Violent Intimacy

Reviews / Votes

This is an important book that sheds new light on the understudied problem of intimate partner violence in China. Tiantian Zheng has deftly integrated findings from interviews, media sources, and online communities to write a powerful ethnography that tells the stories of Chinese women who experienced intimate partner violence and places them in broader sociocultural, economic, political, and historical perspective. * Vanessa L. Fong, Olin Professor in Asian Studies (Anthropology), Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Amherst College, USA * Domestic violence is endemic in China and is naturalized locally by appealing to a reinvented Confucian ideology bent on preserving domestic harmony at all costs and to conceptions of women's and men's temperaments based on their purported biological differences. The state not only blames violence in intimate relationships on its victims but also criminalizes NGOs that attempt to offer them help. Tiantian Zheng's richly textured ethnography documents, in often harrowing details, the predicaments that Chinese domestic violence survivors find themselves in a context in which so little support is available. * Niko Besnier, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Amsterdam * Gender discrimination in Chinese society is real. Tiantian Zheng's keen ethnographic eye is on full display as she probes the way cultural assumptions shape government and the public's response to marital violence. It is a sobering account chock full of insight into the dark corners of marital intimacy. * William Jankowiak, Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas * With great sensitivity and a unique ethnographic eye, Zheng offers a rare glimpse of a hidden harrowing world in which some Chinese women endure constant physical and sexual violence imposed by their intimate partners. Her riveting, poignant ethnography and incisive analysis reveal how such personal experiences are shaped by multiple structural and historical forces that put constrains on women's agency and possible interventions. A timely and important contribution to a deeper understanding of postsocialist complexity and gender politics! * Li Zhang, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Davis, USA *