From rural migrants to bar hostesses: Gender and sex industry in a post-Mao city (China)

This project examines karaoke bar hostesses' lives and predicaments in post-Mao China. Based on 20 months of fieldwork in Dalian City, China, this is the first ethnography of the hostesses and an in-depth analysis of their struggle with the social, cultural, and institutional discrimination. By working and living with these bar hostesses, I learned what it was like for these young women to struggle for respect, to improve their social standing, and to fashion themselves as modern women. I argue that the constraints hostesses face paradoxically become their repertoire for self-advancement. Hostesses are both agents and victims who challenge, contribute to, and reinforce the restraints in their lives.; As rural migrants and sex workers, hostesses carry the heavy baggage of the history of urban-rural divide, demeaning representations, and institution of power in post-Mao sex industry. Hostesses appropriate and perform their represented images as demure virgins and rapacious prostitutes to make use of clients' socioeconomic resources and open up a negotiated space for themselves in the city. The resources gleaned enable them to engage in conspicuous consumption to project an exaggerated image of an urban woman. Such an image refuses their represented image as country bumpkins incapable of being full-fledged urban women. Their refashioned image is intended to contest their stigma and emphasize their urbanity and legitimate citizenship. Although hostesses perform their represented image with an anti-state agenda, the very nature of their agency paradoxically becomes their bondage in reinscribing and reproducing that image and legitimizing the exploitative system of the sex industry and the state.