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Living with Themselves, Creating Themselves

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Caring in Times of Precarity

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society ((PSGCS))

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Abstract

This chapter is an attempt at self-representation. More empirically, since the women in this inquiry are working in the creative fields and have a vested interest in creative practices, it seems to be an opportune occasion whereby their creativity can be mobilized as part of the inquiry. Inspired by visual methodology in general, and image-elicitation techniques in particular, the subjects were invited to produce visual materials that best represent themselves as single women in Shanghai. These “cultural probing” materials are used in two ways. First, they are documented as materials generated directly by the subjects. They offer readers immediate glimpses of the worlds they are living in. Second, the materials are used for discussions between the subjects and the investigator. The self-generated images lend themselves to opening up areas for examination otherwise unexamined, overlooked, and finally, erased from any understanding of their lives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 2001. Reprint, 3rd edition (London: Sage, 2012); Luc Pauwels, “Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research,” Sociological Methods & Research 38, no. 4 (2010): 545–81.

  2. 2.

    Gillian Rose, “On the Relation between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual Culture,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 1 (2014): 24–46.

  3. 3.

    Andrew Clark and Lisa Morriss, “The Use of Visual Methodologies in Social Work Research over the Last Decade: A Narrative Review and Some Questions for the Future,” Qualitative Social Work 16, no. 1 (2017): 29–43.

  4. 4.

    See Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research (London: Sage, 2001); Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography, 3rd Edition (London: SAGE, 2013); Rose, Visual Methodologies. Note also that Gillian Rose prefers the term “visual research methods” or VRM (2014).

  5. 5.

    See Caleb Gattegno, Towards a Visual Culture (New York: Dutton, 1969); James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character, a Photographic Analysis (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1942).

  6. 6.

    See Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research; David Gauntlett, Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences (London: Routledge, 2007); Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman, “Introduction,” in Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination, ed. Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman (Routledge, 2004), 1–17.

  7. 7.

    See Joseph Wherton et al., “Designing Assisted Living Technologies ‘in the Wild’: Preliminary Experiences with Cultural Probe Methodology,” BMC Medical Research Methodology 12 (2012): 188; Linda Liebenberg, “The Visual Image as Discussion Point: Increasing Validity in Boundary Crossing Research,” Qualitative Research 9, no. 4 (2009): 441–67; Dawn Mannay, “Making the Familiar Strange: Can Visual Research Methods Render the Familiar Setting More Perceptible?,” Qualitative Research 10, no. 1 (2010): 91–111; Kim Rasmussen and Søren Smidt, “Children in the Neighbourhood: The Neighbourhood in the Children,” in Children in the City: Home Neighbourhood and Community, ed. Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2003), 82–100; Allen White et al., “Using Visual Methodologies to Explore Contemporary Irish Childhoods,” Qualitative Research 10, no. 2 (2010): 143–58.

  8. 8.

    See Alisha Ali, Emily Sharp, and Shira Meged, “Youth Empowerment and the Digital Representation of Self: Lessons from the PhotoCLUB Project,” Journal of Art for Life 7, no. 1 (2016); Martin Lindstrom, BrandChild: Remarkable Insights into the Minds of Today’s Global Kids and Their Relationship with Brands (London: Kogan Page, 2004); James U. McNeal, The Kids Market: Myths and Realities (New York: Paramount, 1999).

  9. 9.

    See Judit Fullana, Maria Pallisera, and Montserrat Vilà, “Advancing towards Inclusive Social Research: Visual Methods as Opportunities for People with Severe Mental Illness to Participate in Research,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17, no. 6 (2014): 723–38; Victoria J. Palmer, Christopher Dowrick, and Jane M. Gunn, “Mandalas as a Visual Research Method for Understanding Primary Care for Depression,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17, no. 5 (2014): 527–41.

  10. 10.

    Claudia Mitchell, Doing Visual Research (London: Sage, 2011).

  11. 11.

    Ali, Sharp, and Meged, “Youth Empowerment and the Digital Representation of Self”; Mitchell, Doing Visual Research.

  12. 12.

    Nigel Meager, “Children Make Observational Films—Exploring a Participatory Visual Method for Art Education,” International Journal of Education Through Art 13, no. 1 (2017): 7–22.

  13. 13.

    See Buckingham, “‘Creative’ Visual Methods in Media Research”; Clark and Morriss, “The Use of Visual Methodologies in Social Work Research over the Last Decade.”

  14. 14.

    Rose, Visual Methodologies, xviii.

  15. 15.

    Luc Pauwels distinguishes two kinds of visual materials: pre-existing visual materials and researcher-instigated visuals. For the purpose of this inquiry, I do not consider it necessary to confine the participants in their choice of what to represent them. See Luc Pauwels, Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  16. 16.

