Coffee 'Tied With a Pink Ribbon': Transgender Phenomena and Transnational Feminisms in Twenty-First Century Ethical Consumer Movements.

This essay engages the ways femininity has evolved through transnational economic relationships in the specialty coffee industry. What I call "fair trade femininities" are reproduced through specific business practices and media representations prompted by transnational feminisms and ethical consumer movements in the Americas. Here, I analyze Café Femenino, a successful brand of women's organic, Fair Trade coffee first harvested in Peru in 2004. The organization's women-only business model provides a unique window into the transnational production of American femininities, marking the brand as something that disrupts the category of "woman" by enacting and depending upon multiple femininities from women who are usually portrayed by American media in monolithic terms. Café Femenino's English-language website--targeting North American ethical consumer movements--describes its Latin American women coffee farmers as uniformly experiencing poverty, violence, motherhood, and abandonment by husbands. The women farmers appear both worthy of support and interchangeable. Such representations of women from the global south have been common in specialty marketing since WWII, and represent an imperial imaginary of formerly colonized femininity. Transnational feminists have rebuked global north feminists for engaging in "rescue" tactics of development aimed at women from the global south, arguing the activism does more for global north feminists' conceptions of themselves as women than it does for transforming conditions of global inequality. However, the economic framework of Café Femenino provides unusual circumstances that intervene in a different area of gender justice: that of recognizing the constructedness of gender. Café Femenino's gender-segregated business arrangements engender multiple femininities, establishing powerful roles for women at every stage of the coffee's transnational production. Every bag of green coffee beans is gendered, tied with a pink ribbon to mark its femininity. North American roasters and retailers additionally give a portion of proceeds to a women's shelter or halfway house in their local community. This practice, what coffee owner Joanne Sargant calls her "favorite, the paying it forward aspect," was a stipulation designed by the Café Femenino farmers. Unlike traditional Fair Trade coffee contracts, which send money from ethical consumers to "worthy" farmers in developing countries, the women of Café Femenino earn income from their coffee sales and cause marginalized North American women to benefit from their coffee. The pay-it-forward element to Café Femenino flips the gendered rescue narrative, making it difficult to cast indigenous Peruvian women farmers in their "normative" gender roles as in need of rescue. The normative genders of the farmers expand along the specialty coffee chain, while ethical consumers have their gendered roles as "rescuers of women from the global south" re-written. Café Femenino's economic arrangement provides the framework from which I engage a feminist analysis of gender representations circulated via news, documentaries, and advertising about Café Femenino. This reading practice reveals the repetition of gender formation in various Café Femenino media. The category "women" fractures into multiple "fair trade femininities" in this political economy precisely because the kinds of women involved in Café Femenino appear to be the same in every kind of media representing them. I read Café Femenino's normative representations of femininity in layers, in which the very repetition of characters--the farmers, importer, roasters, consumers, and pay-it-forward recipients-- reveals the processes by which we recognize these types of women as normalized. Yet the repeated stories contain evidence that the many women of Café Femenino contradict typical western binary gender norms and defy expected north-south flows of aid. I argue that Café Femenino's gender-segregated business model can be understood as functioning through and as transgender phenomena because it draws attention to the ways gender is far more complex than the dominant Eurocentric sex/gender binary. Thus, Café Femenino has the unexpected effect of disrupting binary gender and global north-south power relations through its transnational production of fair trade femininities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]