‘Naked’ bodies

Abstract

This article describes how Chinese rural migrant workers are left exposed to the contradictory regimes of rural and urban intimacy. The sensuous bodies of the workers have become the central stage for them to experience and perform competing sets of discourses about sex, love and marriage. It is neither a product of discursive discipline in the Foucauldian sense, nor is it an active body learning a socially acceptable presentation of self in the Goffmanian sense. Rather, it is a ‘communicative body’ that is in the process of making itself. To use a theoretical metaphor, they are ‘naked’ in the transient condition of urban modernity. The particular ‘nakedness’ of rural migrant bodies in South China problematizes a simple rural/urban dichotomy by highlighting the inbetween-ness of migrants’ experiences in the rapidly globalizing and pluralized discourses on intimacy.