Made in China ：Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace ( 1 )

Publication subTitle ：Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace

Publication series ：1

Author： Pun Ngai  

Publisher： Duke University Press‎

Publication year： 2005

E-ISBN: 9780822386759

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9781932643008

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9781932643183

Subject： F249.21 labour

Keyword： Women -- Employment -- China., Women -- Economic conditions -- China., Factory system -- China., Globalization -- Economic aspects -- China., Women -- China -- Economic conditions.

Language： ENG

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Description

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family.

Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistanc

Chapter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. State Meets Capital: The Making and Unmaking of a New Chinese Working Class

2. Marching from the Village: Women's Struggle between Work and Family

3. The Social Body, the Art of Discipline and Resistance

4. Becoming Dagongmei: Politics of Identities and Differences

5. Imagining Sex and Gender in the Workplace

6. Scream, Dream, and Transgression in the Workplace

7. Approaching a Minor Genre of Resistance

Notes

Reference

Index

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