CHINESE FACTORIES
When Isabel Hilton first visited Chinese factories about thirty years ago, she found them inefficient and chaotic, immunized from the market by the 'peculiar rules of a state-controlled economy'.
Now, as China's economy is growing rapidly, her new factories are under greater pressure to achieve higher productivity. But what has happened to the workers who have helped create this economic miracle?
Laurie Taylor talks to Isabel Hilton, editor of openDemocracy and expert on China about her recent article 'Made in China: what became of the workers' paradise?' which looks at the lives of the people who make all the things we take for granted and shows how little we know about them.
ACTRESSES AND WHORES
In her new book Actresses and Whores , Kirsten Pullen examines the link between acting and prostitution by focusing on the lives of five women who worked as actresses, performers and writers from 17th to 19th centuries and contemporary escort girls.
Laurie Taylor is joined by Kirsten Pullen, Assistant Professor of English Studies at the University of Calgary and Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London to discuss how certain female performers in the past used their association with prostitution to their advantage and how prostitutes today link their work to performance as a means of protecting themselves.
Additional information:
Made in China: What became of the workers' paradise?
By Isabel Hilton
Page 13 of Granta 89: The Factory
Publisher: Granta Publications
ISBN: 090314175 2
openDemocracy
(on line magazine)
Kirsten Pullen
Assistant Professor of English Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada
Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0 521 83341 8
Professor Angela McRobbie
Professor of Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London
The Uses of Cultural Studies
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
ISBN: 1412908450
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