Arianne Gaetano

Sexuality in diasporic space: rural-to-urban migrant women negotiating gender and marriage in contemporary China

Feminist geographers use the term diasporic subjectivity to emphasize the relational quality of identity as it is constructed in the dynamic in-between space occupied by the migrant and traversed by norms and practices associated with the village community, migrant peers, and urban consumer society, as well as nation-states. Using ethnographic methods, I explore how young, single rural Chinese women who migrated to Beijing in the 1990s negotiate sexuality in diasporic space, within the discursive and institutional orders of state, market and family. Though migration does not fundamentally alter these structures that construct inequality around place-based identity, gender and class, it does enable rural women to shift position within them and, significantly, to imagine that further, future change is possible. Foregrounding migrant womens agency in remaking gender identity from so-called rustic peasants to modern girls as well as in choosing marital partners and conducting courtship provides an important counterweight to the primary emphasis on structure found in much of the migration literature.

Women, Work, and Marriage: Challenges of Gendered Mobility in Urban China

Policies of the Chinese state during the post-socialist era have engendered demographic and socioeconomic changes that intersect with gender and class to both enable and restrict women’s social mobility, autonomy, and independence. This chapter evaluates the impact of these changes on the social mobility of women in China’s cities, drawing upon relevant literature and my own ethnographic studies of rural migrant women workers in Beijing and educated career women in Shanghai. My contribution illuminates the material and discursive constraints that obstruct these women’s achievement of personal goals under conditions of structural inequality as China urbanizes.

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

The twelve chapters of this volume were originally presented at a seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2005. The authors all consider aspects of a central dilemma. Although dominant development models justify, on behalf of the greater public interest, certain investments that transform social and physical environments, those people ‘in the way’ must disproportionately bear the costs. This raises questions on the awkward intersection between project investments and the democratic rights of local people. Whose rights are more important: those who expect to benefit from projects or those who will be displaced by them? In the Introduction, anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith claims a central role for anthropologists in the study of displacement and resettlement arising from development projects. Anthropology, in his view, is the foundation discipline in studies in this field, because anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century were among the first to recognise, document and work towards mitigating the serious impoverishment and human rights violations among people displaced. Thayer Scudder, whose research on resettlement has spanned more than 50 years, focuses on the potential for building social and cultural theory. He identifies four dimensions of development-forced displacement and resettlement that should underpin theory building, namely (a) the resulting increased rate of social change in some behaviour patterns, institutions and belief systems; (b) the involuntary nature of resettlement, in which there is no going back; (c) that resettlement is a by-product of a different development initiative and therefore generally suffers from second-rate planning, inadequate consultation and insufficient financing; and (d) it is difficult to achieve an equitable outcome in addressing displacement given the wide-ranging impacts on the lives of those affected. In Scudder’s analysis, the displacement and resettlement processes have exacerbated the risks of landlessness, increased morbidity and mortality, marginalisation and social disarticulation.