Eating the rice bowl of youth: xiaojies’ everyday self-practices as doing citizenship from the margins

Abstract

The Chinese term ‘eating the rice bowl of youth’ means doing jobs that emphasize youth, body, appearance, and gender instead of solid knowledge. For xiaojies who bear stigma both as female rural-to-urban migrants and as prostitutes, how to eat it becomes not only a matter concerning survival in the Pearl River Delta’s complicated sex industry but also a discursive means of self-transformation and doing citizenship. I argue that such self-practices in the everyday are the main site for them to gain, not the entitlement and rights associated with specific citizenship statuses and policies, but a positive experience that may generate symbolic emotional significance in the process. It leads us to reconceptualize citizenship as multilayered, dynamic, desire-driven and action-oriented boundary-crossing practices.

Keywords:

• Female sex workers
• migration
• citizenship
• desire
• self-practices
• south China

Notes

1. According to the latest survey ‘2015 White Papers of Rural Development in Guangdong: Population Movement and Rural Villages in Guangdong’ done by Lingnan (University) College, Sun Yat-sen University. Available at https://www.lingnan.sysu.edu.cn/Item/10754.aspx [accessed 17 October 2016].