Clothing and identity: Chinese rural students’ embodied transformations in the urban university

Abstract

In the context of enduring urban–rural inequality in China, attention has been drawn to rural students’ encounters in the urban university. In this research, I elicit rural students’ narratives about their (classed) perceptions of clothing and style, as well as the bodily practices embedded in their subjective social mobility experiences in the unique social milieu of China’s context. I argue that participants’ transforming practices entail a nexus of challenge to and also compliance with the urban field. Through the theoretical lens of habitus, I illustrate how rural students strategically transform their ‘style’, as dispositions of habitus, in the urban field to obtain valued forms of embodied capital. At the same time, I emphasise the importance of viewing rural students’ embodied transformations critically, as it entails both their effective generation of valued capital to actively adapt to the urban field and their (involuntary) compliance to the oppressive social relations.