内容简介

As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to “see the world”and gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. Based on immersive fieldwork, Cara Wallis provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time. While simultaneously situating her work within the fields of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, Wallis explores the way in which the cell phone has been integrated into the transforming social structures and practices of contemporary China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women—a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as “backward” and “other”—to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity. In this theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis,Wallis provides original insight into the co-construction of technology and subjectivity as well as the multiple forces that shape contemporary China.

作品目录

Mobile Bodies Mobile Technologies and Immobile Mobility

1

1 Market Reforms Global Linkages and Discontinuity in PostSocialist China

29

Mobile Technologies and Modern Subjectivity

63

3 Navigating Mobile Networks of Sociality and Intimacy

91

4 Picturing the Self Imagining the World

119

5 Mobile Communication and Labor Politics

145

The Mobile Assemblage and Social Change in China