Download or read book Making Couples Kinship Intimacy and Consumption in Contemporary Urban China written by Chen Chen and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My research explores the following questions: Why has spouse-selection become such a phenomenal cultural issue that it not only perplexes singles and their families but also captures the attention of the general public in urban Beijing? How are marriages and intimate relationships "made" in the context of China's rapid social transformation? What kinds of personal and identity-related concerns are voiced and negotiated by Chinese singles during the social processes of "making couples" ( xiangqin)?
Download or read book The Purchase of Intimacy written by Xiaohui Zhong and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Purchase of Intimacy: Chinese Urban One-child Families in Housing Consumption" by Xiaohui, Zhong, 钟晓慧, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This study examines the changes of family life and relationships in urban China with reference to the filial piety and intimacy theories as well as the individualization thesis. It takes housing consumption as an entry point and focuses on the intergenerational relations in one-child families. It adopts qualitative research methods to explore consumption practices and the meanings attached to these actions and events for these families. I conducted in-depth interviews with 22 families (middle-aged parents and/or adult children) and ethnographic observation in Guangzhou during the period of 2010 and 2011. This study examines the meanings attached to housing consumption from the perspective of these urban families. It shows how parents use money to express their love/care and to define their children''s filial obligations. It also demonstrates how parents use their grey money to secure a better future for both generations. It also illustrates the process of consumption to show differentiated family strategies for achieving collective well-being. It also presents their power dynamics and varied ways that parents and children negotiate and handle conflicts for individual goals. It examines the specific socioeconomic context regarding numerous risks and abundant opportunities that are faced by these families. This study thereby enables us to see more clearly the interactions between the state, the market and family dynamics in modern China. It is argued that urban Chinese parents who play an active and leading role in housing consumption use their money to purchase intimacy with only children. Their desires are socially constructed by their life experiences since the Mao era and by their children''s struggles in a marketized economy. Thus this study challenges the victimized image of Chinese parents and refines the over-simplified exchange logic of parental investment in the market economy. Their desires and agency as middle-aged people with only children in a rapid socioeconomic transformation have to be addressed. It notes the rise of new filial individuals among only children in the individualization of Chinese society. They are not the uncivil individuals as portrayed by scholars and the media, but rather the dutiful ones who have a heightened filial sense and also engage in new filial practices. Their ideas of filial piety are less about life-debt (due to parents'' giving them life and raising them up), obedience (to parents) and moral obligations. It is more about money-debt (due to parental investment in housing and other financing projects), exchange of material assistance and emotional bonds. This study thus helps develop a new way of understanding filial piety among young Chinese and reconsider the impacts of individualization on family relations and on the younger generation. The study shows a visible trend of refamiliation with cooperation, conflicts and negotiations involved. By stressing the necessity of collective decision-making between this two-generation collective in housing consumption, these parents and children are building up a negotiable intimacy that reconfirms the vital importance of family intimacy over conjugal intimacy. It thus develops a new model of exploring housing consumption in urban China and helps redefine the Western concept of intimacy. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5270557 Subjects: Intergenerational relations
Download or read book Queering Kinship written by Han Tao and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family? Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.
Download or read book Chinese Men s Practices of Intimacy Embodiment and Kinship written by Cao, Siyang and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-06-14 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently in response to personal relationships and local realities. Drawing from empirical research, the author uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores intimacy and kinship within masculinity. She showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood. This is a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and an invaluable resource for understanding the profound social changes that transformed gendered arrangements in urban China.
Download or read book The Global and the Intimate written by Geraldine Pratt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange. This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling. Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.
Download or read book Sociological Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.
Download or read book Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by and published by . This book was released on 1966-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
Download or read book Marriage in Past Present and Future Tense written by Janet Carsten and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking widespread public comment and concern. Through the close ethnographic examination of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense places new and changing forms of marriage in comparative perspective as a transforming and also transformative social institution. In conditions of widespread socio-political inequality and instability, how are the personal, the familial and the political co-produced? How do marriages encapsulate the ways in which memories of past lives, present experience and imaginaries of the future are articulated? Exploring the ways that marriage draws together and distinguishes history and biography, ritual and law, economy and politics in intimate family life, this volume examines how familial and personal relations, and the ethical judgements they enfold, inform and configure social transformation. Contexts that have been partly shaped through civil wars, cold war and colonialism – as well as other forms of violent socio-political rupture – offer especially apt opportunities for tracing the interplay between marriage and politics. But rather than taking intimate family life and gendered practice as simply responsive to wider socio-political forces, this work explores how marriage may also create social change. Contributors consider the ways in which marital practice traverses the domains of politics, economics and religion, while marking a key site where the work of linking and distinguishing those domains is undertaken.
