Rural migrant women in Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls: Marginality, inequality and transgression

Sheng Keyi (b. 1973) is a prominent post-Mao woman writer of rural origin. Having migrated from a village in Hunan province, she has personally experienced rural-to-urban migration, marginalised status and inequality. Drawing on her background, she adopts an unconventional narrative style to portray rural migrant women in the city of Shenzhen—women who endure intersecting forms of oppression shaped by gender, class, and the rural–urban divide. This paper seeks to fill a research gap in studies of Chinese migrant literature by examining Sheng Keyi’s novel Northern Girls from a poststructuralist feminist perspective. It analyses the representation of rural migrant women, female subjectivity and acts of transgression in the novel. Moreover, it explores how the author articulates her own critical voice to challenge patriarchal norms, urban social hierarchies, and dominant discourses that marginalise, dismiss, and devalue rural migrant women. This paper argues that Northern Girls subverts prevailing stereotypes that reduce rural migrant women to either obedient factory workers or sex workers, instead foregrounding the complexity of female subjectivity through the protagonist’s acts of resistance. Sheng Keyi’s narrative exposes the suffering, exploitation, and injustice faced by these women. By addressing themes of subjectivity, marginality, inequality, and transgression, this paper contributes to both the feminist study of contemporary Chinese women’s writing and the broader understanding of Chinese cultural dynamics, gender relations, and the social realities of marginalised populations in post-Mao China.