Speaker: Dr. Jingyu Mao, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Bielefeld University

Thursday March 24, 8:30 PM – 10:00 PM BJT

Zoom: 913 7002 8782, Passcode: CSCC

Abstract

Based on six months’ of ethnographic fieldwork from 2016-2017 in Yunnan Province, this talk focuses on the work and migration experiences of ethnic performers, whose representations are prevalent in many cultural spheres in China, yet their voices tend to be silenced. Ethnic performers are rural-urban migrants who perform ethnic songs and dances at different venues such as restaurants and tourist sites. Most of them come from ethnic minority backgrounds.

This talk firstly explores how ethnic performance becomes a site of encounter where minority, rural, feminized service providers interact with Han, urban, masculinized customers, and how such physical proximity rendered their social distance even more significant. It is also an important site where performers encounter various bordering processes relating to the rural-urban divide, ethnicity and gender. This talk seeks to elucidate how the daily encounters of ethnicity shape performers’ understanding and ways of doing ethnicity, and the politics of ethnicity it reveals. To be more specific, ethnic performers’ ambivalences regarding whether they are ‘authentic minorities’ points to the inadequacy of understanding ethnicity in an essentialised way. By understanding ethnicity as something people do rather than who they are, ‘ethnic scripts’ was proposed as a conceptual tool to illuminate the cultural and social repertoire which deeply shape people’s understanding and ways of doing ethnicity. By exploring the multi-layered meaning of ethnic scripts in contemporary China, this talk highlights the ways that ethnic scripts are closely related to migrant performers’ emotions and sense of self, and the fact that ethnic scripts are inherently gendered.

Bio

Dr Jingyu Mao receives her PhD in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include work and migration, ethnicity, gender, rural-urban divide, intimacy and emotion. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bielefeld University, working for the ERC-funded project ‘WelfareStruggles’, which comparatively looks at welfare provisions for global factory workers in China and Vietnam.