A Study Of Dagongmei: A Feminist Understanding of Gender Politics in China under Reform

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which women workers have been excluded from the major social institutions and what it means for them to live with an increasing double burden that is placed upon the dagongmei, that is migrant women ‘maiden workers.’ The dagongmei as a category emerged following the structural changes imposed by reform policies and by the accompanying modifications in discourse and perception They embody multiple divisions and tensions in Chinese society relating to gender, class, urban/rural, safe/insecure, development/underdevelopment and modern/backward divisions.They also epitomise a new labour control regime, combining the well-known gendered regime of production and exclusion via the state-led women's liberation of the period prior to the Reform. By describing the impact of the Reform and one of its key side-effects, migration, on women in general and working women in particular, this study seeks to explain and understand gender politics surrounding the dagongmei.