e c reation

of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are oper-

ativebasing oneself on the particular force which one believes to be

progressive and strengthening it to help it to victoryone still moves on

the terrain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and

transcend i t (or to contribu te to this) (Gramsci 19 7 1, 172 ). Struggles


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55 I Apos tolidis

deliberative and agonistic conversations with one another but also through

direct, antagonistic confrontations with institutionalized authority, con-

frontations that determine the course of

fiitur

events. These engagements

offer chances to take the measure oftheoperative forces and also to gain

a sense on a visceral level of both the weight of oppression and the ca-

pabilities of an oppositional movement. They test the abilities of activist

organizations to foster the self-intensification of common sense among

their adherents, nudging them toward discovering how unexpectedly po-

litically visionary the dernands and desires expressed in the ir common sense

just might be. Precisely because something concrete, albeit circumscribed,

is at stake in these encounters, because they make apprehensible in both

conscious and physicomaterial respects the tangibility and contingency of

power, they can prompt moments when a more daring and creative po-

litical ethos crystallizes.

Brown is not alone in underappreciating the emancipative possibilities

of this terrain. Zerilii's influential work to conceptualize what she calls

practices of political freedom seems to move in the direction of grounding

freedom in more institutionally specific and engaged forms of political

action. Yet Zerilli, too, concentrates on reimagining and enlivening com-

munication among women and other subaltern groups in political spaces

disengaged from the negotiations of rights and benefits imder existing

arrangements ofl wand policy. Like Brown, Zerilli critically interrogates

the understanding of freedom that underlies much contemporary activist

politics, where freedom is defined in highly individualistic term s, housed

in constitutionally guaranteed rights, and experienced as something that

begins where politics ends (Zerilli 200 5, 93) . For Zerilli, wom en rein-

force hegemony when they challenge gender domination through the

routines and institutions of political interaction that have been formed in

accordance with this dominant idea of freedom and give practical ex-

pression to it. The alternative is to design a new practice of free relations

among women outside these masculinist domains, in particular a practice

that enables women to acknowledge one another's differences in ways

that the rigid, normative prescriptions of feminine identity disallow

(93-98). Zerilli emphasizes, above all, the need for new practices of sym-

bolic representation or symbolic figuration that would provide an

alternative to the iconic image of woman as victim (1 01 -2 ). Reconsid-

ering Brown's theory of

r ss ntim nt

in light of the progressive politics

of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, Zerilli ratifies the collective's


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S I G N S S prin g 2 8 I SS3

rather like an injury identity inhabited by none and 'a mass identification

with the suffer ing of so m e' (1 00 -1 01 ). Freedo m, then , becomes the

struggle for the 'symbolic au tho riza tion ' of

female desire that does not

'signify itself only in this nega tive fo rm ,' a battie to gr an t sym bolic pre s-

ence to desires that already exist but whose political expression is blocked

by a linguistic aporia (102).

By engaging sympathetically with the Milan collective in a way that

inflises the substance of her theory of how hegemony both operates and

can be opposed, Zeril l i takes an important step beyond Brown, meth-

odologically speaking. The latter stays resolutely in the mode of negation

with respect to the various political projects she considers in

States of

Injury from the writings of Catharine MacKinnon to antidiscrimination

laws that exemplify the juridicalization of identity politics. By contrast,

Zerilli grapples with a political effort to pose a real alternative when she

examines the collective and seems on the brink of expanding her horizons

beyond the realm of language-centered contestation when she applauds

the collective's invocation of a practice of do in g (Zerill i 2 0 0 5 , 103) .

Yet Zerilli does not follow through on this promise but rather remains

focused on attempts to resignify female experience and desire without

attending to the material-practical contexts of such symbolic work. She

confines her remarks on the collective to a critical consideration of

text

published by the collective, forgoing the opportunity to probe both the

routines of everyday life generated in the political space of the bookstore

and the collective's institutional relations to corporate, governmental, or

cultural power centers.

