Mobilities, Translocal Economies and Emotional Modernity. From the Factory to Digital Platforms, between China and Taiwan

Hidden inside a suitcase, invisible to borders’ controls, an orange, fluorescent bra made in a textile factory in Southern China crosses the Strait and arrives to Taiwan. There, it wanders and circulates, on translocal physical and digital platforms, and it moves back to its place of fabrication in China. Based on multi-sited, physical and virtual, ethnographic research in China and Taiwan, including over one hundred ten biographical interviews, I follow the social life of a bra and explore the mobilities of its producers: Chinese women's who move from the countryside to the city, their marriage-migration to Taiwan and, eventually, re-migration to China post-divorce. With close attention to the physical and digital strategies that migrants develop in order to undo a condition of subalternity during mobilities, this dissertation explores women’s use of e-commerce, digital entrepreneurship and links of solidarity. Following both the women and the objects that they commercialise, as well as the emotions that they construct, this research examines the redefinition of modernity and the processes of 'undoing' subalternity by such women and the plural forms that globalisation and movements can take.