Download or read book Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China written by Yujie Zhu and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how heritage interacts with social-cultural changes and how individuals perform and negotiate their identities through daily practices that include tourism, on the one hand, and the performance of ethnicity on the other.
Download or read book The Transformation of Intimacy written by Anthony Giddens and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does 'sexuality' come into being and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life on a more general plane? In answering these questions, Anthony Giddens disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture. The emergence of what the author calls plastic sexuality - sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction - is analysed in terms of the long-term development of the modern social order and social influences of the last few decades. Giddens argues that the transformation of intimacy, in which women have played the major part, holds out the possibility of a radical democratization of the personal sphere. This book will appeal to a large general audience as well as being essential reading for students and professionals.
Download or read book Women in China s Long Twentieth Century written by Gail Hershatter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An important and much-needed introduction to this rich and fast-growing field. Hershatter has handled a daunting task with aplomb.” —Susan L. Glosser, author of Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953
Download or read book The Great Divergence written by Kenneth Pomeranz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.
Download or read book Introduction to Sociology 2e written by Nathan J. Keirns and published by . This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This text is intended for a one-semester introductory course."--Page 1.
Download or read book Leftover Women written by Leta Hong Fincher and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2016-07-31 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.
Download or read book Intimate Citizenship written by Ken Plummer and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solo parenting, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, gay and lesbian families, cloning and the prospect of �designer babies,� Viagra and the morning-after pill, HIV/AIDS, the global porn industry, on-line dating services, virtual sex--whether for better of worse, our intimate lives are in the throes of dramatic change. In this thought-provoking study, sociologist Ken Plummer examines the transformations taking place in the realm of intimacy and the conflicts--the �intimate troubles�--to which these changes constantly give rise. In surveying the intimate possibilities now available to us and the issues swirling around them, Plummer focuses especially on the overlap of public and private. Increasingly, our most private decisions are bound up with public institutions such as legal codes, the medical system, or the media. What impact does the increasingly public character of personal life have on our sense of ourselves and on how we view our own intimate choices? To navigate our way through a world in which people�s private lives are so often subject to public scrutiny and debate, and in which the public sphere is increasingly pluralized and contested, we must broaden our understanding of what it means to be a citizen. Through the idea of "intimate citizenship," Plummer sets an important agenda for the years to come.
Download or read book A Sociology of Family Life written by Deborah Chambers and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family relations are undergoing dramatic changes globally and locally. At the same time, certain features of family life endure. This popular book, now in a fully updated second edition, presents a comprehensive assessment of recent research on 'family', parenting, childhood and interpersonal ties. A Sociology of Family Life queries assumptions about a disintegration of 'the family' by revealing a remarkable persistence of commitment and reciprocity across cultures, within new as well as traditional family forms. Yet, while new kinds of intimate relationships such as 'friends as family' and LGBTQ+ intimacies become commonplace, such personal relationships can still be difficult to negotiate in the face of wider structural norms. With a focus on factors such as class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality, this new edition highlights inequalities that influence and curb families and personal life transnationally. Alongside substantial new material on cultural and digital transformations, the book features extensive updates on issues ranging from demography, migration, ageing and government policies to reproductive technologies, employment and care. With a global focus, and blending theory with real-life examples, this insightful and engaging book will remain indispensable to students across the social sciences.
Download or read book Love Troubles written by Wanning Sun and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four decades of economic reform have made China one of the most unequal countries in the world – but the impact of this inequality is not just socioeconomic. Love Troubles is the first book to examine the emotional cost of this inequality to the intimate and emotional lives of China's people. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic research among rural migrant factory workers in the Pearl River Delta in southern China, Wanning Sun critically analyzes narratives about love, romance, and intimacy in contemporary Chinese public discourses. Examining the impact of economic and cultural inequality on private life, this book both embodies and facilitates an intimate turn in the study of China's social change, and presents a significant intellectual intervention into worldwide debates on inequality.