Zerilli also sidesteps the question of how practices of claiming rights

might in and of themselves be conducive to freedom, even as she insists

that the practice of claiming on e's righ ts can be a practice of freedo m

(Zerill i 2 0 0 5 , 98 ). W hen bro ug ht back into relation with their origin in

practices of freed om , Zerilli co nte nd s, righ ts may be used to do m ore

than affirm

what we

already are (that is, members of various groups with

ascribed social identities). They can and should affirm our desire to be

som ething m or e (12 1). But wha t wo uld it me an, in practice, to forge

such an invigorating connection between rights claims and political prac-

tices? How, exactly, could engaging in the politics of rights open up more

rather than fewer opportunities for re-presenting female desire.^ And be-

yond resymbolization, what kinds of alternative relations among people

could rights politics assist tha t m igh t vie with th e disciplinary me chanism s


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55 I Apos tolidis

answers to these questions. Such an approach would have made room

within their critical theories for further developing the common sense

informing struggles against hegemony on the effective terrain that he-

gemony itself has wrought, including the domain of striving to expand

and enforce juridically administrated rights. Other feminist theorists have

raised related criticisms of academic theory's aloofness from the self-rep-

resentations of subaltern groups, especially racially subordinated women.

Moraga and Anzaldiia, for example, call for racially and sexually margin-

alized feminists to pro du ce th eo ry in the flesh, wh ich they define in

these terms : A theo ry in the flesh mean s one whe re the physical realities

of our livesour skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our

sexual longingsall fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here,

we attem pt to bridge the con tradictions of ou r experience. . . . We d o

this by naming our selves and by telling our stories in our own words

(Moraga and Anzaldiia 2 00 2, 21 ). To be sure, in stressing the impo rtance

of tel l ing stories in an embodied production of theory, Moraga and An-

zaldiia are no t focusing any more th an Brow n o r Zerilli on the radicalizing

potential of regular institutional politics. However, they are underlining

the formative significance of spatially and temporally localized experience

for generating theory and indeed challenging the binary distinction be-

tween theory and fleshly experience. Suppose, then, that some of the

stories working-class wom en of color tell con cern th eir struggles to defend

and ex pand their legal and c ontractu al rights, for instance, in the w orkplace

or with regard to social services. In these cases, the idea ought not to be

dismissed from the outset that such stories could constitute a form of

common sense capable of invigorating critical feminist theory by bringing

to bear on it both the principles and the sensible ethos that such struggle

entails.

At the same time, Moraga and Anzaldvia do not theorize the general

dynamics of projects to win popular consent for political leadership in any

way that wo uld o bviate the ne ed for B row n's and Zerilli's analyses. Ind ee d,

the a rgu m ents a nd p olemics on behalf of politicized iden tity in their widely

read coedited volume This ridge Called My ack stand in need of critical

reconsideration in l ight of the hegemonic operations that Brown and

Zerilli expose.' An alternative method of critique, then, would allow the-

ory in the flesh and hegemony critique on a societal level to leaven each

other. Below, I pursue such an analysis by reconsidering Brown's and


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S I G N S S pring 2 8 I 5SS

Zerilli 's theories in light of the stories of struggle told to my research

assistant and me as we interviewed immigrant workers about their efforts

to take control of their union at Tyson and then effect changes in their

workplace. Taking a cue from Gramsci, and mindful of the concordant

exhortations of Anzaldua and Moraga to give theory in the flesh its due,

the following discussion attempts to intensify the critical rigor of Brown's

and Zeril l i 's theories by having them engage the common sense of im-

migrant workers in the form of the narratives they articulated when we

interviewed them.

Conducting such an inquiry raises thorny and provocative questions

abo ut the meanings of narrat ive and theo ry and abo ut the assump-

tions regarding what i t means to stage an encounter between them. Like

Lisa Disch, I question the predominant view in feminist and subaltern

studies that assigns the character of concrete immediacy to narrative in

contrast to the putatively abstract, disembodied quality of analytical dis-

courses and that locates the subversive power of storytelling in its ability

to give voice to such unmediated experience. As Disch argues, narrative

is always already involved in political struggle rather than simply being

the direct expression of lived experience that is available for theory to rely

on either as an object of scientific study or as a font of moral inspiration

(Disch 2003), This conception of the inherently political character of

narrative resonates with Gramsci's no tion of the criticism of 'co m m on

sen se' that ignites the cri tique of heg em ony and cou nterhe gem onic strat-

egy. Such criticism, Gramsci writes, is n ot a qu estio n of intr od uc ing from

scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of

reno vating and ma king 'critical' an already existing activity (Gramsci 1 9 7 1 ,

