Abstract
Over the past decade or so, a sizeable body of work documenting the lives and work of China’s rural migrants has emerged. Arianne Gaetano’s book is the latest contribution to this well-established scholarship. Out to Work is a theoretically informed, solidly researched, and empirically rich ethnography that seeks to address a distinct and consistent concern with the question of whether labour migration benefits rural women and promotes gender equality.
Gaetano’s book draws on her interviews and sustained interactions with a dozen rural migrant women who worked as domestic workers at hotels in Beijing from 1999 to 2000, and also later in 2002. While her informants worked in Beijing, Gaetano also followed some of them on their visits to their home villages. In this longitudinal and multi-sited project, Gaetano asks how migration affects rural women’s identity, agency, and desire to become modern.
The book starts at a broad historical level, detailing, in Chapter 1, how policy change opened up new possibilities for rural women, while also imposing significant restraints on them. Chapter 2 explores women’s motivations and expectations in relation to migration, while Chapter 3 examines the social context of kinship and networks and enquires into how rural migrant women operate according to the principle of reciprocity. Gaetano then turns her focus in Chapter 4 to migrant women’s workplaces, where women must negotiate their power relations with employers, clients, and co-workers. Moving from place of production to place of consumption, Chapter 5 examines how migrant women’s exposure to an urban lifestyle and consumer culture shapes their subjectivity and gender identity. The last chapter zooms in on the most personal aspect of rural migrant women’s lives, asking how migration changes the ways in which love, courtship, family, and conjugal intimacy are conducted.
The conclusion of the study is paradoxical yet eminently convincing: migration promotes agency and gender equality for rural women, since it opens up hitherto unavailable opportunities for them to acquire skills, achieve economic independence, and pursue individual autonomy; however, this empowerment at the individual level has done little to facilitate gender empowerment and gender equality in structural terms. This overriding message is particularly instructive, as it demonstrates how gender intersects with other social markers such as class and place of origin to produce conditions of either empowerment or subjugation. It also outlines the dynamic interplay of key forces – the state, the market, and patriarchy – that sometimes facilitate and sometimes prohibit rural migrant women’s expressions of agency.
In the book, the discussion of gender, migration, and agency moves effortlessly across a number of levels and contexts – from macro to micro levels, and from social, kinship, and family contexts to the workplace and the personal sphere – affording readers a holistic and comprehensive picture of the multi-layered context in which migrant women operate. Furthermore, Gaetano offers myriad and nuanced insights in all chapters, consistently integrating ethnography with theoretically engaged analysis. The narrative of the experience of half a dozen rural migrant females circulates in all chapters and, taken together, they give texture and substance to the ethnographic account, showcasing the dedication of a consummate anthropologist. The end result is a very engaging and accessible book, furnishing readers with essential knowledge and valuable insights about gender, migration, and social change in post-Mao China.