Convents without nuns: Historical analysis of women workers in a textile factory

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the historical unveiling of a certain set of dispositives and discourses that befell Brazilian textile factory working women who came to reside in the convents inaugurated in the last decades of the 19th century by a textile company located in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. By appropriating methodological contributions such as historical document analysis, we present a historically-situated analysis of the discourses and truth effects organized by the company that influenced the lives of these women, along with an articulation of gender issues and the dynamics of power relations. An analytical scheme following the writings of Michel Foucault is proposed, in order to discuss the statements and their truth effects in the factory worker’s lives, as well as to create an analytical lens through which the discussion of gender issues can take place. Our findings include the demonstration of how gender can be seen beyond a binary, sexist and biological vision, that is, close to a historical creation of power relations that still involves the female sexed body. Lastly, we also demonstrated how the gendered idea of a female factory worker is strongly built via discourse and performed routinely by the enforced compliance to gendered norms that constrain and constitute a female worker’s subjectivity.

Keywords

• power relations
• Foucault
• history
• gender
• organizational studies