330-31), Together, then, Gramsci and Disch enable a more precise for-

mulation of the procedure involved in the mutual leavening of narrative

and hegemony critique. In a radically democratic conception of counter-

hegemonic practice, movement intellectuals^who, for Gramsci, are never

just scholars or imaginative th ink ers b ut also org anize rs of political forces

should approach the stories that proliferate throughout the domain of

common sense as conveying political projects with which agonistic, stra-

tegic alliances can be formed. Their effects can thus be combined with

those of the counterhegemonic project that its leaders envision, not in a

me rely additive sense bu t rathe r in a reciprocally critical an d transform ative

manner. Hence, as the reader will see below, while the theories of Brown

and Zerilli furnish an initial, provisional framework for interpreting the


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556 Apostolidis

Counterhegemony andimm igrant wo m en workers common sense

From

the

mid-1990s through early 2005, meatpackers

at a

major

beef-

processing plant near Pasco, Washington, mobilized

a

campaign

to de-

mocratize their union. Teamsters Lxjcal Union

No. 556, and to

seek

changes

in

exploitative, hazardous,

and

abusive condidons

in

their work-

place. Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) owned the plant until2 1when Tyson

Foods purchased

the

company, thereby becoming

the

world's largest pro-

duceroffreshbeef,pork,and chicken. Immigrant workers from Mexico

made

up

most of the leadership cadre and the vast bulk of the mem bership

of

the

rank-and-file movement, although

a

Mexican-American woman,

Maria M artinez, was

the

movem ent's main leader

and

eventually became

the reformed union's principal officer.

The mobilization started

out

with informal meetings

in

Mardnez's

basement, attended byworkerswho were tiredof being shouted at by

supervisors, enduring speedups, incurring frequent injuries, working

in

unrelenting pain,

and

having little voice

in

their union.

At the

time,

the

union was

run by an old

guard of Anglo officers who preferred

to

avoid

making waves with

the

company,

the

better

to

ensure that IBP would

not

move

to

bust

the

union

and

threaten their posts. These officers neither

seriously addressed

the

growing problems workers were experiencing

nor

permitted

the

kinds of rank-and-file participation that w ould have moved

these issues

to the

center of the union's agenda. However, aftier Martinez

and

her

allies made contact with organizers

for

Teamsters

for

aDemocratic

Union (TDU),

a

group that

has

promoted

the

internal democratization

of the Teamsters since

the

1970s,

the

rank-and-fiie movement started

to

grow. Meetings were held

in

public parks,

and

more workers came. Work-

ers began

to

take collective actions of resistance inside

the

factory, banging

their metal hooks on their worktables in unison to send amessageof

defiance

to the

managers

and

eventually engaging

in

synchronized work

stoppages. These activities climaxed

in 1999

with

a

massive wildcat strike

(i.e.,one

that was legally unauthorized

and not

supported

by the

union),

in which some three-quarters

of

the roughly

1,500

workers

at the

plant

walked

off

the

job and

stayed outside

the

plant

for six

weeks.*

The movement

had

achieved

an

extraordinary degree

of

solidarity

by

that time. Whole families marched on the picket line in the withering

*The historical account of the rank-and-file movement at Tyson in this section draws


13/25

5 I G N S Spring 2 8 I 557

summer heat of the eastern Washington high desert, amid the stench of

feedlots and catde waste cesspools. Before long, the union officers capit-

ulated and petitioned to have the strike legally recognized, which was

possible since it had occurred during contract negotiations and at a point

where an impasse had emerged over the company's plan to eliminate the

workers' pension plans. Ultimately, the workers lost their pensions and

gained negligible improvements in the contract. But the enthusiasm that

swelled during the strike propelled the rank-and-file movement to success

in its subsequent bid to take over the union. The workers accomplished

this by taking advantage, much to the old guard's surprise, of their pro-

cedural rights to change the local's bylaws, in this way bringing about the

first democratically contested elections in the local's recent history. Al-

though the old guard appealed the results, aftier a drawn-out batde waged

in the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB's) administrative courts,

the reformers' victory was upheld.

The reformers then instituted a new regime of local union democracy

that included participatory and bilingual meetings and greatly expanded

members' voting rights. They also established new ties with progressive

groups from the local to the transnational levels and began challenging

in earnest the company's mistreatment of workers. Increasingly, legalist

activism became the predom inant m ode of engagement for the m ovement

in its more institutionalized position. Teamsters for a Democratic Union's

strategy held that taking on legalist endeavors like contract negotiations,

grievance processes, and lawsuits not only could secure concrete benefits

for injured individuals but also would build participatory spirit and the

organizational scaffolding for grassroots movement. Martinez articulated

this strategic vision with clarity when we interviewed her: I think tha t's

one of the main things that you learn to begin w ith: that you have a

rii t

to be active, you have the right to file an NLRB charge, you have the

right to do [this]. . . . Once you learn your rights, you start teaching

other people their rights. And then, you start enforcing your rights. And

people see the enforcement of rights, and not being afraid to stand up to

the [company] . . . then you start getting solid supporters. '' Little by

little, this theory in the flesh went, workers who began to understand that

they had legal rights would start standing up for themselves. Then they

would assist other workers in doing likewise, both as individuals and even-

tually as part of a burgeoning , solidaristic, responsible, rank-and-file force.

