The intimacy and mobility of Chinese female migrant factory workers in Singapore

Abstract

My dissertation examines the situations and lived experiences of low-wage Chinese female migrants engaged in global electronics manufacturing in Singapore. According to the Ministry of Commerce of China, as of 2019, there were about one million Chinese nationals working overseas as low-wage temporary workers. Singapore is one of the largest host countries of low-wage Chinese migrants. A considerable number of the migrants are concentrated in the city-state’s electronics manufacturing sector as factory workers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2019 in Singapore, the dissertation explores the interconnections between the macroprocess of capitalist globalisation and migrant women’s intimacy and mobility, and between migrant women’s productive labour and reproductive labour. It builds and expands on feminist geography research in the following ways: it necessary to the the