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A Cage of VoicesProducing and Doing Dagongmei in Contemporary ChinaOxford University "I have a stomach full of words, but I just can’t say them" is a statement often uttered by migrant women in contemporary China. Using this as a point of entry, this article explores the paradoxical role that the Dagongmei’s Home, a Beijing women’s organization that promotes the rights and interests of female migrants, plays in producing identities for its members and in channeling their voices into the public arena. The Dagongmei’s Home is both a site of articulation and a cage that limits and contains the marginal voices of migrant women. By "hailing" its members into subjectivity as the dagongmei (working sister), the organization empowers these women to speak in otherwise closed spaces. However, since the women can only speak as dagongmei, they end up reproducing the state’s discourse of modernization. Nevertheless, a community-based drama workshop set up by a British woman in collaboration with the Home becomes an unlikely site of resistance as migrant women break the script of strong women sacrificing for the nation’s economic development, thus doing dagongmei subversively.
Key Words: migrant women • China • NGO • voice • identity • state discourse • doing dagongmei
This version was published on September
1, 2009 Modern China, Vol. 35, No. 5,
527-561 (2009) |
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