So union organizers planned workshops where they coached injured work-


14/25

8 I Apos tolidis

ers about their contractual right to file grievances when the company

unfairly disciplined them in attempts to harass them into quitting and

where they urged workers to educate their coworkers about these op-

portunities on a one-to-one basis. When a twenty-two-year-old slaughter

worker lost most of

his

arm in a giant mechanical scissors machine, union

officers worked to ensure an investigation of the incident by the state

Bureau of Labor and Industries, which ended up fining the company for

negligence in m aintaining the m achine's safety buttons. lust as importan t,

however, they used the hearings as an opportunity to build rank-and-file

leadership by convincing the man's coworkers to have the courage to

testify about the incident. Most spectacularly, the union organized and

won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the company, which went all the

way to the U.S. Supreme Court, for not paying workers for the time

needed to don and

doff

their elaborate protective gear.*^ Again, the

union approached this legal initiative as the basis for increasing workers'

active involvement in the union by exhorting as many workers

s

possible

to sign up as plaintiffs. Finally, when the workers' collective bargaining

agreement with Tyson came up for renegotiation in 2004, the union

carried out a fiiU-scale democratic contract campaign that involved mem-

bers'

deliberation over contract goals and the election of a bargaining

committee from the rank and file.

On their face, many of these activities seem to have recapitulated the

logic

of r ss ntim nt v n

as they secured immediate gains for the workers.

The workers were learning, aftier all, to respond to harm by seeking com-

pensation for themselves and punishment for the company

in

the aftermath

of injuries. The experiences of suffering and being vulnerable to injuries

composed much of the basis for these collective actions, and the approach

to state power uniformly presupposed the role of

the

state as an impartial

source of retributive and compensatory justice rather than querying this

assumption. True, the organizers ofiien spoke in bold terms about the

need for workers to insist that the company slow down the chain (the

mechanical apparatus that transports cattle parts through the factory to

be worked on). Yet the union was never able to coordinate a realistic

strategy for mobilizing workers behind such radical proposals, which

would have struck at the very heart of management prerogatives regarding

control of the labor process.

Indeed, the dynamic of self-destruction that Brown associates with the

politics of ressentiment seemed to come dramatically to fruition as the


15/25

5 I G N S Spring 2 8 I 559

by a vote of its own members in an NLRB-administrated decertification

election in early 2005. The more deeply entangled the union became in

legal-administrative processesin collective bargaining negotiations, in

NLRB elections, in government investigadons, and in lawsuitsthe more

tightly the noose closed around the union's neck. Instead of expanding

the cadre of leaders and mustering growing support for more visionary

goals, the activists increasingly found themselves on the defensive, fighting

to minimize their losses and eventually losing the batde to keep the union

itself alive. If Brown's theory is valid, then the overall trajectory of the

union's political project likely also contributed vitally to the movement's

downfall. As the activists' desires came to focus more on legally based

rights, and as unionists became skilled in the disciplines and routines of

legal-administrative action. Brown would suggest, the overarching rela-

tions of class domination became less accessible to critique and less capable

of motivating oppositional politics. In Zerilii's terms, in turn, the more

deeply enmeshed the union's activism became in normative, legalist pro-

cesses, the less possible it was for the activists to cultivate their own prac-

tices of political freedom that were no t governed by preformed, insti-

tutionally sanctioned routines of political engagement. Likewise, the

workers' battles for legal rights perhaps ultimately proved flitile because

they lost their connection to the political relations that had animated the

mobilization of the wildcat strike outside the boundaries of the law.

At the same time, the union's demise was neither so steady nor so

uniform as this interpretation would have it. Even as the informal rank-

and-file network and popular uprising became an official union organi-

zation, and even into its waning months, the union pressed forward with

truly novel experiments that stretched the boundaries of what official

union business normally means in the U nited States. Local 556 's president,

Melquiadez Pereyra, traveled to Japan, which ranks as the third most

important country for Tyson's international sales (behind Mexico and

Canada; Tyson 2007, 2) and where Tyson has concentrated over one-

third of its international pork

s les

(Tyson 20 07 ,1 2 ), to forge transnation-

al alliances. The union continued to nourish

comm unity nonprofit aimed

at publicizing safe work/safe food connections in meatpacking. And in

an even more strategically innovative attempt to bridge the producer/

consumer divide, the local proposed unprecedented contract language

recognizing workers' responsibilities to look after consumers' rights.

