Undoing man ual labour: the performative force of female building workers

Judith Butler's influential writing on psychoanalytic, semiotic, linguistic and material-embodied gender performativity inspired a generation of geographers to advance critical understanding of labour and spaces of work. This paper adds to that progress by engaging with subsequent feminist, post-structuralist, materialist, and more-than-representational thinking that remains under-developed terrain for geographical studies of everyday work life. We offer ethnographic insights into on-site experiences of female building workers in China – career paths, labour practices, intimate spousal relations – evidence of (in)actions, trajectories, absences/presences, visual, vocal, linguistic, embodied, emotional, affective, material and (non)human registers of performative force. Overall, we explore more-and-less reflexive emerging, (re)surfacing, unfolding moments of meaningful, incongruent, incomplete, and contradictory 'being', 'becoming' and subjectivities 'in-the-making' that constitute female building workers' undoing manual labour. Concluding, we offer theoretical, methodological and empirical reflections and signpost new research directions.