The gendered reflections of stayers in China’s migrant sending villages

Journal article

This article draws on my interviews with middle-aged stayers in rural China's eastern interior in the early to mid-2010s to explore interactions between gender and non-migration. I use the concept of ‘spatial reflexivity’ – individuals' reflections on their potential for (im)mobility – to examine how different stayers' reflections about their non-migration were affected by both wider mobility imperatives and by attachments to family, each of which is gendered. I find that my respondents' spatial reflexivity was inseparable from their perception of their villages as home fort, stepping-stone or sanctuary, with these perceptions partly reflective of their households' non/involvement in migration and economic conditions. At the same time, stayers' views of their villages interacted with context-specific gendered ideas about space, obligation and competence, to affect what staying meant to them. This article concludes that even as staying in China's rural interior was an actively worked out process, individuals' spatial reflexivity was mediated and constrained by multi-scalar inequalities, which were in turn naturalized by a pervasive gendered moral geography.

Authors: Murphy, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Journal of Rural Studies
• Volume: 88
• Pages: 317-325
• Publication date: 2021-08-18
• Acceptance date: 2021-08-11
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.08.011
• ISSN: 0743-0167
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR