Rural Villages, Urbanization, and Female Villager’s Social Status: Fieldwork in a Shenzhen Urban Village.

Abstract

In 2004, the Shenzhen Municipality announced that Shenzhen would become the first city without rural areas and rural villages in China, a milestone in the process of urbanization. Officially, rural villages in Shenzhen have disappeared. However, they still exist in another form – urban villages. Attending to the processes of urbanization and rampant economic development, the social lives of these urban villages has changed in many ways, except for the patriarchal logics which continue to marginalize and devalue female villagers. To further understand Shenzhen urban villages and female villagers, I conducted fieldwork in a Shenzhen urban village and collected data by participant observations and interviews. In this thesis, I focus on how urban villages use their agency as formerly rural villages and how urban villages are reclaiming female villager’s social status.