Gender, Intimacy, and Class in a Changing China: The Individual and Social Change(Routledge Studies on China in Transition)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Gender, Intimacy, and Class: The Individual in a Changing China 1. Gender Equality and ‘Independent Men’: Digital Feminism and Online Misogyny 2. Gendered Symbolic Meaning and Social Structure: Tea Making in Chaozhou 3. Homohysteric engagement and male bonding: Male Chinese sports fans and athletic bromances 4. Intimacy in Urban Families: Harmony and Social Cohesion 5. Revolutionary Filial Piety: Red Collecting and the Creation of Intimacy 6. Bridging the Gap: The Market Economy and (Re)Shaping Marriage Transmitted Debt 7. Parental marriage-matchmaking practices: Marketisation, internationalisation, and disgitalisation 8. Upper Class Self-Identification: Social class, narrative, gender 9. Opting Out of the Mainstream: Buddhist Practice as Gendered Critique in Urban China

About the Author :
Fiona Gill is a senior lecturer and 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.