When we probe beneath the unfolding of events on this general level,


16/25

56 I Apostolidis

interviews provide a vivid sense of how elements of radically democratic

style and ethos germinated in the context of the workers' juridically ori-

ented initiatives. They bring into view, that is, not only those relatively

noninstitutionalized elements that Brown and Zerilli would deem of

greatest import but also the relatively m ore institutionalized activities that,

for both theorists, portend the asphyxiation of counterhegemony. As it

turns out, even in the midst of hotly contested and in some waysself

defeating legalist plays of power, imm igrant workers developed new prac-

tices of freedom that were neither straitjacketed by the politics of

ressen

timent nor bound to reproduce statically the inherited patriarchal

conventions of political relations. Instead, as the workers' comments sug-

gest, these practices pointed toward the transformation of capitalist re-

lations of production while also challenging related structures of racial

and gender subordination.

Teresa Moreno is a processing worker at Tyson and was a stalwart

activist in the movement from its earliest

days.

Like many ofher coworkers,

she had suffered a long list of musculoskeletal d isorders, which run ram-

pant among meatpackers, due to the combined pressures of overwork at

high speeds, the company's understaffing of her workstation, and repet-

itive motion (Human Rights Watch 2005). And like many others, M oreno

endured shocking mistreatment when she was assigned to light duty,

temporary jobs that are supposed to give injured workers time to heal

but in practice give the company a pretext for harassing workers into

quitting or going back to work while still hurt and in this way discourage

other workers from reporting injuries and seeking treatment (Apostolidis

and Brenner 2005). Surely it would have been understandable, given these

torments, had Moreno adopted the posture of the wounded subject, in

Brown's terms, in her struggles against the company. Yet her vision of

the character of the union introduces other themes that do not fit with

the schema of

ressentimenP

If we don 't all unite, the company is going to crush us. Because the

union is one. You have to be united inwith all the problems there

are. It might be that you have to sign this [a medical referral form

for a second opinion , typically opposed by the company], and you 're

seeing that you need support. Because if there isn't support from

the people themselves, where is the union.> They think that because

Maria [Martinez] is the [secretary-]treasurer of the union , they think


17/25

S I G N S S prin g 2 8 I S61

the things they should do. And that's not right. You always have to

do your part if you want things to turn out right. It's like a home.

I could come to my home and just stay there sitting around all the

time, like I have nothing to do. Let's say my children are there. If

I set the example of standing up to do something, they've all got

to get up to help. If I don' t do anything, then they're all just sitting

there. But you have to start, too, to do things.^

Rather than dwelling on her own injured condition, fixating upon a per-

petrator of harm, and seeking paternalistic protection and retribution,

Moreno focuses squarely on the need for workers to exert agency both

as individuals and in solidarity with one another to reshape their work

environment. The element of responding to domination in a defensive

manner is undeniably present, of course. Moreno is telling a story abou t

what it takes for workers not to back down when the company tries to

stymie their efforts to acquire appropriate medical treatment for injuries

the company causes in the first place. Her warning that the company will

crush the workers if they fail to stand together evokes a sense of how

palpable the power of authority feels in a mundane encounter like this as

well as the visceral kind of courage it takes to insist on one's rights in

such a situation. So, likewise, does her recollection at another point in

our conversation of withstanding the company doctor's explosion when

she asked to be referred to a physician of her own choice.* Yet Moreno

does not respond to these situations by envisioning an identity for herself

and her coworkers that would define them by their injured and dominated

status, or that yearns for vengeance, as we would anticipate based on

Brown's critique. Instead, she draws the strength from these concrete,

affect-laden experiences to incite among her fellow workers in the rank

and file a belief that they can act effectively and constructively on their

ownbehalf both as individuals and in solidarity with one another.

In turn, as Zerilli helps us see, Moreno engages in resymbolization

when she refigures the very notion of what a union is, offering an alter-

native conception of union that is the rank and file itself in its activity

of mobilization for change. Contrary to Zerillian expectations, however,

this articulation of practices of political freedom has emerged in the con-

text of the union's legalist struggles without being determined by the

institutional strictures of this legal-administrative realm. In this domain.


