Technomobility in China

An ethnographic exploration into the ways in which Chinese women are now using mobile technology -- namely, cell phones -- to navigate and produce a complex terrain of meaning, gender, and technology, Cara Wallis's Technomobility in the Margins: Mobile Phones and Young Migrant Women in Beijing analyzes the modernization of China through the lens of migrant female workers. Wallis evaluates the economic and social implications of "internal migrants," or workers that, though they live in China, do not live in any of its major cities but nevertheless work in them. While simultaneously situating her work within the field of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, Wallis explores the way in which the cell phone has been integrated into and has altered the social structures and practices of modern China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women -- a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as "backward" and "other" -- to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity.