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>> 119 4 Picturing the Self, Imagining the World What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself” never coincides with my image. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12 One spring day I went to visit Li Yun, a friend who worked in one of the large marketplaces in Beijing. It was relatively early in the morning, and the lack of customers meant it was an ideal time for talking with Li Yun and her colleagues. On this particular day Li Yun introduced me to Zhao Ning, who had come from a small village in Henan and had been in Beijing for a couple of years. “She loves to play with her phone. You’ll like her,” Li Yun said. Zhao Ning smiled and agreed that she did indeed love her phone. Over the next hour or so as the three of us chatted about various topics, Zhao Ning had me listen to several songs stored in her phone (acquired through friends rather than downloaded, which would have been cost prohibitive), showed me a few of the phone’s pre-installed games, and had me view dozens of the photos she had taken. Eventually the market started to get busy, so I told Li Yun and Zhao Ning I should get going. As I was about to leave, Zhao Ning said, “Wait, 120 > 121 occasions the preference is to use a conventional digital camera.7 How are the terms of usage different without the assumed choices between a digital camera and a camera phone and without convenient access to a computer for storing images? The questions above lead to the main theme of this chapter: the imaging practices of migrant women and the kinds of cultural work such practices achieve. As with the other socio-techno practices explored thus far in this book, it is not only the activity, in this case taking a picture, that is important , but also the numerous emotions, sensations, imaginings, and desires that are articulated to express what could be called a particular mobile constellation . To map this territory, I examine how young migrant women use camera phones to document their lives in, and imagine a world outside of, Beijing. In order to situate my analysis, I first discuss the rise of commercial and personal photography in China in the reform era, and I follow this discussion by an overview of the technical limitations of my informants’ camera-phone use. I then consider some of the larger theoretical issues surrounding photography and camera phones before exploring how migrant women use camera phones for representing the world, constructing the self, transcending limited circumstances, envisaging new possibilities, and planning for the future. Though I divide camera-phone use into these five categories for analytical purposes, I argue that ultimately all of these imaging practices are about self making and actively deploying the imagination, or what Arjun Appadurai defines as “an organized field of social practices, a form of work . . . and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals ) and globally defined fields of possibility.”8 Thus, although I focus on socio-techno practices specific to migrant women, these must be understood within a broader global visual economy perpetuated through electronic media and heightened in the era of digital technology. In discussing imaging and imagining, I build on themes in previous chapters, including consumption practices, the constitutive nature of subjectivity and technology, the phone as a technology of the self, and the affective dimension of mobile phone use. I also continue my elaboration of necessary convergence and how mobile phones enable immobile mobility, or a virtual means of traversing myriad structural, temporal, and spatial boundaries. In their early work on camera-phone use in Japan, Daisuke Okabe and Mizuko Ito noted “technosocial situations” of camera-phone use that they saw emerging from pre-existing social and cultural meaning systems and 122 > 123 recorders, digital cameras, and photo-editing software. However, in China this transformation is particularly noteworthy when placed in historical context . Throughout the Mao era, some urban families might have had cameras, but most did not, and individual cameras were certainly a rare sight for those residing in the countryside. For special occasions people could go to staterun studios to take black-and-white portraits, which were then prominently hung on living room walls. If a person happened to...

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