Gender in Flux
Agency and its Limits in Contemporary China

Based on recent research and insights from political activism, the volume explores changing manifestations and articulations of gender in China.

Harriet Evans (Edited by), Julia C. Strauss (Edited by)

9781107662384, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 June 2011

196 pages
24 x 15.5 x 1 cm, 0.28 kg

Based on recent primary research in anthropology, sociology, history and politics, and on insights from political activism, Gender in Flux addresses gender as a main axis of social organization and cultural practice in China. Covering the impoverished rural 'sending' villages of western China to the big and wealthy Yangzi valley city of Nanjing, the far northeastern village of Huangbaiyu to the major urban centres of Tianjin and Beijing, it examines gendered practices and experiences in socio-economic, political and administrative configurations, family and household organization, education, employment and mobility, and generation. The volume addresses gendered expectations and practices as lived experience within and across different scales, challenging the standard social science division of urban, rural and migrant. Gender in Flux thus sheds important light on how the changing manifestations and articulations of gender across different practices confound any attempt at a uniform analysis.

Introduction: gender, agency and social change Harriet Evans and Julia C. Strauss
1. Creating a socialist feminist cultural front: women of China (1949–1966) Wang Zheng
2. Embodied activisms: the case of the Mu Guiyang Brigade Kimberley Ens Manning
3. From the Heyang model to the Shaanxi model: action research on women's participation in village governance Gao Xiaoxian
4. Bridging divides and breaking homes: young women's lifecycle labour mobility as a family managerial strategy Shannon May
5. Family strategies: fluidities of gender, community and mobility in rural west China Ellen R. Judd
6. Income, work preferences and gender roles among parents of infants in urban China: a mixed method study from Nanjing Sung won Kim, Vanessa L. Fong, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Niobe Way, Xinyin Chen, Huihua Deng and Zuhong Lu
7. Intergenerational transmission of family property and family management in urban China Danning Wang
8. The gender of communication: changing expectations of mothers and daughters in urban China Harriet Evans.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Sociology: customs & traditions [JHBT], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL], Sociology: family & relationships [JHBK], Population & demography [JHBD], Social research & statistics [JHBC], Social theory [JHBA], Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Cultural studies [JFC]