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The lens of intimacy reveals how migrant performers’ work and lives are governed by the gendered aspects of bordering. Performers undertake sexualized labour because of the ethnic scripts, which readily sexualize ethnic minority women, and the need to pamper guests and create intimacy in the banquets. Female performers who engage in this sexualized labour need to constantly defend their virtuous reputations, yet their relationships with significant others are overshadowed. In the local contexts where promoting ethnic culture is closely related to economic development, female performers refer to this aspect of ethnic scripts to frame ethnic performance as ‘promoting ethnic culture’. In this way, they manage to legitimize and justify doing sexualized labour, demonstrating their agency. By looking broadly at intimacy as negotiated within work as well as ‘private’ relationships, intimacy as a lens reveals how gender is negotiated in close association with ethnicity and rural–urban inequalities.
Ethnic performers are rural–urban migrants who perform ethnic songs and dances at different venues such as restaurants and tourist sites. While performers’ representations are prevalent in many cultural spheres in China, their voices tend to be silenced. This chapter demonstrates how researching ethnic performers’ experiences bridges important gaps in research on rural–urban migration in China, as it focuses on the less-understood experiences of ethnic minority migrants who undertake service work, and those who move from rural areas to small- or medium-sized cities within a province. It also sets up the theoretical framework for the book, that is, the concepts of ‘intimacy as a lens’ and ‘border encounters’, and demonstrates how studying migration and ethnicity from the perspective of emotion, intimacy, and the personal sheds new light on how power and inequality operate in contemporary China. This chapter outlines the research questions, with a brief methodological overview, and provides an outline of the chapters to follow.
Emotions are central to understanding the ways in which migrant performers experience and negotiate the rural–urban borders, most notably in relation to the hukou system in China. While migrants contend with an opaque migration regime, emotional reflexivity plays a crucial role in shaping their hukou-transfer decision. The broader emotional regime at the societal level profoundly shapes informants’ emotional reflexivity. In line with the state’s emphasis on happiness, positive energy, as well as ‘the China Dream’, migrants tend to use emotional management to frame their ‘negative emotions’ into ‘positive’ ones. The different meanings attached to the rural and the urban play a significant role in shaping informants’ personhood, as they seek to embrace migration in order to achieve a modern and valuable self. Yet, following migration, performers continue to experience rural–urban bordering through everyday work in intimate and emotional ways, which consolidate rather than alleviate their marginalization.
In conclusion, this book demonstrates the intimate consequences of social inequalities: how the multi-layered inequalities regarding the rural–urban divide, ethnicity and gender have a profound impact on people’s emotions, sense of self, and their relationships with significant others. At the same time, it seeks to move beyond merely exploring the intimate consequences of inequalities, and further asks how we could use these intimate negotiations as a means to understand social inequalities – an approach I call ‘intimacy as a lens’. It means starting from the intimate realm and working from there to understand broader social inequalities. As this book demonstrates, the lens of intimacy provides valuable insights that otherwise tend to be overlooked, and illuminates how power and inequalities work in contemporary China. In a way, this book provides a convincing answer to the question of what it means to say that ‘the personal is political’, and more importantly, illuminates how we can understand ‘the political’ better if we take ‘the personal’ seriously.
This chapter provides a detailed account of what ethnic performance is like at the three field sites. Ethnic performance is a form of interactive service work through which minority, rural, feminized performers encounter Han, urban, mostly male customers in a physically proximate manner, which renders their social distance even more significant. After considering different sociological frameworks, this chapter argues that ethnic performance could be best theorized as a site of encounters where performers have to constantly encounter multiple bordering processes in relation to the rural–urban divide, ethnicity, and gender. The need to constantly encounter borders through everyday work and migration has an intimate and emotional consequence for performers. It shapes their entitlement to respect and motivates them to achieve a ‘modern self’ through off-work entertainment and consumption. These intimate encounters with borders also point to the need to see work and personal life as closely related and mutually constitutive.
Ethnic performers encounter ethnicity through everyday work and migration, yet they are ambivalent over whether they are ‘authentic’ ethnic minorities. Their ambivalence provides a valuable starting point for understanding ethnicity as something people do rather than who they are, and also for emphasizing the existence of multi-layered ‘ethnic scripts’, that is, the social and cultural repertoires which deeply shape people’s understanding of and ways of ‘doing ethnicity’. In order to achieve ‘valuable personhood’, performers work on their ethnic selves in ways which accord with state and market versions of ethnic scripts. Also, ethnic scripts become part of the ‘feeling rules’ which shape how performers manage their emotions in order to perform the happy, worry-free demeanor of ethnic minorities. Ethnic scripts also tend to sexualize minority women. This chapter highlights the ways that ethnic scripts are closely related to migrant performers’ emotions and sense of self, and the fact that ethnic scripts are inherently gendered.
This book explores the experiences of ethnic performers in a small Chinese city, aiming to better understand their work and migration journeys. Their unique position as service workers who have migrated within the same province provides valuable insights into the intersection of social inequalities related to the rural-urban divide, ethnicity and gender in contemporary China. Introducing the concept of ‘intimacy as a lens’, the author examines intimate negotiations involving emotions, sense of self and relationships as a way of understanding wider social inequalities.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the book reveals the bordering mechanisms encountered by performers in their work as they navigate between rural and urban environments, as well as between ethnic minority and Han identities. Emphasising the intimate and personal nature of these encounters, the book argues that they can help inform understanding of broader social issues.
This article examines the dialogic relationship between emotional reflexivity and emotional regime as it explores ‘the hukou puzzle’ in China. In theory, migrants in small- to medium-scale cities can transfer their hukou (household registration) to urban areas, yet are unwilling to do so in practice. Relying on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork and 60 in-depth interviews with ethnic migrant performers, this article argues that previous theorisation of the hukou puzzle neglects emotions and assumes migrants are making rational choices to maximise their profits. In reality, different emotions and feelings inform migrants’ reflexivity regarding an opaque migration regime, which highlights the crucial role of how they exercise their reflexivity in emotional and relational ways. Moreover, a neoliberal emotional regime at the Chinese societal level – which emphasises positive energy, happiness and ‘the China Dream’ – also significantly shapes migrants’ emotional reflexivity. This article points to the need to further explore the intersection between emotional reflexivity and emotional regime in relation to migration.
Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China, this article unpacks how precarity and migration have deeply shaped young migrant workers’ understanding and experiences of friendship. The precarious work and living conditions compel young migrants to put more emphasis on the instrumental aspects of friendship, in which they deeply value friends’ help and practical support, which also intertwine closely with the emotional aspects of friendship. High mobility does not mean that migrants are not able to form and maintain ‘meaningful’ social relationships; rather, it is friends’ support and help which sustain migrants’ precarious and highly mobile ways of living. This article also discusses the burdens and risks that are associated with such friendship practices, and how, despite these ‘dark sides of friendship’, young migrant workers still largely rely on their friends to survive and keep going in the city.