18/25

56 I Apos tolidis

as trends in labor jurisprudence since the 1950s have stressed, unions are

more commonly understoodasorganizations distinct from their members:

representing them, offering services to them as clients, and having par-

ticular interests that may lead them to violate their own members' rights

(Schiller 1999), Moreno's union, however, operates quite differently, as

its slogan "jNosotrossomos la uni n\[ eare the union ]" declares. And

at least partly through the union's activation of an ethos and a concrete

agenda of rank-and-file democratic leadership to enforce workers' rights,

her comm on sense ends up supporting a robust conception of freedom,

Maria Chavez, another key activist in the movement, also experienced

acute pressures from the company to accept inadequate treatment for

work-related health problems; she, too, no t only demanded that her rights

be observed but also turned these conflicts into opportunities to join

Moreno in cultivating the union's capacious notion of rank-and-file de-

mocracy. Having contracted an infection in her hands from using the

company's wet, dirty gloves, she asked repeatedly to be sent to the infir-

mary, but her supervisor always refused to give her the referral. When she

finally disobeyed him and went anyway, company representatives tried to

humiliate her and blamed her for bringing the infection on

herself

"They

asked , , , if

had had abortions , , , and later they asked me how many

times a day I washed my private parts , , , and what kind of

soap

I used

when I bathed or when I washed my private parts,"' In effect, these

officials accused Chavez of maintaining an unsanitary and promiscuous

lifestyle, trying to intimidate her into shutting up and going back to work,

Chavez could have responded to this browbeating simply by stressing

the need for workers to seek protection, compensation, and revenge for

the grievous wounds inflicted on them, physical and emotional alike (as

Chavez notes), through the coordinated intervention of a paternalistic

union and an ostensibly impartial state labor relations apparatus. She did

in fact pursue this route to an extent, becoming the lead plaintiff in a

second wage and hour lawsuit that was still working its way through the

courts a year after the initial suit had been decided in the workers' favor.

In addition, however, she took matters into her own hands, just as she

had done by taking herself to the infirmary in defiance of her supervisor

and just as the workers collectively had donein part through her lead-

ership^when they walked off the job in 1999, She went to see a better

doctor whom she had chosen, and then she encouraged her coworkers

to take similar steps for themselves and in solidarity with one another,


19/25

S I G N S S pring 2 8 I S63

taking advantage of their contractual right to be treated with respect and

dignity, language the union had secured as a result of the strike. She even

did so in public forums with workers and community supporters. Refusing

to bow to the shame the company had tried to induce and refraining from

constructing an identity for herself and others as victims of abuse, Chavez

instead used these painful events to stretch die boundaries of what the

union meant .

During our conversation, Chavez repeatedly invoked a conception of

justice that she seemed to have forged in the context of the strike and

then elaborated and deepened through her opposit ional engagements with

audiority on more everyday, micrological levels to ensure that her rights

were honored. Here is how Chavez recounts her decision to join the

wildca t strike and to urge her fellow wo rkers to do likewise: I felt the

obligation to invite them to go o ut [of the factory ]. . . . W hen w e all

got together with Maria [Martinez], and looked at everything, we saw

that there were lots of things to d o. Th at was wh en we m ade the decision,

and I felt that I had decided: 'If they fire me or whatever happens, I 'm

committed, whatever it may be. But I want to see justi e in this place .' *

These remarks echo Moreno's conception of the workers ' organization

as a mutua list, collectively respon sible, and active enterprise. B eyond this,

as Zerilli helps us see, they resignify the capitalist (and racist and patri-

archal) noti on of justice favored by the Team sters' old guard , the com pany,

and the law: whereas this inherited conception of justice was equated

simply with the procedural outcome of negotiations among these eli tes,

for Chavez i t comes to include the workers 'and immigrant women's

autonomous, collective action. Of course, Zerilli would also lead us to

wo nde r h ow visionary the aspiration to fi-eedom animating Cha vez's yearn-

ing for justice was once the relation between the union's later efforts to

promote workers' rights and these earlier practices of freedom, which

evolved before and during the wildcat strike, became attenuated. But Cha-

vez's narrative of standing up for her rights to medical care and helping to

refortify rank-and-file enthusiasm through these experiences suggests that

her ability to envision a more democratic workplace and a union coter-

minous with the rank and file did not simply hinge on connecting that

battle for rights to prior initiatives to forge relatively noninstitutionalized,

extralegal spaces of struggle. It also grew out of those very efforts to reap

material consequences from legally codified rights, in a more immediate

sense.


