[Commlist] New Book Announcement: Caring in Times of Precarity: A Study of Single Women Doing Creative Work in Shanghai

New book announcement:

Caring in Times of Precarity: A Study of Single Women Doing Creative 
Work in Shanghai

(2019, Palgrave Macmillan)

Chow Yiu Fai

“Drawing on a wonderfully eclectic mix of theory and research, Chow hits 
the reader time and again with critical and humane insights. Caring in 
Times of Precarity is a major contribution to studies of creative 
labour, and a brilliant feminist-inspired sociology of women’s lives in 
contemporary China.”

– David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds, UK

“This remarkable book makes a timely scholarly intervention. 
Provocatively, it supplements the standard Leftist critique of creative 
labour’s neoliberal precarity with attention to the ethics of self-care. 
With solidarity and deep respect for these women, Chow reveals the 
complexities and singularities of their social and affective experience, 
challenging our understanding of Shanghai, the creative classes, and 
female individualization.”

– Fran Martin, University of Melbourne, Australia

Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural 
observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the 
growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical 
juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of ‘precariat’: 
single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. 
While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these 
women also find themselves interpellated as shengnü (‘left-over women’) 
in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual 
ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women’s 
professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their 
singlehood and creative labour as problematic, and them as victims. It 
departs from dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and 
critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous 
to the extent of (self-)exploitation, accepting insecurity. The book 
seeks to understand– empirically and specifically–women’s everyday 
struggles and pleasures. It highlights the up-close, everyday embodied, 
affective, and subjective experience in a particular Chinese city, with 
broader, global resonances well beyond China. Exploring the limits of 
the politics of precarity, the book proposes an ethics of care.

Chow Yiu Fai is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and 
Creative Writing of Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.

https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319768977

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-76898-4

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------