Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pham, Minh-Ha T.

Titel

“How to Make a Mask”: Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains

Ist Teil von

• Feminist studies, 2020-06, Vol.46 (2), p.316-326

Ort / Verlag

College Park: Feminist Studies, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• At-home mask-making in the context of coviD-19 is being interpreted as a gendered form of civic participation based on traditionally feminine skills of sewing and crafting as well as moral, spiritual, and cultural uplift. Like her predecessor, Rosie the Riveter, Rosie the Seamstress is understood as the feminine embodiment of the American can-do spirit. She's a tough but feminine, white, middle-class woman who, when her country needs her, dutifully rolls up her sleeves and gets down to work-not by making airplanes and bombs but by sewing face masks. In national and local newspapers, this latest icon of feminist empowerment and national solidarity can be seen in the myriad photos of grandmothers, moms, sisters, neighbors, little girls, and social media groups sitting at sewing machines making face masks. With few exceptions, they're all white, feminine-presenting, and middle-class. "Rosie the Seamstress" is uplifting, but it's also a narrative that pushes women of color, low-income women, and immigrant women to the margins of the US cultural and social imaginary, thus threatening to erase them from the historical memory of coviD-19 (and of World War II). Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of garment workers, the other group of mostly women and girls who are making face masks.