Questioning the Self

Abstract

After accession to the World Trade Organization in 1999, China has been further incorporated into the global track. The national policy of economic development requires a continuing exploitation of natural resources and intensive labor from the rural sector, and over the last few decades there has been a ceaseless wave of rural women going to the cities and working mainly as assembly-line workers, domestic helpers, and sex workers. Developing a subaltern and feminist perspective, this paper attempts to invoke a spectral figure of the subaltern as the rural woman demonstrably haunting dominant regimes of representations of modernization. Through a textual analysis of the television series Girls from Outside (1991), this paper examines how a rural woman peasant worker is represented as a model of the imperative to “develop the self” as a marker of social upward mobility, in the dominant discourse of development. Yet, this paper also reads against the grain of the texts, in which there are contradictions and ambivalences in portraying a rural woman as an actor of modernization. The self here is haunted by the other, as exemplified by rural kinship, a strike, and the women “left-over” in the job market.