Gendered Transnational Ties and Multipolar Economies: Chinese Migrant Women's WeChat Commerce in Taiwan

Zani, Beatrice

doi:10.1111/imig.12526

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Consequently, the question here shifts from the amount and duration of mobilities to "how the formation, regulation, and distribution of these mobilities are shaped and patterned by existing social, political, and economic structures" (Salazar, 2014: 60). By way of example, transnational mobilities are also shaped by ethnic enclaves (Molina, Valenzuela-García, Lubbers, García-Macías, & Pampalona, 2015), supranational organizations (Fradejas-García & Mülli, 2019) or gendered transnational connections (Zani, 2019).…”

Section: Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe

Fradejas-García

Polese

Bhimji³

2021

Migrat. Lett.

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People around the globe rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of institutions and states. In the EU, regimes of mobility at multiple scales affect various people on the move who are pushed into informality in order to acquire social mobility while having to combat border regimes, racialization, inequalities, and state bureaucracies. This text explores how mobilities and informality are entangled with one another when it comes to responding to the social, political, and economic inequalities that are produced by border and mobility regimes. Within this frame, the ethnographic articles in this special issue go beyond national borders to connect the production of mobility and informality at multiple interconnected scales, from refugees adapting to settlement bureaucracies locally to transit migrants coping with the selective external borders of the EU, or from transnational entrepreneurs’ ability to move between formal and informal norms to the multiple ways in which transnational mobility informally confronts economic, social and political constraints. In sum, this volume brings together articles on informality and mobility that take account of the elusive practices that deal with the inequalities of mobility and immobility.

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Section: Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe

Fradejas-García

Polese

Bhimji³

2021

Migrat. Lett.

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“…Studies on Chinese spouses who migrate to and set up life in Taiwan have pointed out obstacles to women’s social, economic and cultural integration. The political stand-off between China and Taiwan, together with social and gender stereotypes (Cheng, 2013), produce grammars of misrecognition towards Chinese women, with strong repercussions in the local Taiwanese labour market, where women are often denied access to work or to a decent employment (Zani, 2018).…”

Section: The Puzzle: From Inequalities In the Labour Market To Digitamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This represents a novel business practice which is performed through digital platforms, of which WeChat, used by Wenfeng, is illustrative. Crucially, it involves the visible or invisible transfer of information, money and goods by social networks of sellers and clients (Zani, 2018).…”

Section: The Puzzle: From Inequalities In the Labour Market To Digitamentioning

confidence: 99%

WeChat, we sell, we feel: Chinese women’s emotional petit capitalism

Zani

2020

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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Through multi-situated and virtual ethnography, this article investigates the link between mobilities, subalternity, emotions and digital economies. Drawing on the case study of Chinese migrant women’s digital labour and e-commerce in Taiwan, it elucidates the social and emotional construction of translocal virtual markets, which connect online and offline the different temporalities, spatialities and emotions of women’s mobilities. In Taiwan, Chinese migrants contest a local condition of social, economic and cultural subalternity by exploring physical and digital, material and emotional markets. Setting sail through local consumption and translocal logistics, through the online application WeChat an emotional petit capitalism is socially and emotionally produced within women’s daily microcosmos of experiences and practices.

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“…Grounded studies on transnationalism have probed the permanent links established by migrants between society of departure and of settlement (Glick‐Schiller et al, 1994). Within a globalised context of interconnection, instantaneous movements and hypermobility (Burawoy, 2001; Zani, 2018), migrants become trans ‐ migrants (Tarrius, 2000) since they carry on transnational experiences and lifestyles. They position themselves in between societies, creating new connections and new bridges between the spaces they crossed during their multiple, bifurcated, and labyrinthine paths.…”

Section: Introductory Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In‐between: Re‐migration, orbital mobilities and emotional circulations of women from China to Taiwan and back to China

Zani

2020

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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After a first labour migration from the countryside to the city in China, some Chinese migrant working women are engaged in marriage migration to Taiwan. There, they face social, gendered and economic subalternity. Therefore, some women divorce and re‐migrate to China, to the city they had been previously working in, where they remobilise social, economic and emotional resources, as well as the new competences and knowledge capitalised during mobility experiences in China and Taiwan. They oscillate between new local and global scales, and generate creative social, economic and emotional connections among spaces, places and people. Mobilities take the shape of physical and virtual, material and emotional ‘orbits’, connecting diverse spatialities, temporalities and affections. Drawing on a multi‐situated global ethnographic work tracking women's migrations from China to Taiwan and from Taiwan to China, this article contributes to the study of physical and virtual, material and emotional mobilities of migrants in a globalised social world of interconnection and hypermobility. It provides insights to apprehend, theoretically, methodologically and empirically, the link between mobilities, emotions the digitalisation of social and economic practices. Navigating through spatialities, temporalities and emotions, Chinese women produce ‘in‐between’ cosmopolitan biographies inside mutating and fluid local and global, physical and virtual, spaces. Mobilities take an orbital shape, embedded in social and affectional relations, economic practices, and emotions.

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Gendered Transnational Ties and Multipolar Economies: Chinese Migrant Women's WeChat Commerce in Taiwan

Cited by 17 publications

References 41 publications

Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe

Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe

WeChat, we sell, we feel: Chinese women’s emotional petit capitalism

In‐between: Re‐migration, orbital mobilities and emotional circulations of women from China to Taiwan and back to China

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