Mismatched: Intensive Mothering in China's Urban Villages

Abstract

As the PRC is woven ever more tightly into transnational circuits of culture and capital, Chinese working-class subjectivities—like middle-class ones, but also distinctively—become (re)produced through increasingly transnational processes. This includes the new reach of global discourses like intensive mothering into China’ s migrant-worker population. Intensive mothering has long been learned as the dominant culture of motherhood in North America. Along with other products and ideas, this ideology of intensive mothering is imported to China’ s new generation of mothers, supported by the state’ s emphasis on scientific child-rearing and the social media boom. Euro-American middle-class mothers, depicted as ideal mothers who abide by expert knowledge and cultivate their children’ s talent accordingly, are represented as counterexamples to traditional Chinese mothers in mass media. Migrant mothers in the urban villages of China have learned and internalized this ideology of intensive mothering along with their rural-to-urban migration through reading and interactions with medical and educational experts. Based on eight months of ethnographic research in two urban villages in southern China, this article presents research into how migrant mothers become trapped in the mismatches between the Euro-American, urban middle-class ideology of intensive mothering and their own position in the social class hierarchy. With limited economic and cultural resources, learning and internalizing intensive mothering disempowers migrant mothers and makes them feel even less competent. In response, they find other alternatives to reassert their agency.