The Gendered Rice Bowl: The Sexual Politics of Service Work in Urban China.

Under new service work regimes in China, women?s bodies and their labor are subject to a process of feminization and sexualization that reflect dramatic changes to China?s gender politics. Female service workers? bodies are at once the objects of managerial interventions and disciplinary strategies that aim to produce a particular kind of serving body as well as the subjects of new, feminized subjectivities rooted in a sexualized bodily consciousness. In this paper I use the term ?embodification? to describe a process that marks young female bodies as emblems productive capitalism while and at the same time mapping the inefficiencies and backwardness of state socialism onto the bodies of middle-aged women. At the same time, the new, normative embodiment of the productive woman service worker stands opposed to a deviant, potentially threatening variant: the aggressively sexual young woman who represents the underbelly of capitalism. The ?embodification? of service work in China allows some women to sup from the ?rice bowl of youth? while others, and middle-aged women in particular, increasingly find their rice bowls left empty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]