The Incomplete Transmutation of Feeling: Female Platform Drivers' Negotiation and Resistance to Emotional Labour in China's Ride‐Hailing Industry

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the scholarship of the gig labour process and gendered emotional labour and enriches the theorisation of emotional labour and alienation and Marxist feminist platform studies in transportation platforms. Focusing on Chinese female platform drivers' lived experience, this study conducts Chatnography and ‘chat’ interviews with 40 Chinese female Didi drivers, from November 2020 to June 2022. First, this article highlights how communication technologies and social reproduction processes complicate the emotional disciplinary process in China's ride‐hailing industry. Second, this study unveils the gender logic of emotional labour in China's transportation platforms, such that women's double identities as a platform driver and digital labour are intertwined in the gig labour process, resulting in the unprecedented human costs of gendered and sexualised emotional labour, such as self‐alienation and estrangement. Third, this study argues that the transmutation of emotion is an incomplete, antagonistic, and contradictory process in China's ride‐hailing industry. On the one hand, women worker's consciousness is contextualised in the social reproduction process. Care activities for children create an antagonistic force to combat gendered emotional labour on ride‐hailing platforms. On the other hand, the affordances of communication technologies energise individual and collective resistance to gendered and sexualised emotional labour.