Chinese female workers’ cultural production and vlogs against techno-colonisation

Among female workers in China, a subtle new form of decolonisation has emerged through their self-produced videos, which have gained popularity on Chinese video-sharing platforms. Whether employed in factories or on construction sites, these female worker vloggers actively create videos that document the laughter and struggles of their daily work lives. Their workplaces serve as key sites and components of vlog production, and the digital subjectivities these vlogs generate carry class and gender significance. Through the critical lens of digital nomadism, this chapter contributes to developing the concept of “re-coupling site” to examine how Chinese female workers transform their conventional workplaces into new digital spaces. In these spaces, they articulate their perspectives, perform their identities, demonstrate everyday resilience, and enact everyday resistance. By incorporating workplace alongside gender and class working experiences into cultural production, the self-articulation of these female workers enriches the cultural imagination of the Chinese working class, on the one hand. It challenges digital nomadism’s fetishisation and colonisation of nomadic identity, shattering its coloniality regarding the cultural-economic creation of a “technological utopia” and the desirability to become digital nomads to fit its capital accumulation, on the other hand.