Inequality in Mobility: The Pursuit of Conjugal Intimacy for China’s Rural Migrant Women in Industrial Shenzhen

ABSTRACT

Existing studies of dagongmei (China’s rural migrant woman workers) tend to situate them in the space of industrial production and, to a lesser extent, the site of everyday life. But we still do not know how their gender and mobility impact on their capacity to achieve personal intimacy; nor is it clear what social, economic and cultural forces may impede their search for it. This paper explores these questions by drawing on longitudinal ethnographic interactions with migrant women in Shenzhen who work for Foxconn – the world’s biggest multi-national electronics manufacturer. Focusing on the stories of three women, this discussion shifts the analysis of the body and labour from the public to the private sphere, thereby attempting to shed light on the link between intimacy, emotion and inequality in China’s capitalist industrial regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• rural migrants
• China
• gender
• intimacy
• inequality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She is best known for her work on the cultural politics of inequality and rural to urban migration in China. Her other research areas include diasporic Chinese media, Chinese media and cultural studies, and soft power and public diplomacy. She has written three single-authored monographs: Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination (2002), Maid in China: Media, Morality and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009), and Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (2014).

ORCID

Wanning Sun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8687-3739

Notes

1. For a recent discussion of the diversity within this group, the politics of the naming of nongmingong, the importance of hukou in understanding their socioeconomic status, and the similarities and differences between this group and laid-off state factory workers and the urban poor, see Sun (2014).

2. For research on the working conditions of Foxconn workers, see Pun et al. (2016); Chan and Selden (2017); and Qiu (2016).

3. Only the initials of the first names in pinyin are used here, to ensure the anonymity of interviewees.

4. All quotes are from my field notes or audio recordings, unless otherwise indicated.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP150103544].