Caring in Times of Precarity

A Study of Single Women Doing Creative Work in Shanghai

Chow Yiu Fai

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319768977
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319768984
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of 'precariat': single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these women also find themselves interpellated as shengnü ('left-over women') in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women's professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their singlehood and creative labour as problematic, and them as victims. It departs from dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous to the extent of (self-)exploitation, accepting insecurity. The book seeks to understand– empirically and specifically–women's everyday struggles and pleasures. It highlights the up-close, everyday embodied, affective, and subjective experience in a particular Chinese city, with broader, global resonances well beyond China. Exploring the limits of the politics of precarity, the book proposes an ethics of care.

© The Author(s) 2019

Chow Yiu FaiCaring in Times of PrecarityPalgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76898-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Living on My Own, Creatively, Precariously

Chow Yiu Fai¹

(1)

Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Chow Yiu Fai

End Abstract

This book project originated from my personal observations and curiosity. In addition to my academic pursuits, I have been working for many years as a creative writer. My base has been Hong Kong. In the past decade, my base has spread to mainland China. When I started visiting mainland China more frequently, I started to notice this: many of the media people I met were women, and many of them single. I started to wonder about the relationship between single women and creative work. Does their singlehood help them deal more effectively with creative work demands? Or, conversely, do their work demands actually strengthen their choice or necessity to remain single? Or, are they just fine with being single and doing their work? … I simply did not know, but I suspected that there must be something about their working lives, their private single lives, that was embodied in the women I came across.

When I consolidated these initial observations and curiosity into a research project, I realized something about its historicity. These single women doing creative work are actually straddling a historical, precarious conjuncture, configured by two peculiar trajectories in our globalizing times.

First, increasing numbers of people do not subscribe to traditional forms of shared living; they lead a single life. Whether as a matter of choice or an act of necessity, singlehood has become possible by processes of urbanization and modernization, and all the conveniences they afford. For the first time in human history, as argued by Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, as well as Eric Klinkenberg, people do not necessarily need a family.¹ Citing Klinenberg’s work, a 2017 commentary on China announced in its headline: “The single society has come!”² According to the latest available official figures published in 2014 and 2015, among the total national population of 1.368 billion, 21.5 per cent of those aged 20 and above are single. Among those aged 20 to 59, 170 million are single, 40.4 per cent of whom are female.³

At the same time, single people continue to be stigmatized. Single women, particularly—as Kinneret Lahad repeatedly shows in her series of studies—have had to wrestle with the accusation, and sometimes internalized self-accusation of being unnatural, unattractive, pathological, eccentric, desperate, and egocentric; in short, single women are often led to believe they are lesser women while the ideology of marriage, family, and above all, motherhood continues to be privileged.⁴ In the Chinese context, the widely circulated term “3S ladies”—single, seventies (born in the 1970s)—has stuck, testifying to the negative stereotype single women in China have to wrestle with.⁵ Another term, shengnü (剩女)—literally, leftover women—referring to single urban professional women in their late twenties, was introduced by the official Women’s Federation in 2007, to remind women not to be too demanding and to get married before it is too late.

Second, increasingly more people are attracted to the promises of creative work, and so, join the creative workforce. The discourse of the creative industries—and its underpinning ideologies of self-fulfilment, flexibility, and freedom—has globalized profoundly, especially with the influential and upbeat thinking on creative class and creative city by Richard Florida.⁶ Creative labour in China, as yet understudied, offers a unique prism to view how such a globalized discourse is articulated in the context of China. Creative work is supposed to give you more autonomy, flexibility, and job satisfaction, and is generally considered more human. Paradoxically, in return for such presumably desirable work, creative workers often sacrifice more regular working hours and good job security. They bear the risks and responsibilities individually, struggle with their work–life balance, and tolerate multiple demands, demoralization, and exploitation.⁷ In her latest book on creative work, Angela McRobbie critically reframes the call to be creative as “a potent and highly appealing mode of new governmentality,” adding, “this mode of neoliberal governmentality is also a general and widespread mode of precarization.”⁸ While scholarship is building on “Creative China,” existing studies show a preference for issues concerning the political economy, for instance, or creative policies and industry practices,⁹ as well as concerning the nation itself, such as, for instance, the promotion of freedom and the exercise of “soft power.”¹⁰

