Traversing Precarity: The Socioeconomic Mobility of Female Migrant Building Workers in China

This article is located at the nexus of three bodies of geographical research. First, we respond to calls for careful and considered engagement with conditions, subjectivities, and experiences of precarity. Second, we contribute to the small but critically rich literature exploring structural organization of building industries and the everyday lives of workers. Third, we offer new ontological and epistemological momentum for long-standing study of migration in China. In doing so we interrogate ethnographic research focused on female migrants who work long hours, rarely take holidays, endure physical and emotional tiredness, extreme temperatures, dirty and dusty working conditions, family dislocations and, for some, challenging communal living. With an average age in the mid-forties, respondents nonetheless had moved from farms, factories, or both to building sites to secure higher salaries as well as contractual, financial, and familial stability. Few expressed concerns regarding working conditions nor articulated experiences of anxiety, uncertainty, and unmoored-ness at “the edges” of society. Drawing on feminist, materialist, and more-than-representational insights into resistance, resilience, and reworking, we unpack this empirical terrain, highlighting how female building workers respond to and shape relations of power, in and through mundane labor and domestic and family struggles. Overall, we contribute to progress in decolonizing geographical knowledge complexes.