Modern Asian Studies 53, 3 (2019) pp. 800–821. C  Cambridge University Press 2019 doi:10.1017/S0026749X17000919 Jiagongchang Household Workshops as Marginal Hubs of Women’s Subcontracted Labour in Guangzhou, China NELLIE CHU Duke Kunshan University Email: nellie.chu@dukekunshan.edu.cn Abstract This article introduces South China’s jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affective and industrial labour, which are produced by migrant women’s yearnings for people and places far away. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. The unrequited longings of migrant women who work in factories and as caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs are created through disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as these women attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour across the supply chains. Introduction One afternoon, as I strolled through the dark and musky alleyways that zigzagged through Guangzhou’s garment district in South China, I came across a community magazine intended for an audience of female migrant labourers. The cover photograph of a young bride dressed in a long white gown caught my attention as I picked up the magazine from the dusty shop floor of a factory in the neighbourhood. The periodical lay on top of heaps of torn fabric, industrial scissors, and stray threads. It addressed various issues concerning women’s physical and emotional well-being, including questions related to abortion, dating, and disease. Sponsored by a neighbourhood hospital that was operated by a village committee, the magazine was widely distributed 800 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17000919 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 134.73.240.160, on 28 Mar 2019 at 13:00:13, subject to the Cambridge Core