Rural Women As ‘Docile Bodies’: Discipline of Informal Female Workers and the Resistance to Disciplinary Power in Midwest China

The informal employment of rural women is commonly depicted as being exploitative and unregulated. Particularly in the Global South, female rural workers in informal sectors, as a significant source of labour in globalisation, are subjected to severe deprivation of rights and benefits. In one of the ‘world’s factories’, China, the issue is further aggravated by the patriarchal cultural values, the gendered division of labour, and the state’s rigorous control of core enterprises. For such political and cultural specificities, rural women’s informal employment in Chinese (state-owned) sectors appears to be an interesting topic that invites extensive studies.

This research is based on fieldwork in a state-owned tobacco-leaf acquisition site in a rural region of Midwest China. Through in-depth ethnographic observation and interviews with temporal female workers at the site, we revealed the structural coercions the workers endured in the forms of rigid spatial and temporal organisations. From a Foucauldian analytical lens, we argued that the female workers’ experiences embodied how disciplinary power regulates and turns individuals into ‘docile bodies’ to improve their structural functionality. In the meantime, our findings also unpacked the female workers’ strategies in resistance to disciplinary power, including tactic management of attendance and intentional underperformance at work. The female workers’ endeavour to enhance their work conditions epitomised how Chinese rural women performed their autonomy to counter the disciplines and oppressions in informal employment. By conducting this research, we appeal to broad investigations of the disciplinary exploitation of rural women, as well as their agentic resistance, in the informal economy in the Global South.