Mobilities, Communication, and Asia| Im/materializing Cross-Border Mobility: A Study of Mainland China–Hong Kong Daigou (Cross-Border Shopping Services on Global Consumer Goods)

Abstract

The mobilities facilitated by copresent modalities of media have attracted increasing attention. Despite noting multimode mobilities, existing studies rarely specify in the digital context how physical, digital, or virtual mobility and the meanings created by the mobility can be two sides of one coin of mobility politics. This article depicts mobility practices of mainland-China-to–Hong Kong cross-border shoppers known as daigou. I adopt mediated corporeal mobilities to understand the apparatus of uneven mobilities—which refers to the broad emergent cluster of ways of performing and signifying corporeal mobilities in which the mobility of people, material artifacts, and data are themselves experienced and articulated through mobile technology. I argue that mediated corporeal mobilities anchor the unbalanced power relationship in daigou, which manifest in the differential performance of corporeal mobilities and hierarchical classification of people’s corporeal mobilities.