Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China

摘要

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three formal and informal service sectors in Beijing and Kunming, this book explores the ways in which the service economy in post-Mao China produces new forms of gender and class inequality. This new social inequality is expressed and materialized through the attention, care, respect and deference that the emergent class of service workers provides to new affluent consumers. Service labour, the book argues, not only is conducive to profits in the consumer economy, but also fundamentally transforms women's social status in contemporary China.