Abstract
Drawing on interviews from two case studies in China’s food delivery and house cleaning sectors, this research examines workers’ gender subjectivities and their interaction with the labour politics of platform work. Male delivery riders experience a crisis of masculinity, de-flexibilise their labour to maximise income and affirm migrant masculinities, yet their insecurity persists. Female cleaners seek to construct respectable femininities in stigmatised domestic work, juggling care and paid work across life stages and strengthening relational labour to counter algorithmic constraints. The study conceptualises platforms as gendered organisations of flexibility and algorithmic management and examines their interaction with workers’ gendered subjectivities. This interaction produces distinct gendered consequences: exposing men to intensified work and risk of injury, and women to persistent precarity and low pay. The article argues that gender subjectivities both sustain platform domination and provide limited bases for everyday resistance.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170261468515
Jing WANG, Yunnan University
Jenny CHAN, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