20/25

56 I Apos tolidis

workers' cause, and the feminine virtue of self-sacrifice for others that this

posture entails in her case, introduces another politically significant aspect

of her narrative that concerns gender identity and its relation to working-

class mobilization. More specifically, and in contrast to Moreno's story,

the gendered common sense with which Chavez narrates her struggles

for workers' rights is quite consistent with maintaining patriarchy in the

family. As we have seen, Moreno's ethic of shared, active responsibility

for running a home both infiises and is fed by her ethos of rank-and-file

unionism: in the family and the union alike, a distinctive mood of busy

cooperation prevails, a sensibility of joint attentivcncss to concrete, com-

mon concerns. Chavez, by comparison, embraces much more fervently a

conventional notion of motherhood premised on self-renunciation and

suffering for o thers. She proud ly tells us tha t her tw o sons have c om pleted

their educ ation and go tten go od jo bs , saying: Th e way they are living

now , I thin k it's the rew ard for all tha t we suffered before. . . . It's w or th

it in a certain way to sacrifice yourself

little bit. . . . Th ey say 'you have

to suffer a lot to deserve a lot. ' And I would really say that, with God's

help, I have achieved in my life what I wantedthat what happened to

me did n' t happen to my ch ildr en . Chavez further underscores her com -

m itm en t to this altruistic feminine nor m wh en she praises her sister

M aria M arti ne z as a m od el of self-sacrificial d ev otio n to oth ers : It do es n' t

matter to her whether she sleeps or doesn't sleep, whether she cats or

do esn ' t eat. . . . I t 's not imp ortan t to her; trying to defend th e workers,

she's ready at any time. '^

Brown and Zerilli alike provide abundant grounds for critically eval-

ua ting th e ultimate political imp lications of this self-renou ncing feminine

ideal, crucial though it was to the activation of the workers at Tyson, not

only in staging th e wildcat strike bu t also in carrying o ut the u nio n's later,

more legally oriented endeavors. For one thing, the ideal fosters the dis-

position of

ressentim ent

that Brown questions by displacing women's vital

energies to reshape the world around them onto ascetic practices ofself

denial, un der take n t o shore up an identity premised on suffering as a

moral good but still resentful of the agents of harm. In addition, this

notion of feminine virtue deters women's development of their own po-

litically significant relationships, in the ways proposed by Zerilli, insofar

as it positions women as mere auxiliaries to the world-making activities

of men. Brown and Zerilli further lead us to anticipate that the union's

increasing concentration on juridically based forms of class activism would


21/25


have had a mutually complementary relation with these concessions to

patriarchy. For example, as women who are focused on promoting their

children's upward class mobility and are willing to embrace suffering and

self-denial to make it possible, these workers would likely prioritize aug-

menting wages through contract adjustments over inaugurating new prac-

tices of political fi-eedom in the workplace and the surrounding community,

practices crafting a m ore hu m ane w ork environm ent and a m ore dem ocratic

local culture. Yet, as we have seen, the activists did not Umit themselves to

the former, more domesticated forms of struggle. This indicates the crucial

role that the organized movement played, as Gramsci's theory suggests, in

energizing the mo st politically prom ising elements of the wo rkers' c om m on

sense despite its inevitable complexity and self-contradictory texture. And

since at least in Moreno's case a subtle questioning of patriarchy in the

family ap peared to em erge in th e co ntex t of her unio n activism, it is possible

that this refashioning of common sense in the environment of collective

struggle also affected the gendcr-rclated aspects of hegemony.

Our interview with Rosario Robles, a slaughter worker and another

key union activist , provides one more example of how, in the common

sense of these immigrant workers, dispositions reinforcing patriarchal-

capitalist power relations could coexist in unresolved tension with more

politically inaugurative currents of thought and practice. Robles had

helped motivate other workers to walk off the job when the wildcat strike

broke out. When we spoke to her three years later, she was particularly

concerned that the workers use the power of their union to preserve their

health benefits in the face of the company's looming plans to roll them

back. She also reiter ated the t he m e o f m atern al self-sacrifice as she recalled

the strain on her family tha t un ion involvem ent had created: So m etim es

I end up running around with my children, because I come home and

take them right out and carry them running around to all the meetings,

to the strike, and everywhere else; they've gone along with me. And it 's

a great sacrifice som etim es. Rob les add ed tha t the po int of taking on all

these com mitm ents was so that in a l i tde while, ou r children d o n 't arrive

at the same level where we are now; because [otherwise] soon they too

will be suffering the same things we are now.' ^

Patient, self-renouncing altruism, however, is not the only principle

structuring the poli t ical relations among workers in Robles 's conception.

