Blurring life and work: the predicament of young middle-class women in Shanghai

ABSTRACT

The article examines the positioning of young middle-class women in the dispositif of creativity in China. Based on empirical fieldwork, it argues that the call to be creative – as a form of governmentality – directs the middle-class youth to work and live with limited social protections. The discourse of creativity marks a tendency whereby young middle-class women are subject to an increasingly flexible, informal, and precarious condition. Instead of being taken merely as victims of such a ‘creativity dispositif’, the young middle-class women in this research reject the stable jobs within the system and prioritize the value of flexibility promoted by the cultural and creative industries. Besides, they embrace the self-enterprising culture as a new norm and engage themselves actively in multiple ways of capitalizing their skills, lived experience, and social relations. Such activities eventually dissolve the boundaries between life and work, both formally and informally. Thus, under the joint forces of state and market, the discourse of creativity operates as a self-motivating mechanism that facilitates these women to embrace flexibility and entrepreneurship in acts of self-actualization. Consequentially, all pain and risks emerging from the tiring and unbearable working life are perceived as personal problems to be dealt with by the individuals alone. These young middle-class women seek recourse in the market and their families to solve their problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Young middle-class women
• creative work
• governmentality
• flexibility
• Shanghai
• urban China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The concept stresses quantitative and qualitative aspects of labor transformations, referring to the implementation of the rising number of the low-paid female workforce in the low-end service industries and the progressive insertion of educated professional women into relatively high-end service industries on a continuum of global production. See Morini, 2007.

2 According to Li Chunling, since the initiation of higher education reform, the proportion of female students in the universities increased by 1 percent yearly from 1998 to 2012, and it reached to 50.48 percent exceeded that of male students in 2009. Meanwhile, the number of female postgraduates also exceeded that of male in 2010. Li also notes that in general female students’ academic performances were better than their male counterparts. See, Li 2016.

3 All the quotations from policy documents and interviews cited in this article are originally in Chinese and are translated by the author.

4 The work for this paper derives from the doctoral research I undertook at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, during 2016 and 2020, for which I received funding from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council PhD Fellowship Scheme (reference number PF15-18758). My gratitude to my supervisor Professor Chan Ching-kiu for his guidance over the years. My thanks to Diego Gullotta for his constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lili Lin

Lili Lin is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, with the dissertation entitled Blurring Boundaries: Life and Work of Young Middle-Class Women in post-2000s Urban China. Her research interests include gender and cultural studies, popular culture, and urban China.