Building urban lives: female migrant workers emotional counter-topographies in China

ABSTRACT

This paper develops new ontological and epistemological terrain to advance critical understanding of migrants’ everyday lives in urban china. More specifically, we highlight the opportunities afforded by pluralist relational theoretical and comparative empirical interrogation of emotions across diverse work, domestic, family and leisure times/spaces both within and, beyond cities. To that end, we apply a counter-topographical approach to a kaleidoscope of imaginative, implosive, and mutual emotions as competences and resources that constitute past, present, and future lives of female building-workers. Concluding, we signpost fruitful avenues for ongoing migration research in China, as well as reflecting on broader opportunities and challenges when exploring the complex emotional lives of urbanites no matter where in the world studies are undertaken.

KEYWORDS:

• emotions
• migration
• building-workers
• gender
• counter-topographies
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors would like thank Wu Shuibao, Huang Xuebin and Liu Jielin for their invaluable help in negotiating and enabling access to building sites, and the anonymous reviewers for their help and guidance in strengthening our arguments. Mark would also like to thank Sun Yat-Sen University for funding this research alongside Chinese National Social Science Foundation support: 18XZW004 - Mobilities Theory and Practice in Contemporary Western Criticism 当代西方批评中的“移动性”理论与实践研究（西部项目).

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Qian’s (2022) paper focuses on Lefebvre’s work on everyday life, rather than other topics such as rhythmanalysis or the ‘right to the city’, the latter becoming a popular topic in interdisciplinary urban studies in the past decade. Moreover, while Qian touches on the writing of a handful of theorists who engage with urban materialities and social infrastructure this is limited to signposting, rather than offering detailed and sustained engagement with relational ontological opportunities enabled by study of the listed topics including, organisation of the city, and everyday practices, bodies, affects.

2. e.g. studies of gendered and migration include moral economies of being ‘a good mother’, ‘left-behind’ unmarried women, homemaking/domesticity, work-life balance, patronage networks/relationships, and eroticised/sexual subjectivities (e.g. Zhou 2020).

3. While the use of red-and-white bags has arguably diminished it is not unusual to see migrant workers carrying building tools, buckets, large suitcases, and backpacks on public transport.

4. For a full discussion of positionality, reflexivity and power relations that constitute our research project, see Jayne et al. (2024).