Straddling this historical, precarious conjuncture, this book zooms in on one particular group of “precariat”: single women in Shanghai who earn their living by various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, they also find themselves interpellated as latent or actual shengnü in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Put differently, despite all the purported undesirability of single womanhood and creative work, they are still living as single women doing creative work. Following these women’s professional, social, and intimate lives in the urban space, this book is, first and foremost, an attempt to understand a woman’s life in both its work and after-work time and practices, defying the artificial demarcations of singlehood as personal, and creative work as professional. At the same time, this book fills a research gap by bringing into dialogue two fields of studies: while studies on the creative class have neglected gender and affective dimensions, studies on single women, on the contrary, often privilege the personal and leave behind issues of work. Thus premised, it aims to study the Chinese case not only for its specificities, but ultimately, for its mobilization as a method, following Chen Kuan-hsing’s “Asia as method.”¹¹ My intention is to explore the world of these single women in China, to see if there are new paths to follow outside of—or crisscrossing with—the well-trodden paths of thinking on single womanhood and creative work.

As I shall explicate in the following chapters, what these women have to say urges me to write a book that converses with, but departs from, dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous to the extent of self-exploitation and acceptance of insecurity. My approach refuses to see these women’s singlehood and creative labour necessarily as problems, and them as victims. I do not want to; I cannot. Although the women I have got to know may have their share of difficulties, hardships, and quandaries, they show a strong sense of caring for their lives despite and because of these difficulties, hardships, and quandaries. This book seeks to understand, empirically and specifically, their everyday struggles and pleasures in a city such as Shanghai. Ultimately, it aims to address an urgent issue in our contemporary mode of existence: how (far) can one take care of oneself in times of precarity?¹² Teasing out the local experiences of such a global question, I continue by asking: while these Chinese women are dealing with the multiple demands of singlehood and creative jobs, how do they maintain a sense of well-being, obtain pleasure, and exercise agency? In other words: how can one take care of oneself in the midst of everyday precarity? And how, and how far, do they experience such precarity? And how do global scripts related to womanhood, love, and creative work inform their aspirations? In other words, this inquiry is about local modes of precarity implicated in global ideologies and imaginaries pertaining to (ideal) womanhood and its intersection with creative labour. Ultimately, my aim is to hold up the Shanghai case as an opening to re-enter scholarship on precarity: perhaps, for these Chinese women, precarity is a human condition known to them, suitable for them, and available to them? Perhaps “precarity” is a male-centric and Western-centric notion? Driven by its local, empirical insights, this book aims to rethink the global condition of precarity; it pushes current debates on precarity beyond the domain of labour towards the domain of care.¹³

In the rest of this introductory chapter, I will start by contextualizing the research by offering a historical account of (single) womanhood and (creative) work in contemporary globalized urban China. The chapter continues with discussions, particularly in their intersections with the concerns of precarity and what the single women in this inquiry have to say about their lives. The specificities of the Chinese women, both in terms of being “Chinese” and “women,” lead me to argue for the limits of the politics of precarity, and to propose an ethics of care. I will then present the women, and the methods I have used to converse with them. Chapter 1 ends by presenting the organizational logic of the book and the gist of the subsequent chapters.

The Chinese Context

Any account that dares to cover the colossal changes of the last decades in the colossal country of China is bound to be sketchy, jumpy, and unfinished. Even if I confine it to the realms of (single) womanhood and (creative) work, I will exclude much more than I include. For our purposes, allow me, therefore, to focus on two historical moments: the Communist Revolution of 1949, and the opening up of the Chinese economy to the global capitalist system, starting in 1978.¹⁴

Mao’s famous call for women to “hold up half of the sky” is often quoted as an epitome of the post-1949 exercise to achieve a radical form of gender equality. Organized by the State and the Party, the exercise was part and parcel of the Marxist doctrine of casting female subordination in the larger project to erase all kinds of class and socioeconomic inequali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Living on My Own, Creatively, Precariously
• 2. Living with Their Own Images
• 3. Living with a Generation—Qilinghou, Balinghou, Jiulinghou
• 4. Balancing Work/Life?
• 5. To Love, to Live
• 6. Living with Us—The Case of Kunqu
• 7. Living with the City
• 8. Living with Themselves, Creating Themselves
• 9. Epilogue
• Back Matter