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Abstract
Chinese television dramas over the past decades have seen the rise and decline of various narratives, but no other narratives speak to the emerging urban middle class's fear and anxiety more palpably than the stories of the maid. However, despite the growing popularity of the maid stories among urban viewers, most of these stories do not resonate with domestic workers themselves. How do we make sense of the growing popularity of the maid stories among urban viewers? And how do we account for the differentiated capacity to resonate and identify with the characters among viewers? These are important questions to consider if one is to understand the new cultural politics of power and social formations in post-Mao China. In this paper, I explore some of the crucial ways in which a controlling gaze is facilitated and naturalised by the visualisation of place and space in these dramas. Then, through both critical analyses and engaged ethnography, I demonstrate how two sets of controlling gaze—everyday and televisual—reinforce and justify each other. Finally, I advance the concept of “peripheral vision,” which, I show, denies the modernist “master” narrative of the city and, instead, empowers the subaltern figure with an epistemological position of “eye-witness” and anthropologist of the city.
Notes
1. See Zhu, Keane and Bai (Citation2008) for a comprehensive analysis of various themes in television dramas in China.
2. I give a similar account of the plot of the main television drama texts in Sun (Citation2008, Citation2009, chapter 2). While this paper is concerned with developing the concept of peripheral vision through a discussion of the subaltern spectatorship, the other two works analyse how the maid is constructed as a “threshold figure” in television representations.
3. There is at least one more way of translating the drama series. Lee (Citation2006), in her critical analysis of the series, calls the series “Nannies for Foreigners.”
4. http://ent.sina.com.cn/v/m/2007-03-23/15281490677.html (June 2006).
5. In a seminal article called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey (Citation1975) observes that classical Hollywood films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films, she argues, subject women to the controlling male gaze, presenting woman as image or spectacle and man as bearer of the look. Mulvey's argument remains relevant and useful today, despite the limitations—it has been critiqued as both simplistic and essentialist. I am deploying Mulvey's concept of gaze to pursue a number of different directions. I want to add to the category of gender other social markers such as social-economic inequality (class) and rural/urban divide (place) which are equally responsible for producing objectifying manner of looking.
6 Suzhi is a Chinese term for “quality.” It occupies a central place in neo-liberal discourse of governmentality in reformed China. There is not enough space to discuss suzhi at length here. Suffice to say that in several works on suzhi, the figure of the rural migrant and that of the urban, middle class are juxtaposed. These works argue that suzhi codes the difference between these two social groups, since it devalues migrant bodies and allows the “transfer of economic value from one body to another” (see Yan Citation2003, Citation2006).
7. I acknowledge the funding of Australian Research Council (2004–2007), which enabled me to conduct extensive ethnographic fieldwork in China.
8. Personal communication with Dr. Li Tianguo, senior research fellow of the Institute for Labour, Ministry of Labour and Social Security, China, February 2004.
9. Donald's (Citation1999, p. 74) discussion on the difference between narrative and cinema in this context draws on his reading of Georg Simmel, Ezra Pound, and of course Walter Benjamin.
10. I have developed the concept of the “intimate stranger” in Maid in China (Sun Citation2009).
11. The first apartment building I lived in was twenty storeys high, and the second apartment building I lived in was twenty-six storeys high.
12. Having said this, my conversations with some live-in maids also suggest that some domestics have developed individuated strategies of getting around this hurdle. One 19-year-old domestic worker from Henan succeeded in getting her employer hooked on television dramas, thus watching with her was one example, while 21-year-old domestic worker from Shanxi, an enthusiast for Korean television dramas, resorted to purchasing dramas on DVD and quietly watching them at night while everyone else was asleep.
13. This description of domestic workers' living and working condition comes from Chinese feminist scholar Meng Xianfan (see Meng quoted in Feng Citation2004, p. 27).
14. The use of surveillance camera was mentioned in public discussions about domestic work. See, for instance, a television program entitled Why is it so Hard to Find a Good Baomu (Tian Ya Gong Ci Shi ) (2006).
15. Although somewhat tangential, readers may be interested to know that an earlier work on television also invokes the metaphor of peripheral vision to up a conceptual frame for alternative non-Western spectatorships (see Sinclair, Jacka & Cunningham Citation1996). I am indebted to one of the reviewers for pointing this out to me.
16. This exchange took place on July 6, 2006, in the xiaoqu I lived in.
17. This exchange took place on July 1, 2006, in the xiaoqu I lived in.