Maid as Metaphor
Maid as Metaphor
Dagongmei and a New Pathway to Chinese Transnational Capital
This chapter notes that the circuit of transnational capital is inhabited not only by power elites but also by invisible laboring bodies. It begins with an examination of Jia Zhangke's film, The World, which underscores an often underexplored connection between transnational imagination and global mobility. The lives of the migrant workers in the film demonstrate that mobility can be understood as both a material and a mental process, one predicated on the consumption of transnational images. The chapter then studies the figure of the maid and the particular labor of Chinese dagongmei (female migrant worker), tracing a number of often contradictory ways in which the migrant maid is configured in the narratives of nationalism and global capitalism to establish the maid as an evolving metaphor in Chinese popular mediatized narratives of modernity.
Keywords: Chinese transnational capital, transnational imagination, global mobility, transnational images, Chinese dagongmei, migrant maid, nationalism, global capitalism, modernity
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