No Room for Respectability: Boundary Work in Interaction at a Rental in Shanghai

• In Event: 543 - Regular Session. Symbolic Interaction

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic study on the boundary work that 36 women living at a 3-bedroom rental in Shanghai do to assert their respectability in everyday tenants interaction. All the tenants are non-locals; many are “Ant Tribe” college graduates—an emergent group of low-pay white-collar workers—while others are rural migrants working in the service sector. The tenants’ struggle to present themselves as “high-quality” people shines a spotlight on performance aspect of boundary work that we often take for granted. To come off as people who can self-regulate, the tenants need wiggle room in the interactional setting and in their self-conception to manage the discrepancies between their talks and acts. They find neither in the social world that is their rental. Instead, the boundary work that the tenants do to manage their precarious living situation highlights the social dispossession and symbolic violence that they endure.

Author

• Lily Liang, University of Wisconsin-Madison