Uses of the Erotic and Drugs

I continued to be interested in Ulysse's presence in her research-- the ways she intersperses her research with narrative and descriptive language about her feelings and the world around her that are seemingly extraneous to the project. I found myself getting irritated at some points with her need to constantly remind us of her unique academic integrity, but I understand that she is working against a long, institutionalized tradition in anthropology of exploitative ethnocentrism. In "Counter Topographies," the authors quote a study of Mexican maquiladoras and explain that 'the trick [for the American manager] is to guarantee that she disappears from the thing that she makes.' ("Transnational (Counter) Topographies,"160) I found it interesting that, at least thus in the six chapters we have read, Ulysse chooses not to address the origin of the goods that the ICI's are selling. I wonder how they relate to these goods, where the goods come from, how they feel about the (most likely) women who made them. The women who made the goods they sell are completely absent from Ulysse's narrative and from the goods themselves. I also thought that Ulysse's book kind of dispels some of the notions that arise in "Transnational (Counter) Topographies" because if we replace maquiladora worker with ICI and the "thing she makes" with the selling the ICI's do, then here we have a study that works against this idea. The ICI's good is their buying and selling, and they frequently have personal relationships with the vendors they purchase wholesale from. They also have relationships with their customers, and they frequently care more about the community of ICI's than their own financial success, as evidenced by Ulysse's descriptions of ICI's helping each other out, selling things for less than they are worth, etc. Perhaps the thing I found most interesting in this week's reading was how the ICI's fit into the larger global neoliberal economic and political landscape, and how they are situated in regards to the war on drugs. The heart of the idea of drug trafficking being related to higglering and ICI's was, for me, found when Ulysse paraphrases Alex Dupuy with "the expanding drug trafficking and money laundering booming in the region are consequences of neoliberal globalization policies that supplant local economies, undermine local production, and increase dependence on international institutions and migration as the region exports more of its labor force." (209-210) Clearly, the ICI's can be described in similar language, that ICI's turn to their trade in large part because of their failure to be able to subsist in contemporary economies in more traditional sectors. I also found it incredibly interesting when Uylsse writes that "in times of unrest, the government's first recourse is to manage street vending. The removal of vendors is viewed as central to securing downtown streets. In that sense, vendors' bodies become boundary markers that are used to demarcate safety." (171) I wonder what about the fact of individual people exchanging goods on the street is so threatening to states. I think it is much more deeply-rooted in raced and gendered ideologies than blaming it simply on lack of regulation and revenue would suggest. I think it has something to do with Audre Lorde's ideas about the power of the erotic, which Ulysse references, that so often informal vendors are women of color and that their raced and gendered bodies are threatening to the institutionalized capitalist system.