Suzhi on the move: Body, place, and power

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Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 617-642

  Sun, Wanning ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 75849123755     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-2009-017     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Sun Wanning, "Anhui Baomu in Shanghai: Gender, Class, and a Sense of Place," in Locating China: Space, Place and Popular Culture, ed. Jing Wang (London: Routledge, 2005)
2. Yan Hairong, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organising Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks," Cultural Anthropology 18 (2003): 493-523
3. Yan Hairong, "Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value," in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 227-59
4. Ann Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," Public Culture 16 (2004): 189-208
5. Baomu in Chinese means "maid" and, like the word maid in English, is distinctively female. The fact that baomu are often addressed by their urban employers as ayi (aunty) is further lexical evidence of the gender-specificity of this type of work. I have opted to use the most commonly used word, baomu, in my essay despite these associations. I am, of course, aware of the potentially derogatory - gender and class-connotations of the term. However, it is also my impression that most people - including urban residents and migrant workers - use the term without intending to insult, as, again, in the use of the word maid. The Chinese Ministry of Labor prefers to describe those engaged in domestic work as jiazheng fuwu yuan (domestic worker). While the official term is gender-neutral, it is not free from a political agenda of its own and is ironically but unintentionally complicit with certain feminist positions on this matter
6. Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 108
7. Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
8. For a discussion of Hui (i.e., Anhui) merchants and Hui culture, see Wanning Sun, "Discourse of Poverty: Weakness, Potential and Provincial Identity in Anhui," in Rethinking China's Provinces, ed. John Fitzgerald (London: Routledge, 2002), 153-78
9. Fei-ling Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China's HuRou System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), xii
10. Many scholars have considered how the hukou system discriminates against rural migrants. See, for instance, Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion; Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within Chinas Floating Population (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)
11. Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migration, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
12. Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion, 180
13. Interview with baomu employer, July 2005, Beijing
14. Wu Wenjie, "Baomu, guzhu 'chengjiao' za zhenme nan?" ("Why Is It So Hard for the Baomu and Employer to Reach an Agreement?"), Jingji ribao (Economic Daily), April 18, 2005
15. This is not the place to talk at length about the contrast between the "abject" and the "sublime" body. Suffice it to say that such a contrast is drawn by Julia Kristeva in her work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), especially in chap. I, "Approaching Abjection." In this highly influential work, Kristeva observes that the abject body is where the boundaries of the body are transgressed and the internal becomes external. Mouth, nose, ears, eyes, anus, and vagina are all sites where the outside and the internal merge. Bodily fluids - blood, urine, tears, saliva, and feces - become repellent to us when they cross the boundary of the skin. Outside the body, bodily fluids are divorced from their owner's body. The search for a sublime body and denial of basic bodily functions is particularly symptomatic of Western culture. However, according to Kristeva, the sublime body is impossible, as abjection is a fact of being alive
16. Ngai Pun, Made in China: Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
17. Chinese Ministry of Labor and Social Security, Jiazheng fuwuyuan shouce (A Handbook for Domestic Workers) (Beijing: Chinese Ministry of Labor and Social Security Press, 2000)
18. Louisa Schein, "Negotiating Scale: Miao Women at a Distance," in Translocal China, ed. Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein (London: Routledge, 2006), 213-37
19. Ibid
20. See "Henan Anhui ji mian shi, Shenzhen mo qiye zhaogong guanggao re zhengyi" ("Henan and Anhui Applicants Need Not Apply: Shenzhen's Company Job Ad Becomes Controversial"), from www.people.com.cn (accessed June 2005)
21. See "Qishi Henan re an wuyue kaishen, kai quanguo xianhe" ("Legal Case against Discrimination of Henan People Due to Start in May - The First of This Kind in China"), Lanling (Blue Bell) 22 (2005): 70
22. Yan Hairong, "Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labour Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China," American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 578-96
23. Pun, Made in China, 50
24. Interview with Zhang Xianmin, June 2005, Beijing
25. Feng Xiaoshuang, "Zhuanxin shehui zhong baomu he guzhu de guanxi" ("The Maid- Employer Relationship in the Transitional Society"), in Zhuan xin zhong de Zhongguo funü (Chinese Women in Transitional Society), ed. Meng Xianfan (Beijing: China Academy of Social Science Press, 2004), 34
26. Xie Lihua is deputy editor-in-chief of China Women's Daily and founder of the Migrant Women's Club, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Beijing dedicated to providing legal and emotional support to rural women. The interview was conducted in Beijing in July 2005
27. Interview with Zhang, July 2005
28. Interview with Stella Xing, June 2005, Beijing
29. Feng, "Zhuanxin shehui zhong baomu he guzhu de guanxi," 34
30. Conversations with Xie, June and July 2005, Beijing
31. Interview with Shen, July 2005, Beijing
32. Peters John Durham, "Exile, Nomadism, and the Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon," in Home, Exile, Homeland, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999),17-44
33. Interview with Sylvia Xu, June 2001, Shanghai
34. Interview with Ge, March 2003, Shanghai
35. Zhang, Strangers in the City
36. See Li Haixia, "Baomu Chuan Mei Zi Jin Jing Zao Feng Qiang" ("Sichuan baomu are Snatched Up by Prospective Employers upon Arrival in Beijing"), www.xinhuanet.com (accessed February 2004)
37. Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein, "Translocal China: An Introduction," in Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining of Space, ed. Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein (London: Routledge, 2006), 28.40. Ibid
38. Interview with Xu Xiying, June 2005, Beijing
39. See Li Lei, "Zongshu: Chong qiang shou dao tang shou chuan mei zi baomu za la," ("Summary: From High Demand to Reject: What Happens to Sichuan Mei?") Huaxi dushi bao (Western China Metropolitan Daily), www.scol.com.cn (accessed June 2005)
40. See "Di yi kou: 2004 de chang xian huo dong" ("Have a Bite: Tasting Freshness in 2004") (anon.), Jingpin Gouwu Zhinan (The Elite Shoppers Guide to Luxury Goods), www.csonline .com.cn (accessed June 2005)
41. According to a 2006 work report produced by Beijing's March 8th Domestic Service Center, the biggest and most established center of this kind in Beijing, as many as 95 percent of the domestic workers registered with the center are from outside Beijing, from mostly rural areas. "Beijing shi sanba fuwu zhongxin jiazheng fuwuyuan guanli fuwuyu weiquan gongzuo qingkuang huibao" ("Report on the Beijing March 8th Domestic Service Center's Performance on Management and Rights Protection)
42. Liu Yida's 1998 statistics indicate that there were around one hundred local Beijing residents working as baomu
43. The survey results are recorded in Liu Yida, Cangsheng Fanjing: Beijing Yan (Ordinary People Extraordinary Times: The Eye of Beijing) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 1998)
44. Interviews with Zhang, July 2005 and September 2006
45. Interview with Stella Xing, July 2005
46. Lenore Lyons, "Embodying Transnationalism: The Making of the Maid," in Corporeal Inscriptions: Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and Practices, ed. Edyta Lorek-Jezinska and Katarzyna Wieckowska (Torun: Nicolas Copernicus University, 2005), 171-85
47. Yan, "Specialization of the Rural."