Caring for the Small: Gendered Resistance and Solidarity through Chinese Domestic Workers’ Writings

Abstract

In recent years, over 35 million female migrant workers have left their families behind in the countryside to enter the urban middleclass home as domestic helpers thanks to China’s latest boom of urban development and care economy. They are expected to make intensive emotional investment in their daily toils to create an enriching environment for the best material and affective benefits of their employers’ families. Meanwhile, domestic workers’ everyday struggles, concerns, and emotional needs are often brushed under the rug as trivial matters, while mainstream media tend to represent them as insignificant and untrustworthy laborers who are belittled and devalued for their age, gender, class, and lack of symbolic and cultural capital. This essay examines the ways women worker writers bring back these “small matters” to public discourse and articulate their deep concerns for gender equity and social justice. Through their persistent intellectual and organizational labor, the meaning of care is transformed from a naturalized gendered ritual in traditional patriarchal system and commodified labor in the profit-driven care economy into a networking strategy deployed ingeniously by women workers in their active efforts to build up a literary collective that pushes for accumulative micro-changes characterized by cultural creativity, gendered resistance, and grassroots solidarity.