Gendered Identity and Voice: Chinese Female Migrant Domestic Workers' Responses to Subordination (original) (raw)

Feminist composite narratives of Chinese women: the interrelation of work, family and community in forced labour situations

Community, Work & Family, 2016

This contribution builds on the work Lewis has engaged in around women's decisionmaking processes on work and care. Gender has been an important consideration across her work and this has been explored in familial and organizational settings. The personal is undoubtedly political and a feminist lens privileges this. Previous research (including Lewis) has marked a shift from work-life balance to work personal life integration. This implies agency and perhaps a particular kind of woman able to make choices. In contrast, this paper focuses on Chinese migrant women working in vulnerable situations. Drawing on data gathered from a forced labour project, we present some composite narratives from women as daughters, mothers and wives. These highlight the role of the core economy in decisions about migration for work. Inevitably work decisions are bound up with and situated in wider care and familial networks. These insights around emotional and practical labour are feminist concerns. We present the complex decisions made by women around precarious work, present and distant 'families' and care. We suggest that future work-life research should heed Lewis' call for more nuanced understandings of the multi-layered context of people's experiences, workplace practices and relevant national policies, but go beyond this, to pay attention to the globalised forces underpinning ever greater inequity in work, in families and in communities.

The Precarity of Trust: Domestic Helpers as "Working-Singles" in Shanghai

In this chapter, we analyze the working conditions of domestic helpers (ayi) and coin the term "working-single" to refer to their affective experiences in laboring in the private urban households, where they are being isolated, and, arguably, alienated. Whether married or not, the ayi usually lives a single life in the city. Focusing on the ways in which ayis build trust with their employers, we present an ethnographic study of ayis in Shanghai, based on nineteen interviews. We begin by outlining the reasons why rural-to-urban migrant women have chosen to work as ayis. Then, we follow Arlie R. Hochschild's theorization of "emotion work" and emotional labor to explore the tactics that Shanghai domestic helpers use to gain their employers' trust. Three main tactics are identified: honesty, professionalism, and care. These tactics enable ayis to attain moments of agency and create a sense of reciprocal intensity that shapes the production of emotional labor as well as the employer-employee relationship. We argue that the ayi-urban employer relationship is dynamic and intense. In this sense, the process of trust-building should be reconsidered as a power game in the context of rural migrant women's job security and work safety.

Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory: Trajectory of a Migrant Woman in South China

positions: asia critique, 2023

With the simultaneous growth of the manufacturing and service industries and the rapid expansion of information and communication technology, what do Chinese workers actually do in order to survive, and what methodological approaches are useful for exploring their subjectivity? In this article, the labor trajectory of Zuo Mei, a young migrant woman, is traced over six and a half years. The author relates Zuo's experience to what Mario Tronti calls the “social factory,” where the extraction of surplus occurs not just on the factory floor but also through social relations inside and outside multiple workplaces; at the intersection of factory, service, volunteer, and domestic labor; encompassing urban and rural, waged and unwaged, (re)productive and distributive, and on- and offline work. By detailing the interactions between these multiple forms of labor, the article argues that Zuo's suffering does not end outside the factory but extends to wherever social relations are capitalized, unveiling how alienation results from the resistance to that alienation.

Becoming Homecare Workers: Chinese Immigrant Women and the Changing Worlds of Work, Care and Unionism

Critical Sociology, 2018

This article examines how the intersectional dynamics of gender, migration, and labor shape the trajectories of immigrant women into home-based elder care and how unions and community organizations mediate its conditions. Our analysis, which uses interviews with In-Home Supportive Services workers in California's Oakland Chinatown, shows that the growth of publicly-subsidized homecare jobs has created an occupational opportunity for workers who face restrictive labor markets due to declining factory jobs and discriminatory hiring. Workers acknowledge the daily stress of working in low-paid, precarious jobs characterized by high levels of informality and coercive gender and racial-ethnic dynamics but the quasi-public nature of these jobs complicates a facile depiction of it as domestic servitude. Ethnic community organizations and labor unions open up institutional pathways to empowering forms of collective voice. Our findings contribute to the growing effort to understand how the social organization of care work both draws upon and exacerbates existing inequalities.

Jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of womens subcontracted labour in guangzhou china

This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affective and industrial labour, which are produced by migrant women's yearnings for people and places far away. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. The unrequited longings of migrant women who work in factories and as caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs are created through disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as these women attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour across the supply chains.

Home and away: Chinese migrant workers between two worlds

Sociological Review, 2010

The Chinese communist party dissolved powerful local clans into modular individuals loyal to the central state and easily mobilized for government projects. Now migrants must redefine home and family for an era where government safety nets are no longer reliable and mobility yields economic returns. We discuss female migrant factory worker's attitudes towards home and traditional and modern values and implications for themselves and family who remain behind. Methods: We surveyed 1,017 rural female migrants in Guangdong factories. Measures included the General Health Questionnaire 20 and the Chinese Individual Traditional and Modern Values Scale, as well as other relevant attitudes. Results: Participants supported filial piety but rejected other aspects of traditional society, instead emphasizing values such as personal ability that contribute to success in modern society. These value judgments did not vary with duration of residence in the city. Participants did not sever ties with home or assimilate into urban culture. A case study illustrates contradictions involved in combining mobility, individualism and devotion to distant family. Conclusion: Rural migrants unable to change their legal place of residence maintain psychological and economic ties with their former homes even if they plan not to return.

Negotiating Social Boundaries and Private Zones: The Micropolitics of Employing Migrant Domestic Workers

The employment of migrant domestic workers has turned the private home into a contested terrain where employers and workers negotiate social boundaries and distance from one another on a daily basis. Based on indepth interviews with Taiwanese employers and Filipina migrant workers, this article explores how the groups negotiate two sets of social boundaries in the domestic politics of food, space, and privacy: socio-categorical boundaries along the divides of class and ethnicity/nationality, and socio-spatial boundaries segregating the private and public spheres. Along these two dimensions I create two typologies to analyze a variety of boundary work conducted by employers and workers in this global-local, public-private matrix.