Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration

Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration: Experiences of Ethnic Performers in Southwest China (Bristol University Press, 2024) offers a compelling account of the intimate experiences of Chinese migrant workers engaged in ethnic performance at restaurants and tourist sites in southwest China. Departing from the more commonly examined narratives of rural-to-urban migration to first-tier cities, Jingyu Mao highlights ‘untypical’, yet equally significant, forms of mobility: intra-provincial migration. More importantly, she foregrounds the role of ethnic performance as a site where work and everyday life are tightly entangled, thereby exposing the intricate processes through which social inequalities are produced, sustained, and perceived.

Unlike the factory labour often associated with rural-to-urban migrants—typically characterised by impersonal interactions between workers and machines—ethnic performance constitutes a form of interactive service work. In this context, ethnic minority migrants dress in colourful traditional costumes to enact staged representations of local culture, engaging in intimate proximity with consumers through practices such as dancing around dining tables and toasting guests. This embodied and affective closeness accentuates social distinctions along the lines of ethnicity, rural–urban divides, gender, and sexuality.

By adopting intimacy as an analytical lens, Mao traces how dynamics of inequality are experienced by ethnic minority migrants at the intersection of self-perceived identity, interpersonal relationships, and structural conditions such as the hukou (household registration) system. Her approach offers a rich, nuanced account of the lived experiences of internal migrants in contemporary China, advancing a powerful analysis of the ‘cultural politics of inequality’.

Hongkun Wang: The concept of ‘intimacy’ is central to your book. Given that this term has been theorised in various ways across disciplines, could you elaborate on how you conceptualise ‘intimacy’ in your work and what distinguishes your approach from previous understandings?

Jingyu Mao: Intimacy often refers in sociology to the feeling of closeness and the efforts to achieve such closeness. It is used to study a broad range of relationships including family relationships, romantic relationships, friendships, etcetera. My use of the term draws inspiration from scholarship on the sociology of intimacy and the sociology of personal life, yet it has distinct features. Intimacy as a lens means starting from people’s emotions, sense of self, and relationships with other people, and using these micro-scale negotiations as a starting point to advance social inquiry. The main argument of the book is that intimacy is a useful lens for us to understand how inequalities work. Recently, there has been an ‘intimate turn’ in the study of inequality (see Sun 2023), as scholars increasingly recognise how inequalities operate not just at the material level, but also have profound consequences on people’s emotions and private lives. In my work, I detail such consequences, as these migrant performers bear the emotional impacts of multilayered inequality through their work and migration. I also take this one step further to regard intimacy as not only the ‘consequence’, but also a valuable starting point to understand how power works to maintain and reproduce inequality. I hope to show in this work how we can better understand the ‘political’ if we take the ‘personal’ seriously.

HW: You emphasise the entanglement of everyday life and work in the lived experiences of intra-provincial ethnic migrants and propose ‘intimacy as a lens’ to capture the nuanced complexities of the social inequalities they encountered. While intersectionality has often served as the dominant framework in analysing such intricacies, what analytical advantages does the lens of intimacy offer in understanding the inequalities these migrants experienced?

JM: Migrant performers do experience the intersectional inequalities of the rural–urban divide, ethnicity, and gender through their work and migration. Intersectionality does deeply influence my work by considering how different axes of inequality are intertwining and mutually constitutive. Ethnicity, for instance, is strongly associated with rurality in China. And this is one of the reasons my informants initially suggested that I should go to the remote mountain villages to search for the ‘authentic’ ethnic minorities. I am glad that I did not follow this advice. Ethnicity and gender are also deeply interconnected, as can be seen in the myriad ways ethnic minority women are eroticised and regarded as subject to different sexual norms, especially in southwest China. In Chapter 5 of the book, the story of a young migrant woman named Ying is a great example to illustrate how an individual is simultaneously constrained by multiple intersecting oppressions. Therefore, although I did not choose ‘intersectionality’ as the main framework, my work is deeply informed by it.

