New Masters, New Servants ：Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China ( 1 )

Publication subTitle ：Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China

Publication series ：1

Author： Hairong Yan  

Publisher： Duke University Press‎

Publication year： 2008

E-ISBN: 9780822388654

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780822343042

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9780822342878

Subject： D442 Chinese womens movement and organization

Keyword： Women household employees -- China -- Social conditions., Rural women -- Employment -- China., Rural-urban migration -- China., Women domestics -- China -- Social conditions.

Language： ENG

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Description

On March 9, 1996, tens of thousands of readers of a daily newspaper in China’s Anhui province saw a photograph of two young women at a local long-distance bus station. Dressed in fashionable new winter coats and carrying luggage printed with Latin letters, the women were returning home from their jobs in one of China’s large cities. As the photo caption indicated, the image represented the “transformation of migrant women”; the women’s “transformation” was signaled by their status as consumers. New Masters, New Servants is an ethnography of class dynamics and the subject formation of migrant domestic workers. Based on her interviews with young women who migrated from China’s Anhui province to the city of Beijing to engage in domestic service for middle-class families, as well as interviews with employers, job placement agencies, and government officials, Yan Hairong explores what these migrant workers mean to the families that hire them, to urban economies, to rural provinces such as Anhui, and to the Chinese state. Above all, Yan focuses on the domestic workers’ self-conceptions, desires, and struggles.

Yan analyzes how the migrant women workers are subjected to, make sense of, and reflect on a range of state and neoliberal discourses about development, modernity, consumption, self-worth, quality, and individual and collective longing and struggle. She offers keen insight into the workers’ desire a

Chapter

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Emaciation of the Rural: “No Way Out”

2. Mind and Body, Gender and Class

Part I. “Intellectuals’ Burdens” and Domestic Labor

Part II. Searching for the Proper Baomu

Intermezzo 1. A Survey of Employers

3. Suzhi as a New Human Value: Neoliberal Governance of Labor Migration

Intermezzo 2. Urban Folklore on Neoliberalism

4. A Mirage of Modernity: Pas de Deux of Consumption and Production

5. Self-Development and the Specter of Class

Intermezzo 3. Diary and Song

6. The Economic Law and Liminal Subjects

Notes

References

Index

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