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Author: Jingyu Mao

Discussants: Susanne Yuk Ping Choi, Suvi Rautio & Guanyu Jason Ran

Details: CRFR, GENDER.ED and UoE Sociology welcome Jingyu Mao, author of ‘Intimacy as a Lens in Work and Migration’, to discuss her recent book along with a guest panel.

This book elucidates the intimate consequences of inequalities, and how intimacy offers a fresh set of insights into understanding the multi-layered and intersecting inequalities. Based on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork and 60 in-depth interviews, this book demonstrates how rural/urban, ethnic, and gendered inequalities structure certain kinds of service work and migration trajectories, and how they are experienced through the intimate and emotional experiences of workers themselves. It coins the concepts of ‘intimacy as a lens’ and ‘border encounters’ as key tools to make sense of how close encounters between ethnic, rural, feminised performers and Han, urban, masculinised customers re-inscribe the boundaries between more and less privileged groups in China. The idea of exoticised, feminised, and rural ‘ethnic’ workers animates how this particular form of service work is organised and experienced. This has intimate consequences for the workers: it shapes the kinds of people they aspire to become, the levels of respect they feel they are entitled to, the ways they understand their own ethnicity and its (in)authenticity, and how they navigate intimate relations with others in their lives. The book reveals how close attention to intimacy in relation to work and migration offers a fresh set of insights into inequality in contemporary Chinese society.

Author Bio: Jingyu Mao is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include emotion, work and migration, ethnicity and gender, rural-urban inequality, intimacy and personal life. Her work appears in journals such as Emotions and Society, the China Quarterly, China Perspectives, Global Social Policy, and Families, Relationships, and Societies.

Discussants Bios:

Susanne Yuk Ping Choi is Professor of Sociology/Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include migration, gender, family, and sexuality. Her lead-authored book Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China received the Best Book Award of the International Sociological Association’s Sociology of Migration Section (RC31). Her journal articles were published in American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, The Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies etc.

Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Trained as a social and cultural anthropologist specialising on China, her academic interests cover a range of fields that help her unpack the historical and social orderings of the country’s marginalised populations. She has conducted fieldwork in rural Guizhou on heritage and with African dancers in Guangzhou. Currently she is working on her own family history contributing to discussions on the politics of memory amongst Beijing’s intellectual class during the Maoist era. Alongside her writing and research, she is the editor-in-chief of Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society and an active podcast host for New Books Network Chinese studies.

Guanyu Jason Ran is a Lecturer of Sociology and Social Policy in the social science programme at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. His research investigates the process and outcome of immigrants’ settlement in major Western societies, with a particular focus on the changes in family dynamics and intergenerational relationships of Asian immigrants. He is an Associate Director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, and currently co-editing the journal Families, Relationships, and Societies. He is also an Associate Editor for the journal International Migration Review, and the Book Review Editor for New Zealand Sociology.