Abstract
The chapter examines male migrant workers’ articulation and negotiation of being single. A central question is how migrant men make sense of their status of being single. The men recount heteronormative cultural values in relation to the family, which serve as central resources in forging their identities. It highlights that traditional cultural values, such as those attached to being a capable man, are lived out in single migrant men’s everyday lives. More specifically, their articulations regarding “ben shi” (capability) and “mian zi” (the face), in relation to heterosexual relationships and marriage, are central in making sense of the attributes of their masculine identities.
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Notes
- 1.
http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20140124/100675.shtml (accessed on 10th May 2015).
- 2.
The migrant workers’ names in this paper have been anonymized.
- 3.
According to Yan (2003: 494), “suzhi”: “refers to the somewhat ephemeral qualities of civility, self-discipline, and modernity…(suzhi) marks a sense and sensibility of the self’s value in the market economy… it is often used in the negative by the post-Mao state and educational elites to point to the lack of quality of the Chinese labouring masses. Improving the suzhi of China’s massive population has become vitally important in the planning of governing elites for China to become a competitive player in the field of global capital… a new ontological valuation and abstraction of human subjectivity through examining the linkages among poverty-relief campaigns, labour migration, and development.”
- 4.
The term “diao si” is web-slang. It literally means “pubic hair”. It refers to unprivileged young individuals with low social status.
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Lin, X. (2017). Single Male Rural-Urban Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of Masculinity in China. In: Lin, X., Haywood, C., Mac an Ghaill, M. (eds) East Asian Men. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55634-9_2
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