Migrant Ecologies : Zheng Xiaoqiong's Women Migrant Workers

Migrant Ecologies investigates how Zheng Xiaoqiong's poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies with local and global networks of capital and labor and the challenges faced by women migrant workers.

Migrant Ecologies investigates the ways in which Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies embedded within local and global networks of capital and labor. The author contends that women migrant workers in particular, as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, are the visible manifestation of the interconnections between the so-called “factories of the world” and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China, the author explores what Donna Haraway calls “webbed ecologies” (49). The concept of “ecologies” serves to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers’ plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformation of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization.