Cara Wallis

Micro-entrepreneurship, new media technologies, and the reproduction and reconfiguration of gender in rural China

This article explores the connections between micro-entrepreneurship, new media technologies, and gender in rural China. Based on fieldwork among diverse individuals engaged in agricultural and non-agricultural micro-entrepreneurship, I examine how uses of technology in economic production become the site for the reproduction and/or reconfiguration of gender hierarchies. Grounding my analysis in feminist and critical theories of technology, I investigate the gendered uses and discourses of new media technologies that emerge from three types of entrepreneurial spaces: physical places where micro-entrepreneurship is based on new media technologies, such as internet cafés and mobile phone shops; virtual realms where new media technologies potentially facilitate entrepreneurship, including text messaging and various websites; and virtual spaces where informal learning and sharing take place via mediated networks formed around common occupations. I argue that in the context of entrepreneurship, even among women and men who are young and have migration experience, deeply entrenched gendered power differentials produce unequal access to capital and social networks, and hence uses and understandings of technology. Although engagement with technology has opened up new spaces for economic enhancement and the rearrangement of conventional gender norms, such engagement does not overcome – indeed, in many cases reproduces – gendered power relations.

Technology and/as Governmentality: The Production of Young Rural Women as Low-Tech Laboring Subjects in China

This article presents an ethnography of a group of young women from rural China who attended a three-month computer-training course and then were placed in a data input company in China. Building upon scholarship on “Chinese governmentality,” I argue that although the training emphasized individual “quality” (suzhi) and the attainment of “useful” skills, once the women were employed their choices as autonomous individuals were severely limited through workplace disciplines that problematize notions of self government. I show how multiple modes of power were deployed to produce rural women as low-tech laboring subjects necessary for Chinas domestic development and participation in global capitalism.

Public interactives, soft power, and China’s future at and beyond the 2010 Shanghai World Expo

This article uses the Shanghai World Expo as a case study to examine how soft power and processes of nation branding are articulated to public interactives, defined as a range of technological devices and applications that serve as the stage for digitally mediated communication with audiences in communal spaces. We focus on three Expo pavilions—those of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and China—and show how their public interactives augmented the performance of culture, the production of soft power, and a future vision at a global mega-event. We argue that public interactives not only transformed built environments into spaces for the pleasure of physically proximate audiences but also were the conduit for mediated narratives that represented contemporary understandings of a particular nation and actively produced imagined futures of that nation in a China-centric world. This article adds to prior scholarship by analyzing the use of public interactives by both host and guest nations to produce culture through spatial and temporal logics, comparing how technologically mediated narratives communicated these three nations’ soft power goals more generally as well as within bilateral relations underscored by the rise of China, and discussing the significance of these (past) future visions in the present. We thus add to understandings of the concept of soft power and the role of technology in the praxis of public diplomacy.

Studying the Sent-Down Internet: roundtable on research methods

WB: Rural people make sense of things in their own contexts, which researchers from urban areas usually do not understand in the first place. Back in 2002, when I was doing fieldwork in Renshou County, Sichuan Province, I was shocked to see the local cable TV channel “broadcast” online news. They cut and pasted pure text from Internet news sites such as Sina, and then showed it on a special channel 24 hours a day. Information from Sina thus entered the contexts of ordinary rural families, now all equipped with TV sets. This was something urban people wouldn’t understand without being in the field. A second challenge is, who sets the standard? Researchers often bring a rigid set of standards from cities, from their own experiences, about what’s “advanced technology” and what’s “backward.” They apply these standards with little respect for rural experiences, become judgmental, and miss important things. Rural people may also fabricate answers to please the researchers, telling them that they go online often when it is not true. A third challenge is gender sensitivity. The tremendous gender inequality that characterizes rural areas (in addition to other forms of inequality) is also beyond imagining for inexperienced urban researchers. All of these challenges boil down to one point: how can we recognize, in a way that remains true to its (rural) context, new modes of what I call “media convergence from below”?

The SK-II #changedestiny campaign and the limits of commodity activism for women’s equality in neo/non-liberal China

ABSTRACT This article examines one market-based intervention to combat gender discrimination in China, beauty brand SK-II’s #changedestiny campaign, and in particular an accompanying video, Marriage Market Takeover, which attempts to challenge the cultural stigma of “leftover women” (single women over 25). By mobilizing affect and highlighting the self-optimizing subject, SK-II, through the #changedestiny campaign, positions itself as a key instigator of women’s empowerment, and ultimately of not only familial, but also societal, change. In this regard, it follows the logic of what Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee (in Commodity activism: Cultural resistance in neoliberal times [NYU Press, 2012]) call commodity activism, or the merging of consumer behavior with efforts at social change within neoliberal brand culture. However, in a context we call “neo/non-liberal China,” modes of authoritarian and therapeutic governance intersect, and consumer subjects, not consumer citizens, are encouraged. We argue that through offering resistance to, and a resolution situated within familial relationships, the #changedestiny campaign does little to challenge the patriarchal “leftover women” discourse. We further argue that gender discrimination is raised in the #changedestiny campaign as a way to rationalize a neoliberal emphasis on consumption, self-care, and personal fulfillment, and that ultimately gender—as well as class—norms are reaffirmed despite the campaign’s efforts to promote meaningful social change.