LAUSR

Chakravarti offers a thought-provoking analysis of the intersection of three discourses, namely: gender, class, and religion and their contested powerhierarchies 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 socialismof the 1950s toAnwar Sadat’s infitah (opening) to international trade, development, and privatization in the 1970s, and finally to Hosni Mubarak’s neoliberalist policies. Sociocultural proscriptions against mixedgender interactionswere navigatedwithwomen-only factories underNasser. 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),