Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China

Eileen Otis presents a discussion of the relationship between China's economic growth and gender inequality.

Eileen Otis, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon

As China’s urban centers grow ever wealthier, so too does consumption grow and become a central element of social life. China’s spectacular economic growth has launched a “consumer revolution” that has also sparked an urban occupational transformation in services.  Professor Otis examines the creation of a service class in urban China that has has fundamentally transformed women’s social status by segregating them into work that is low-waged, low-status and temporary.  Based on her book Markets and Bodies, Professor Otis will discuss how China’s new service purveyors, like hotels, restaurants, bars, and retailers design organizational vehicles  use women workers bodies to enable customers’ display of status and taste. These workers are the bedrock of a new commercial culture that converts the material resources of China’s affluent consumers into attention, care, effort and regard of workers, and thus forms the bases for new expressions of gender and class inequality. The talk will examine the emergence of new gendered "body rules" in China’s consumer economy and assess the effects of different kinds of consumer markets on women’s bodies.

For more information about  Eileen Otis, click here