1st Edition
Gender, Intimacy, and Class in a Changing China The Individual and Social Change
This book examines the varieties of continuity and change evident in the development of contemporary Chinese society’s attitudes and practices related to gender, intimacy, and class.
By focusing on innovative aspects of gendered experiences in contemporary China, this book reveals the developing trends in gender, including but not limited to social media based digital feminism, patriarchy experienced by tea supply chain workers, and the ‘bromance’ male college students experience through sports culture. It also evaluates more traditional influences, on gender and how these are still shaping the lived experiences of individuals, aspects such as parental marriage-matchmaking practices and revolutionary filial piety. Alongside these traditional influences the contributions contrast developments driven by government and state direction, such as officially sanctioned discourse of social class, particularly the formation of an upper-class identity, as well as how the market economy in the latter half of the 20th century to the present has transformed marriage-transmitted debt.
Featuring a broad spectrum of topics impacting gender and class in China, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Gender studies as well as Chinese Culture and Society.
Introduction: Gender, Intimacy, and Class in a Changing China: The Individual and Social Change
Fiona Gill
1. Gender Equality and ‘Independent Men’: Digital Feminism and Online Misogyny
Shuhan Chen
2. Gendered Symbolic Meaning and Social Structure: Tea Making in Chaozhou
Jinghong Zhang
3. Homohysteric engagement and male bonding: Male Chinese sports fans and athletic bromances
Altman Yuzhu Peng, Fengshu Liu and Chunyan Wu
4. Intimacy in Urban Families: Harmony and Social Cohesion
Hui Miao
5. Revolutionary Filial Piety: Red Collecting and the Creation of Intimacy
Emily Williams
6. Bridging the Gap: The Market Economy and (Re)Shaping Marriage Transmitted Debt
May Cheong, Jie Huang, and Joseph Black
7. Parental marriage-matchmaking practices: Marketisation, internationalisation, and disgitalisation
Pan Wang
8. Upper Class Self-Identification: Social class, narrative, gender
David S G Goodman
9. Opting Out of the Mainstream: Buddhist Practice as Gendered Critique in Urban China
John Osburg
Biography
Fiona Gill is a senior lecturer and current Chair of the Discipline of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include gender and the experiences of women in different contexts, memory, identity, and qualitative research methods.