    Pauwels, Reframing Visual Social Science, 27.

  17. 17.

    Knowles and Sweetman, “Introduction.”

  18. 18.

    Rose, “On the Relation between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual Culture,” 2.

  19. 19.

    See Béatrice S. Hasler and Doron A. Friedman, “Sociocultural Conventions in Avatar-Mediated Nonverbal Communication: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Virtual Proxemics,” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 41, no. 3 (2012): 238–59; Zhong Zhi-Jin and Mike Zhengyu Yao, “Gaming Motivations, Avatar-Self Identification and Symptoms of Online Game Addiction,” Asian Journal of Communication 23, no. 5 (2013): 555–73; Paolo Gerbaudo, “Protest Avatars as Memetic Signifiers: Political Profile Pictures and the Construction of Collective Identity on Social Media in the 2011 Protest Wave,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 916–29.

  20. 20.

    See Jesse Fox and Margaret C. Rooney, “The Dark Triad and Trait Self-Objectification as Predictors of Men’s Use and Self-Presentation Behaviors on Social Networking Sites,” Personality and Individual Differences 76, no. Supplement C (2015): 161–65; Yasmin Ibrahim, “Self-Representation and the Disaster Event: Self-Imaging, Morality and Immortality,” Journal of Media Practice 16, no. 3 (2015): 211–27; Derek Conrad Murray, “Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of Selfies in the Age of Social Media,” Consumption Markets & Culture 18, no. 6 (2015): 490–516.

  21. 21.

    See Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill, “Beauty Surveillance: The Digital Self-Monitoring Cultures of Neoliberalism,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2017, 1–19; Ursula Oberst, Andrés Chamarro, and Vanessa Renau, “Gender Stereotypes 2.0: Self-Representations of Adolescents on Facebook,” Estereotipos de Género 2.0: Auto-Representaciones de Adolescentes En Facebook. 24, no. 48 (2016): 81–89; Dian A. de Vries and Jochen Peter, “Women on Display: The Effect of Portraying the Self Online on Women’s Self-Objectification,” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 4 (2013): 1483–89; Betsy Emmons and Richard Mocarski, “She Poses, He Performs: A Visual Content Analysis of Male and Female Professional Athlete Facebook Profile Photos,” Visual Communication Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2014): 125–37.

  22. 22.

    Chang Jiang, Ren Hailong, and Yang Qiguang, “A Virtual Gender Asylum? The Social Media Profile Picture, Young Chinese Women’s Self-Empowerment, and the Emergence of a Chinese Digital Feminism,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2016, 1–16; Murray, “Notes to Self.”

  23. 23.

    See Lu Ye and Chu Yajie, “Media Use, Social Cohesion, and Cultural Citizenship: An Analysis of a Chinese Metropolis,” Chinese Journal of Communication 5, no. 4 (2012): 365–82; Liu Tzu-kai, “Minority Youth, Mobile Phones and Language Use: Wa Migrant Workers’ Engagements with Networked Sociality and Mobile Communication in Urban China,” Asian Ethnicity 16, no. 3 (2015): 334–52; Lian Hongping, “The Resistance of Land-Lost Farmers in China,” Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration 36, no. 3 (2014): 185–200; Jeroen de Kloet and Anthony Y. H. Fung, Youth Cultures in China (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).

  24. 24.

    Chang, Ren, and Yang, “A Virtual Gender Asylum?”

  25. 25.

    The images are reproduced with the subjects’ consent.

  26. 26.

    Edgar Gómez Cruz and Helen Thornham, “Selfies beyond Self-Representation: The (Theoretical) f(r)Ictions of a Practice,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 7, no. 1 (2015): 1–10.

  27. 27.

    Yvette Wong, in her master’s thesis on wenyi qingnian (文艺青年), roughly translated as literary youth, points to the same lacuna: studies on creative workers tend to overlook the aesthetic aspects of their work. Put crudely, creative workers are often taken more as workers and less as creative. See Wong Lok Yee, “The Poetics and Politics of Hong Kong Wenyi Qingnian” (Hong Kong Baptist University, 2017).

  28. 28.

    Chang, Ren, and Yang, “A Virtual Gender Asylum?” 13.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 12.

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  • Ibrahim, Yasmin. “Self-Representation and the Disaster Event: Self-Imaging, Morality and Immortality.” Journal of Media Practice 16, no. 3 (2015): 211–27.

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  1. Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Chow Yiu Fai

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Yiu Fai, C. (2019). Living with Themselves, Creating Themselves. In: Caring in Times of Precarity. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76898-4_8

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