Embodiment of Beauty: Chinese Migrant Female Workers in the Making of Body

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session I
  In Interactive Paper Session: Feminist Scholarship Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This study tries to illustrate how Chinese migrant female workers involve into the discourses of body politics in the realms of discipline and beauty embodiment. By closely examining female workers’ everyday routine in a beauty salon near a factory, the current research proposes a typology of embodiment of migrant bodies, namely: commoditized, professional, conformed and naked body, to articulate the struggles that the rural body meets to transform into modern dwellers, and the power and domination embeds into the discourses. It is revealed that no fixed categories can be attributed to the body, and the transition among different types is a tactical response to the compulsory external and internal power that cultivates the body. The fluid body is not determined but affected by a combination of wider historical, social-political, economic-cultural conditions and personal particularities.

Author

• Sara X. T. Liao, University of Texas at Austin