One hesitation I had about using ‘intersectionality’ is that the boundaries between different social positionings are not always stable and unchanging. Some scholars call this ‘intra-categorisation’ to problematise the categories and the boundaries that are used to inscribe them (McCall 2005). These unsettled boundaries are particularly salient in my project, as I discuss how being an ethnic minority is not a given fact, but something people must constantly practise and negotiate with. Therefore, I decided to use ‘intimacy as a lens’ to better capture how migrant performers constantly negotiate with the various bordering processes of the intersecting inequalities, highlighting the significance of the personal and the emotional in constituting, resisting, or reinforcing these inequalities.

WH: In your analysis, you highlight the emotional self-reflexivity that emerges as ethnic migrants navigate the multilayered and intersecting inequalities of the rural–urban divide, ethnicity, and gender in everyday life and work. Could you elaborate on your decision to foreground emotional experience? 

JM: I did not start the project with ‘emotions’ as one of the central focuses. Yet, I found emotions emerged through my data and realised that they are crucial to fully make sense of these migrant performers’ experiences. Emotions are everywhere in social lives. As sociologists, we must decide whether to consider these emotions to help us understand social interactions and social contexts or to ignore them or treat them as ‘background information’. I chose the former approach and found it fruitful.

One example is the ambivalence many informants feel when they talk about whether they are ‘authentic’ ethnic minorities. That means they are officially registered as coming from a minority background, yet they feel ambivalent about this identity—and sometimes do not even feel a strong sense of belonging linked to it. This sometimes also leads them to feel guilty. They feel they should know more about their ethnic culture, yet, as the younger generation who has grown up under the twin influences of the state’s ‘Han assimilation’ approach and globalisation, they are gradually losing touch with this aspect of their identity. Ambivalence is a subtle emotion that can be easily overlooked by researchers, yet I find it a very useful starting point to probe deeper into the politics of ethnicity and reveal what I call the multilayered ‘ethnic scripts’ in contemporary China. This is also what I mean by ‘intimacy as a lens’, as I focus on people’s emotions (ambivalence in this case) and use this as a starting point for social inquiry.

Even though emotions are often theorised in relation to people’s private lives (such as their family lives and intimate relationships), I find it helpful to understand emotions in social spheres that are often assumed to be unemotional. In this book, I wrote about migrants’ emotional encounters with the migration regime (that is, the hukou system), and how these encounters are highly emotional and therefore require them to exercise their ‘emotional reflexivity’ (Holmes 2010; Burkitt 2012)—that is, the ability to draw on one’s own and other people’s emotions to navigate a complicated situation that lacks a specific ‘feeling rule’ (Hochschild 1979). Migrants’ emotions when encountering an opaque migration regime also have much to tell in terms of revealing the mechanisms of mobility inequalities and an overall ‘emotional regime’ existing at the broader societal level. In the field of psychology, emotions are often regarded as ‘signals’ and can inform us about a person’s mental state. This ‘signal’ function of emotions can also be useful in sociology, as emotions are often revealing of the structural inequalities in which people find themselves, and they are valuable in revealing the ways power works in producing and maintaining inequality.

WH: One of the most compelling concepts in your book is ‘emotional regimes’, which manifest in official discourses such as ‘positive energy’ (正能量). Could you elaborate on how you theorise emotional regimes in the context of contemporary China? Moreover, your analysis of how these normative affective discourses influence ethnic migrants’ perceptions of intimacy within bordering processes is particularly insightful. How are these macro-level emotional discourses embedded in and reproduced through the everyday work and life of ethnic performers?

JM: I did not invent the term ‘emotional regimes’; William Reddy (2001) did in his book about the history of emotions. In a nutshell, emotional regime means the normative ways to feel in a specific historical period of a society. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork from 2016 to 2017, I argue that the emotional regime in China at that time was a neoliberal one that was characterised by three interlocking discourses: happiness, positive energy, and ‘the China Dream’. At the core of these normative feeling rules is the expectation that one must achieve happiness through personal effort and that it is the individual’s fault (rather than society’s responsibility) if they fail to do so. What is left unmentioned is that inequalities mean that people have stratified access to resources to achieve a state of happiness, and that this ‘happiness duty’ (Ahmed 2020) is unequally distributed among different social groups to begin with. For instance, as ethnic minorities, my informants have even more limited space to express their ‘negative emotions’ such as anger since it can be associated with national separatism and therefore regarded as dangerous.

