Cultural production in the working-class resistance: labour activism, gender politics, and solidarities

Abstract

ABSTRACTAgainst the backdrop of China as a seemingly ideal model to justify and normalize capitalist globalization, this article seeks to demonstrate how grassroots and bottom-up resistance can disrupt hegemonic ideologies and dominant values. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a local NGO and an activist group from March 2016 to July 2017, my study demonstrates that labour activism through cultural production becomes an important constitution of contemporary working-class resistance in China. Collective cultural production, such as advocacy songs, live shows, and writing endorsement articles, expresses a working-class subjective position and an anti-capitalist standpoint. Rural migrant workers’ inequality serves as a political and ideological stance from which different social actors join together in activism and resistance to construct imaginations of a new socialist China where there are equal relations in production and distribution, and social inclusion and respect. In the process of forming solidarities, feminist agendas for gender equality are marginalized in working-class resistance and gendered power relations greatly shape activists’ subjectivities, practices, and experiences. This study contributes to the intersection of labour studies, cultural studies, and feminist studies in China. I argue that grassroots labour cultural production contributes to the discursive formation of counter-hegemonic power; yet a more inclusive activist agenda is still required to imagine and build an equal and just society.