When Robles speaks of literally carrying her children with her into the

workers' space of politically creative practical activityespecially since her


22/25

66 I Apos tolidis

husband, too, always at tended union events and supported the movement

even though he did not work at Tysonshe offers us a vision of struggle

that is the collective project of the family as a whole instead of only

involving self-sacrifice by the mother for the sake ofher children. Indeed,

the presence of children at events was a consistent feature of the style of

Local 556's unionism. This bespoke not just that the women faced the

notorious burden of the triple shift (domestic work, wage labor, and

political activism), and not only that they were making sacrifices for the

children , bu t also that p art of their etho s of activism was to involve children

within the struggle as both present and fiature agents. In other words,

the inclusive, part icipatory meetings through which the union imple-

mented its democratic approach to waging legal and administrative strug-

gles generated a practical reformulation of family life: children and hus-

bands,

instead of being (only) the recipients of women's self-renouncing

care,

now became (also) wom en's comrades in a joint struggle. This re-

fiinctioning of th e family did n o t rise to th e level of explicit resign ification,

and Zerilli rightly would lead us to anticipate that the absence of such

resymbolization likely inhibited the fiirther transformation of gender re-

lations in these women's lives. Nonetheless, the familial ethos of Local

55 6 also sugge sts a possibility Zerilli dow nplays: th at relatively unrefiective

mutations on the practical terrain of everyday life might eventually insti-

gate adjustments in consciousness and rep resen tation. T he stirrings of such

innovation on the symbolic level can be detected, in fact, in a comment

made by Martinez. Counterbalancing the sentiments both Chavez and

Robles expressed, that they never wanted their children to experience the

hardships they had borne, Martinez stressed how vital it was for the youn-

ger generation to und erstand the strugg le not just the batde against

Tyson bu t the fiiU range of trials faced by imm igrant w orkers and ho w

it was the union's task to foster that cultural understanding even as it

pursued the practical recognition of specific rights.'*

Conclusion

While in some respects the practices of freedom of Local 556's women

activists can be criticized for lacking sufficient articulation in a symbolic

register , the opposite problem was more common: usually, their counter-

hegemonic initiatives were realized more in terms of questioning norma-

tive subjectivities and having public conversations than through sustained


23/25


of jNosotrossomos

la u nionV

yielded various rank-and-file m obilizations

and ventures to bridge the producer/consumer divide, for instance, i t did

not produce concerted efforts to modify the company's authoritarian pre-

rogatives over the organization of production. Also, while the workers '

expansive reconce ptualization of their rights initially led them to transgress

and question the law, ultimately this did not lead them to devise new

strategies interrogating more aggressively the state's pretense to impar-

tiality (e.g., in mediating class relations). Finally, despite the symbiosis

between Moreno's image of the mutualist home and the ethos of familial

striving that emerged in the union hall, for most women the gendered

power balance in everyday domestic life seemed to change very litde even

as the movement progressed. In meaningfiil ways, then, this story of im-

migrant worker uprising and struggle underscores the critical acumen in

both Brown's and Zerilii's accounts of freedom's calcification and self-con-

finement under the current hegemonic formation. Their theories continue

to offer insight into the very real peril that accompanies activists' entan-

glements with the normalizing and power-obfiiscating dynamics of law,

policy, and rights: the reinforcement of institutionalized h ege mo ny thr ou gh

the diversion of energies toward the reactive politics of wounded identity

and the short-circuiting of efforts to forge new politically significant relation-

ships.

Nonetheless, by closely examining the narratives of workers engaged

in juridically oriented endeavors, instead of discounting such material on

the assumption that these engagements uniformly reproduce domination,

it is possible to see how new beginnings of freedom can emerge from

within these struggles for concrete rights and benefits based in policy and

law. Precisely because the women of Local 556 who led the drive for safer

work, better treatment, and a democratic union invested themselves in

these institutionalized struggles, they gained access to an effective terrain

where their visions and affective sensibilities for radically reconstructing

class, racial, and gender relations could start to coalesce. This substantive

insight, in turn , confirms tha t critical feminist th eo ry stands t o gain a great

deal from inco rpora ting th e stories of subaltern gro up s involved in specific,

institutionally directed struggles into its methods for tracing the contours

and vulnerabilities of hegemonic power. After we listen to the narratives

of Moreno, Chavez, and Robles, the stories Brown and Zerilli tell us

about the intrepid mechanics of hegemony in the present era sound

slightly, but noticeably, different, and call for new and creative retellings.


24/25

68 I Apos tolidis

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