Beyond Victims or Heroines: Intersectional Resilience in Women’s Migration

• In Event: Gender and Class: Privilege and Precarity

Abstract

What mechanisms enable migrant women to generate resilience within intersectional structural constraints? This study addresses gaps in scholarship on women’s migration, which has either emphasized intersectional forms of oppression, including those structured by gender, class, and age, or highlighted instances of women’s resilience. However, such work risks neglecting the causal relationship by which intersectional oppression shapes resilient practices. To support its analysis, the study develops the concept of “intersectional resilience.” This conceptualizes resilience as a relational process produced through women’s situated engagements with intersecting power regimes.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with 32 rural-to-urban female migrant workers in an electronics factory in Chengdu, China, supplemented by creative methods including walking interviews, timelines, and self-portraits, this study examines how women navigate class-based factory discipline, gendered family responsibilities, and the rural-urban divide in their everyday lives. The findings demonstrate that resilience may emerge precisely through, rather than in spite of, intersectional regimes of oppression. The study advances theoretical understanding by bringing intersectionality and resilience into direct conversation, showing that intersectional oppression does more than provide a backdrop for women’s agency: it actively configures the conditions under which resilience becomes necessary and the practical repertoires through which it is forged in everyday life.

Author

• Ziqi Yin, University of Cambridge