“Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration”:
Intimacy as a lens means starting from people’s emotions, sense of self, and relationships with other people, and using these micro-scale negotiations as a starting point to advance social inquiry.
One hesitation I had about using ‘intersectionality’ is that the boundaries between different social positionings are not always stable and unchanging. Some scholars call this ‘intra-categorisation’ to problematise the categories and the boundaries that are used to inscribe them (McCall 2005). These unsettled boundaries are particularly salient in my project, as I discuss how being an ethnic minority is not a given fact, but something people must constantly practise and negotiate with.
One example is the ambivalence many informants feel when they talk about whether they are ‘authentic’ ethnic minorities. That means they are officially registered as coming from a minority background, yet they feel ambivalent about this identity—and sometimes do not even feel a strong sense of belonging linked to it. This sometimes also leads them to feel guilty. They feel they should know more about their ethnic culture, yet, as the younger generation who has grown up under the twin influences of the state’s ‘Han assimilation’ approach and globalisation, they are gradually losing touch with this aspect of their identity.
Even though emotions are often theorised in relation to people’s private lives (such as their family lives and intimate relationships), I find it helpful to understand emotions in social spheres that are often assumed to be unemotional. In this book, I wrote about migrants’ emotional encounters with the migration regime (that is, the hukou system), and how these encounters are highly emotional and therefore require them to exercise their ‘emotional reflexivity’ (Holmes 2010; Burkitt 2012)—that is, the ability to draw on one’s own and other people’s emotions to navigate a complicated situation that lacks a specific ‘feeling rule’ (Hochschild 1979). Migrants’ emotions when encountering an opaque migration regime also have much to tell in terms of revealing the mechanisms of mobility inequalities and an overall ‘emotional regime’ existing at the broader societal level. In the field of psychology, emotions are often regarded as ‘signals’ and can inform us about a person’s mental state. This ‘signal’ function of emotions can also be useful in sociology, as emotions are often revealing of the structural inequalities in which people find themselves, and they are valuable in revealing the ways power works in producing and maintaining inequality.
I did not invent the term ‘emotional regimes’; William Reddy (2001) did in his book about the history of emotions. In a nutshell, emotional regime means the normative ways to feel in a specific historical period of a society. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork from 2016 to 2017, I argue that the emotional regime in China at that time was a neoliberal one that was characterised by three interlocking discourses: happiness, positive energy, and ‘the China Dream’. At the core of these normative feeling rules is the expectation that one must achieve happiness through personal effort and that it is the individual’s fault (rather than society’s responsibility) if they fail to do so. What is left unmentioned is that inequalities mean that people have stratified access to resources to achieve a state of happiness, and that this ‘happiness duty’ (Ahmed 2020) is unequally distributed among different social groups to begin with. For instance, as ethnic minorities, my informants have even more limited space to express their ‘negative emotions’ such as anger since it can be associated with national separatism and therefore regarded as dangerous.
They very rarely feel angry, because to feel angry one must be a politically informed citizen who feels that they have been deprived of something. With inequalities so naturalised, my informants justify social injustice as being their own fault—for instance, by referring to their low educational qualification, the fact that they were born in a rural area and not a city, etcetera. This fits the state’s neoliberal governmentality perfectly, as people are encouraged to look inward rather than critiquing the structural oppression that makes their pursuit of happiness challenging.
I define ‘bordering’ as ‘the processes of making boundaries and drawing distinctions, which overlap territorial borders (such as rural and urban) with their non-territorial (such as symbolic, cultural and cognitive) forms in producing different types of inclusion and exclusion’.