This thesis examines gender and labor issues based on my field research focusing on a group of women oil workers of different generations in the oil production workplace in Daqing Oilfield, northeast China. Daqing Oilfield is a typical state-owned corporation developed during the process of China’s industrialization. With men constituting the main labor force in important production sectors of the oilfield as expected in the petroleum industry, masculinity is perceived as the central value in local culture and the powerful masculine discourse of “Iron Man Spirit” was promoted during the whole period from its founding in late 1959 through the various development stages till the present. This thesis explores state discourse about labor and gender and the embodied experiences of masculinit...[ Read more ]

This thesis examines gender and labor issues based on my field research focusing on a group of women oil workers of different generations in the oil production workplace in Daqing Oilfield, northeast China. Daqing Oilfield is a typical state-owned corporation developed during the process of China’s industrialization. With men constituting the main labor force in important production sectors of the oilfield as expected in the petroleum industry, masculinity is perceived as the central value in local culture and the powerful masculine discourse of “Iron Man Spirit” was promoted during the whole period from its founding in late 1959 through the various development stages till the present. This thesis explores state discourse about labor and gender and the embodied experiences of masculinity through the ethnographic analysis of women oil worker’s lives and work experiences in the three periods of transformation of the oil industry in Daqing: exploring and primary developing period (1959~ the late 1970s), stable development period (the late 1970s~ 1999), and economic reformation and structural transformation period (1999~ present).

Previous studies about gender and labor in China have concentrated on discipline, struggle and resistance in different work settings and addressed impacts of globalization on gender and labor inequalities related to migrant women workers’ lives in foreign investment enterprises. This thesis seeks to explicate gender and labor issues in a large mainstream state-owned enterprise by examining the life strategies of female oil workers and their empowerment. It is based on various women workers’ life histories related to work and domestic experiences against the backdrop of state discourse and corporate institutions. The major argument is that the powerful masculine discourse of “Iron Man Spirit” in Daqing was responded and interpreted diversely by different generations of women oil workers in their struggle for empowerment under the historical circumstance of Daqing Oilfield’s development corresponding to China’s major transformation when the nature and practice of the state discourse was also modified.