Between Iron and Flesh: Rhythmanalysis in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Migrant Worker Poetics

Abstract

In the late 20th century, Henri Lefebvre proposed rhythmanalysis as a method of understanding the temporal and bodily patterns that structure everyday life. His rhythmanalyst is an ordinary figure who perceives, interprets, and transforms these rhythms to understand social and bodily existence. Given the prominence of his framework in examining urban and industrial experience, this paper situates rhythmanalysis within the context of post-reform China and explores how rhythms of industrial labor manifest in the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong, a Chinese migrant worker turned poet. It will explain how her work reveals the female migrant worker as a rhythmanalyst in situ, caught between the rhythms of machine production and biological reproduction. It will interrogate how Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst is a powerful tool for examining the working-class experience; however, his model often presupposes a degree of bodily autonomy not available to the female migrant-worker body and overlooks the violent disruptions of rhythm imposed by industrial labor. Finally, this paper will demonstrate how, through the mechanics of language itself, Zheng extends beyond Lefebvre and transcends the limits of her own body. By taking on the role of an ethnographer-poet, she extends the act of rhythmanalysis from individual to collective in Records of Women Workers, thereby constructing a symphonic body of voices that gives form to the sufferings and solidarities of women workers. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how Zheng’s poetics applies and critically revises rhythmanalysis, expanding its potential as a practice of solidarity, witness, and social memory.