We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Glaring invisibility: dressing the body of the female cleaner.
- Authors
Naidu, Maheshvari
- Abstract
The paper explores how the uniform of a group of female cleaners appears to be more than an abstract object framed by the practical exegetics of work. The uniform is seen as acting as a material exercise of discretionary and disciplinary power of inscription, and as the paper shows, emerges as a mode by which the cleaners are homogenously objectified and plastically turned into 'subjects' (Foucault 1982). The paper shows too that while the single layered cleaners' uniform can be seen as disciplining the body and stripping down the complex multi-layers of their personality and attempting to naturalise their status as cleaners, the women's narratives reveal their attempts to destabilise this conscription, if only outside the spatial and organisational domain of the work space.
- Subjects
CLEANING personnel; SYMBOLIC aspects of clothing &; dress; WOMEN cleaning personnel; DRESS codes; UNIFORMS; JANITORS; ETHICS
- Publication
Anthropology Southern Africa (Anthropology Southern Africa), 2009, Vol 32, Issue 3/4, p128
- ISSN
0258-0144
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1080/23323256.2009.11499987