“Invisible people have no politics”: Becoming middle-class working women with rural roots in a mobile assemblage

This chapter focuses on a group of understudied female workers in Dalian China’s call centers and their mobile-mediated English-reading group. It examines their everyday life in both corporate and familial settings. Drawing on concepts of articulation (e.g., interdependency with technology) and assemblage (e.g., the arrangement of energies, activities, interpenetrations, and investments, activated in technologically enabled reading groups), we examine marginalized working women’s mobile-mediated experiences in a social milieu that is undergoing significant changes. We first explain the context of our study by describing these women’s life and working conditions in the post-colonial city of Dalian in Northeast China where the economy is struggling to recover. We then explain our ethnographic method, followed by a thematic analysis of our findings. We situate the agency of these women in the emergent mobile assemblage through their engagements in reading groups. This is used to investigate the development of identity and solidarity across different socioeconomic backgrounds. We argue that the mobile assemblage that juxtaposes gender, technology, class, emotions, and place (rural/urban) becomes an enabler for progressive and nonlinear changes.