I find that migrant performers internalise these positive feeling rules associated with a neoliberal emotional regime quite deeply. On one hand, they are hopeful that a bright future can be achieved through hard work, even though sometimes this work can involve a refashioning of one’s ethnicity—what I call ‘working on the ethnic self’. On the other hand, they tend to blame themselves for their current struggles in life. They very rarely feel angry, because to feel angry one must be a politically informed citizen who feels that they have been deprived of something. With inequalities so naturalised, my informants justify social injustice as being their own fault—for instance, by referring to their low educational qualification, the fact that they were born in a rural area and not a city, etcetera. This fits the state’s neoliberal governmentality perfectly, as people are encouraged to look inward rather than critiquing the structural oppression that makes their pursuit of happiness challenging.

This broader emotional regime manifests itself in performers’ daily work life in many ways. For example, one of them said that ‘to be a migrant worker is to be a doormat that anyone can vent their anger on’. Generally, they feel they do not deserve much respect. While urban middle-class guests come to the setting with a natural sense that they deserve respect and social recognition, performers are used to enduring the emotional consequences of inequality in their everyday work and migration experiences.

HW: Finally, I would like to revisit a foundational concept in your book: bordering processes. How do you define ‘bordering’ in your framework and how does it differ from the notion of ‘boundary work’? In particular, how do bordering processes function to construct the imagined identities of ethnic minorities as ‘Others’ within the Chinese sociopolitical context and how does this facilitate their marginalisation?

JM: Scholars are increasingly recognising how borders are not just lines on a map demarcating different geographical and political areas. They are also not just a stable institution such as the policed border areas one must pass through when entering another country. Yuval-Davis (2013), for example, talks about ‘everyday bordering’ and how ordinary citizens such as landlords and teachers are mobilised—sometimes even forced—to make bordering work to distinguish legal migrants from the so-called illegal ones in their everyday lives. Inspired by this scholarship, and especially by Mezzadra and Neilson’s Border as Method (2013), I define ‘bordering’ as ‘the processes of making boundaries and drawing distinctions, which overlap territorial borders (such as rural and urban) with their non-territorial (such as symbolic, cultural and cognitive) forms in producing different types of inclusion and exclusion’ (p. 12).

I find that migrant performers must constantly negotiate with these bordering processes in their everyday work, which is not a comfortable position in which to be, as one can imagine. But in a sense, it is also unavoidable for them. As people who undertake interactive service work, they, as rural, minority, working-class service providers, must be in close proximity with those whom they serve—that is, urban customers who are often from a middle-class background, belong to the Han majority, and most of whom are men. Not only is the performers’ labour an intimate labour that requires substantial emotional and aesthetic investment, but also the impact of this type of work does not stop once their shift ends. One of the values of intimacy as a lens is to challenge the division between work and personal lives. Who one becomes at work does not stop when the working hours are over. The lack of respect performers experience during working hours, for example, has a profound impact on their sense of self and their aspirations.

This bordering work, therefore, is constantly producing and reproducing the ‘Others’ in several ways. One way is by distinguishing different groups of people based on their entitlement. For example, as rural migrants, my informants often find it hard to claim medical insurance in the city due to their lack of urban hukou. Another way is by attaching different symbolic meanings to different bodies, behaviours, and social groups. One poignant example is how performers often feel the pressure to prove that they are modern citizens and not backward minorities from rural areas who are of ‘low quality’. This again points to the fact that these bordering processes are highly intimate and emotional, and that one can gain a more solid understanding of how they play out by paying attention to how people feel and act in the private sphere.

References

Ahmed, Sarah. 2020. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Burkitt, Ian. 2012. ‘Emotional Reflexivity: Feeling, Emotion and Imagination in Reflexive Dialogues.’ Sociology 46(3): 458–72.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.’ American Journal of Sociology 85(3): 551 –75.

Holmes, Mary. 2010. ‘The Emotionalization of Reflexivity.’ Sociology 44(1): 139–54.

McCall, Leslie. 2005. ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3): 1771–800.

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Sun, Wanning. 2023. Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences. London: Bloomsbury.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2013. ‘A Situated Intersectional Everyday Approach to the Study of Bordering.’ EUBORDERSCAPES working paper no. 2. www.euborderscapes.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Working_Papers/EUBORDERSCAPES_Working_Paper_2_Yuval-Davis.pdf.