Gaetano, "Off the farm: Rural Chinese women's experiences of labor mobility and modernity in post-Mao China (1984--2002)," 2005

Gaetano, Arianne M., Ph.D.

Abstract (Summary)
This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of the lives and experiences of rural Chinese women who have migrated to the city of Beijing and found work in its informal service sector as domestic servants and chambermaids. Their experiences of labor migration provide a window on the interconnection of gender, place, and identity as well as power and agency in contemporary China. In their imaginaries, the journey to the city is seen as a passage into modernity, and gaining urban experience is symbolic of becoming modern. Through labor migration, rural women engage with new ideas about modernity and experience the ambiguities and ambivalence of the changes, no more so than that of their identity itself, that are set in motion by their pursuit of dreams. Ironically, the reality of migrant life in the city rarely fulfills such promise, because neither the state nor the market recognizes peasants and rural migrants as equals to urban citizens and workers. Denied the recognition by urban society as equally modern, exploited by state and market, most rural migrant women suffer broken dreams and shattered spirits. Especially as they begin to grapple with the ineluctable matters of marriage and return, young rural migrant women at best are ambivalent about their "experience of modernity." Yet at the same time, they are empowered by their experiences, especially the exposure to new ideas and the acquisition of new skills and their changing sense of self as relatively modern compared to their nonmigrant peers. Most significantly, through their experiences, they challenge dominant ideologies of gender and place that marginalize them in rural households, urban society, and the labor market, albeit in limited and largely individual ways. Finally, for some rural migrant women, the unjust dissonance between imagination and reality that they experience first-hand becomes knowledge that empowers them to engage in more radical political critique and protest, including collective action. Indeed, rural migrant women display ingenuity and perseverance as they strive to imbue their migration experiences with meaning and dignity, and despite the unequal economic and social conditions of late socialist modernity, to "make themselves modern."

Advisor:Cooper, Eugene