ABSTRACT
China leads the world in mobile phone use, with roughly 700 million subscriptions as of mid-2009 (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology 2009) and, as the mobile phone has become integrated into Chinese society, its presence has generated a certain amount of alarm, particularly due to perceptions that its usage threatens individual and societal morality. Such sentiments were depicted in director Feng Xiaogang’s film Shouji (Cell Phone), which chronicles a television talk show host’s extra-marital affairs, with lies and liaisons all made possible via his mobile phone. As the topgrossing Chinese domestic film of 2003, Shouji indeed captured the national Zeitgeist: pride and pleasure in the newfound personal freedoms and affluence of contemporary China as well as anxieties about the accompanying breakdown in traditional morés. In the Chinese popular imagination, mobile phones are often linked to the
relationships of an affluent professional class, such as those depicted in Shouji, or to a freewheeling urban ‘cool youth’; in this chapter, however, I present a different perspective by examining the way mobile phones are used as a new space for exploring sexual identity and forging intimate relationships by young rural-to-urban migrant women – a group that, as a whole, is extremely socially and economically marginalized. After briefly outlining the methodology and theoretical framework of the study, I provide a background to rural-to-urban migration and its affects on the traditional marriage patterns of rural women. I then discuss migrant women’s use of mobile phones by highlighting examples of ‘love’ text messages and by presenting three examples of dating via the mobile. My aim is twofold: first, to argue that migrant women’s mobile phone use emerges from, and must be understood
within, their specific socio-cultural context; and second, to show that as much as these young women use mobile phones to autonomously establish intimate relationships and thereby challenge parental authority in such decisions, they also adhere to conventional gendered discourses and engage in practices that blend the traditional as much as the technological.
