“打工妹”。。。

Dagongmei is a specific ethics of self, construed at the particular moment when private and transnational capital engulfed contemporary China. As a new social identity, it reveals the story of how a state socialist system is giving way to the capitalist global economy and how capitalist practices depend entirely on a complex web of regulations, on class, rural-urban differences, and sexual relations.

The mobilisation of migrant labour, which in China is termed temporary labour, is one of the most distinctive elements of capitalist development in both developed countries in the nineteenth century and newly developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

The contemporary Chinese scene is characterised by a proliferation of sex talk, sexual discourse and consumerised female images. Signs of sex are everywhere, and we seem to be invited to a world in which female bodies are commodified and fetishised to such an extent that only a mass grave of signs remains.

While a workplace full of young women might be an orchard of peaches for men, it is definitely not a world of joy and happiness for women, at least not for the women workers themselves.

The “sex boom” is seen by the central state as a moral attack on Chinese society by the Western wind. The local state, however, is far more tolerant, since it sees the sex industry as closely linked to local economic development. One local cadre in a southern Chinese town openly told me: “No sex, no video shows, no clubs, no hair salons, no restaurants, no hotels, no money!” Sex links the whole chain of economic activities in China. No sex, no money.

Pun Ngai, Engendering Chinese Modernity: The Sexual Politics of Dagongmei in a Dormitory Labour Regime.

foto: volantini pubblicitari di due concerti, nella bacheca del dormitorio per stranieri.