Beyond Tears and Laughter
Douban
Gender, Migration, and the Service Sector in China
overview
This book explores the experience of China's migrant laborers in Shanghai from economic, anthropological, and gendered analyses, offering extraordinary insights into the life-world of the marginalized people. China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants coming from the countryside to the big cities in search of fame, fortune, or just a living. The author also explores the political, economic, and gendered realities of this marginalized, yet huge population. With an in-depth and multidisciplinary examination of the experience of restaurant workers in Shanghai, this book sheds humanizing new light on the experience of the megacity from the inside and will be of direct value to policymakers, demographers, urbanists, anthropologists, sociologists, and responsible citizens.
contents
1 Introducing Migration, Gender and the Service Sector 1
2 Gendered Subjectivities in a Patriarchal China 29
3 Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical
Workplace 47
4 The Short-Lived Jobs: From Beginning to End 73
5 Negotiating Intimacy: Obedience, Compromise and
Resistance 95
6 Crafting a Modern Person via Consumption? Women and
Men in Leisure Activities 127
7 Unpacking the Complexity of Gender, Class and Hukou 151
Appendix A: Doing Ethnographic Research from a Feminist
Perspective 163
Contents
xii Contents
Appendix B: List of Informants 187
Bibliography 193