Male Migrant Workers and Shifting Masculine Identities in Urban Workspaces in China

A key feature of China’s internal rural–urban migration is the transformation of work from a rural-based agricultural sector to urban-based industrial and service sectors. The paper critically examines the interplay between urban work and accompanying social relations in the workplace (that is, service and low-skilled manual jobs) and the (re)construction of male peasant workers’ subjectivities and identity formation.

The qualitative data from the men’s life histories suggest that familial gender practices, conceptualized as an appropriation of the traditional Confucian ‘father–son’ relationship, are of importance in shaping the men’s occupationally located shifting identities in traditional urban ‘female’ jobs.

This study aims to examine complex and multilayered accounts of rural–urban labour migration, in terms of how the men accommodate themselves to the city, involving both material constraints (structure) and creative cultural practices (agency).

Their biographical transformations are located within wider socioeconomic and political transformations associated with China’s current modernization project, of which they are a major constitutive component.