Covert resistance beyond #Metoo: mobile practices of marginalized migrant women to negotiate sexual harassment in the workplace

ABSTRACT

Our study gives voice to socially marginalized women from the Global South whose struggles with sexual harassment are largely invisible in the #Metoo movement. Employing an ethnographic approach, this study examines the digitized resistance of Chinese rural–urban migrant women (n = 41) against sexual harassment faced in their workplaces. We adopt the lens of intersectionality to reveal the nuanced impacts of mobile communication practices negotiated in the context of gender, class, and the organizational structure across informal and formal economies. We find contrasting pictures of bottom-up disruption in the informal labor market and top-down transformation occurring in the modern factory. Migrant women working in the unregulated market restructured the existing patriarchal culture by deploying mobiles to establish collaborative groups for job information sharing. This mobile-mediated sharing enabled the rise of self-employed entrepreneurship, thus avoiding male intermediation in their livelihoods and thereby reducing the chances of encountering harassment. However, these benefits were uneven, with digitally-challenged women missing out. In contrast, migrant women employed in a registered factory with established rules actively negotiated top-down transformation of patriarchal culture. Female managers, in newly gained leadership roles, exercised their professional authority to encourage female workers to re-shape the discursive gender power of mobile spaces shared with male workers. Women actively confronted sexually provocative behavior of men on chat groups. We argue that subtle and covert mobile practices, in addition to visible and direct ones, allow for the construction of digitized female resistance culture as part of broader societal change influenced by mobile communication. We conclude with comments on the complexity and dynamism of mobile-mediated gender transformation in the context of rapid socio-economic development in the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• #Metoo
• mobile technology
• sexual harassment
• marginalized female migrants
• China
• Global South

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Nanyang Technological University [grant number: M4081081].

Notes on contributors

Xin Pei

Xin Pei (PhD, Nanyang Technological University) is a research fellow in School of International Communications, University of Nottingham, Ningbo China. Her research focuses on mobile uses of socially marginalized women and the social consequences. Her research works have appeared in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, New Media & Society, and the Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society [email: [email protected]].

Arul Chib

Arul Chib (PhD, University of Southern California) is Associate Professor and Department Lead, Strategic Communications and Digital Marketing, at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. He investigates the impact of mobile phones in healthcare (mHealth) and in transnational migration issues, focusing on intersects of marginalization [email: [email protected]].

Rich Ling

Rich Ling (PhD, University of Colorado) is the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. His work has focused his work on the social consequences of mobile communication. Ling has been the Pohs Visiting Professor of Communication Studies (2005) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he has an adjunct position [email: [email protected]].