Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace

Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

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• Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition
• Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving
• In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis
• Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)