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The January 10th, 2010 earthquake decimated the Haitian capital of Port-Au-Prince as well as large swaths of the countryside. What was striking was that among the first sectors of the country to resume normal activities, even as vital services remained offline and casualties reached horrific levels, were the Free Trade Zones (FTZs), also called Industrial Parks or Export Processing Zones, outside of Port-Au-Prince as well as along the Haitian-Dominican border. My preliminary inquiries—which involved examining accounts of the situation in post-earthquake Haiti in American newspapers—revealed that a great deal of the coverage was focused on rebuilding economically, with a particular emphasis on the importance of apparel factories in FTZs in this process. This cursory reading prompted me to ask two simple questions, what is the significance of FTZs in Haiti and what is the role of the representations of political economy in shaping our perceptions of these spaces? Answering these questions however, is not so simple—being trained as a Sociologist, my disciplinary instincts pushed me towards a Marxist analysis of FTZs. I looked at them as spaces of exploitation established by the forces of global capital. It is Marx (2003:245) who says, “Constant capital, the means of production, considered from the standpoint of the creation of surplus-value, only exists to absorb labor, and with every drop of labor a proportional quantity of surplus-labor.... The prolongation of the working-day beyond the natural day... quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.” To be sure there is a temptation to theorize FTZs as the byproduct of Capital’s need, née Capital’s thirst, for a cheap and easily exploitable source of labor. This would point to the problem of quenching Capital’s thirst and posit something like the following: Given that free trade agreements allow for goods to be produced in Haiti with minimal overhead, particularly because of the abysmal working conditions, low wages, and a near complete lack of substantive protections for labor, it was in the interests of Capital (especially because corporations have no allegiance to the people of the Haiti, only to their shareholders) to ignore all other problems associated with the damage caused by the earthquake and focus on rebuilding the socalled ‘productive’ center of the economy. While this argument is not without merit, I began to believe as I continued to trace the transnational connections through an analysis of various texts ranging from media coverage to documents produced by States and entities such as the World Bank and IMF, that it was incomplete. Most problematic is that not only does it fail to explain the gendered division of labor in factories inside FTZs, is it not particularly sensitive to the specificities of history and politics within Haiti. Without revision, it would be guilty of the ‘economic reductionist’ argument, as outlined by Mouffe (1981), which suggests that this variant Marxism always refer back to the economic (as the only vital principle of social organization) in the last instance. Feminists, among others, have called for attention to be paid to other modes of social organization such as gender. Lisa Brush (2003:46) argues that, “Gender is a principle of social organization,” that structures everything from domestic practices within the home to complex institutions The Cracks in the Walls: Earthquakes, Patriarchy, and Transnational Capital in Haitian Free Trade Zones