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 and efforts to achieve suzhi (quality) through self-improvement, the way workers are treated by their employers, and representations of migrant domestic workers on television and the Internet and in newspapers and magazines. In so doing, Yan demonstrates that contestations over the meanings of migrant workers raise broad questions about the nature of wage labor, market economy, sociality, and postsocialism in contemporary China.
0 有用 Viraganio 2014-07-26 02:47:52
oh 我们的海蓉女神...
0 有用 Siqi 2015-12-22 13:50:48
The emaciation of the rural: “no way out”
0 有用 打击豹腹 2019-06-19 20:23:03
两个chort的比较,modernities in the plural
1 有用 sisyphean 2015-01-09 16:47:17
上学期零散读完其中的中文章节,作者是黄瑜一生推的好基友。视角很“纯正”,分析很有力,田野略不足。
0 有用 karaShiba 2022-02-06 07:50:42
Quote from我朋友 "新越南故事"
0 有用 电胆马 2022-11-21 18:25:36 中国香港
农村不仅在经济上处于相对劣势的地位,而且也失去了作为社会主义道德教育课堂的象征意义。当城市作为现代文明和现代礼仪的中心脱胎换骨之时,农村在公共话语中被塑造成为“落后的”、“传统的”,或如严海蓉所说的“幽灵般的他者”。农村生活难以提供农民建构正面而有意义的自我认同所需要的符号资源(Yan,2003)。严海蓉认为,国家、媒体和精英通过扮演教育者的角色,界定、宣传与利用“素质”的概念,以便在全球资本领域... 农村不仅在经济上处于相对劣势的地位,而且也失去了作为社会主义道德教育课堂的象征意义。当城市作为现代文明和现代礼仪的中心脱胎换骨之时,农村在公共话语中被塑造成为“落后的”、“传统的”,或如严海蓉所说的“幽灵般的他者”。农村生活难以提供农民建构正面而有意义的自我认同所需要的符号资源(Yan,2003)。严海蓉认为,国家、媒体和精英通过扮演教育者的角色,界定、宣传与利用“素质”的概念,以便在全球资本领域里追求中国的合法性、地位和荣誉。“素质”概念的出现标志着“把人的主体性从属于发展话语”,以帮助新自由主义重塑国家、市场和劳动主体的关系,维持劳动力的持续流动与供给(Yan,2008) (展开)
0 有用 karaShiba 2022-02-06 07:50:42
Quote from我朋友 "新越南故事"
0 有用 奥博洛莫夫 2021-10-14 15:02:14
核心还是她那篇论文
0 有用 于小床 2021-06-23 15:52:21
进入其写作语境,与自己的田野方向对话。展示了什么是学术英语写作
0 有用 打击豹腹 2019-06-19 20:23:03
两个chort的比较,modernities in the plural