Serving the people: Gender, class, and ethnicity in China's emergent service sector

This dissertation analyzes the gendered causes and consequences of marketization in China by investigating new service-based occupations in contrasting regional and institutional settings. The development of feminized service sectors is a central yet overlooked dimension of socialist transitions and of processes of market restructuring. Service sector employment represents a dramatically new and important source of wage employment for women in China and leads to a fundamental reshaping of gender structures. In this dissertation I show that as China engages in the process of global market restructuring, the service sector is a central site for also restructuring gender and class. I draw on comparative ethnography to chart the organizational processes through which gendered working classes are produced and analyze how women themselves weave divergent cultural threads (from global and local sources) into a new fabric of identity as they negotiate the demands of service work. The dissertation's three case studies include two formal sector international hotels and a population of service outlets in the unregulated sector.; The dissertation asks: Why do women service workers embrace gender identities that are tightly bound up with dramatic new inequalities? To answer this question, I theorize gender identity as a potential resource for navigating new structures of work. But gender identity varies, I find, depending on regional and sectoral context and ultimately depending on how state agencies mediate global capital. I propose a five step macro to micro conceptual apparatus, called the “chain of global incorporation,” through which I link state mediation of global capital to labor regimes, labor commodification, and ultimately to forms of gender identity. I show that while the chain of incorporation provides a scaffolding for constructing gender, women actively draw upon and use forms of femininity to manage new structures of work in a quest for dignity. This study analyzes the contextualized modes in which women workers construct a sense of dignity and the specific resources they have for doing so.