Healthy, Skilled, Disciplined - Modernizing Changes and the Sense of Self in the Embodied Experiences of a Female Factory Worker
Keywords:
factory, working class, technology, rationalization, health care, body, upward mobilityAbstract
lt follows from Pierre Bourdieu's (1977) theory of habitus that an individual can be a full agent if the conditions and environment in which she grow up remain the same. This means that the changes inherent in 20th century modernization have posed a potential threat to individuals' sense of self and agency. ln this article, I discuss the experiences of one female factory worker in modernizing Finland of mid-20th century. The informant is my own grandmother born in 1927, who began working in an iron works at an carly age. I analyze her experiences of the everyday life, the physical factory work and domestic work from an embodied perspective, reading them as embodied memories of things that used to feel different, of events that left a mark on her and ff conflicting situations, where other people - or the new order of rationalized technology - tried to take control of her. I seek to include two perspectives on the body and social power into my analysis of my grandmother's experiences: the Foucauldian view of power/ knowledge and discipline (2005 [1977]) and the possibilities of individual agency when it comes to identification and self definition.
