Living Emotions

: An Ethnography of Chinese Migrant Women Factory Workers and the Worlds of Mobility

Abstract

This thesis, based on 6-month ethnographic fieldwork in the Alpha Factory in the Yangtze River Delta, China, examines the emotional worlds of Chinese women rural-to-urban migrant factory workers in their late teens to mid-30s. Against the backdrop of China’s role as the “World’s Factory” being challenged and evolving, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, it asks how these women experience factory life and explores how they construct their selfhood and coordinate different facets of life through the working of emotions. This study contributes to the sociology of gender and labour research in China by addressing the fundamental significance of emotions in women workers’ lives. It also contributes to global scholarship by introducing and conceptualising collective emotions related to mobility, labour, and womanhood in a non-Western context.

Applying the theoretical framework of the cultural politics of emotion by Sara Ahmed (2004a), this research attends to the representative, shared feelings situated in the different realms of women workers’ lives. In this study, piaobo (i.e., drifting and anchoring in Chinese, meaning living an unstable life on the move with no place to rest or belong to) is conceptualised as a core feeling of women workers’ migration, which connects their structured melancholy working as labourers in the factory system, their feeling of shenbu youji (i.e., having no choice but to do something in Chinese) in their love lives, and their enduring feeling of inadequacy in performing family roles. These interrelated feelings constitute the emotional landscape of these women workers, through which we can see how they construct, transform, and understand their selfhood in a precarious socioeconomic status.

By foregrounding the politics of these emotions in Chinese working-class life, I argue that the sustainment of the patriarchal systems, including the capitalist factory, the traditional family, and intimate relationships, is based on emotional exploitation and constraints on women. These systems, on the one hand, create contradictions and ambivalence by leaving subtle space for women’s resistance and then hindering them from dismantling patriarchal norms. On the other hand, they craft a sense of stability, which fabricates a promise suggesting that happiness can be attained by conforming to sociocultural gender norms. Faced with the structural and emotional dilemma, women workers actively engaged in constructing meanings of their decisions and actions by articulating and interpreting their feelings related to the systems. These engagements reveal the central role of emotions in women workers’ lived realities.

Date of Award	12 Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Junko Yamashita (Supervisor) & Katharine A H Charsley (Supervisor)