Love Troubles
Inequality in China and its Intimate Consequences
1st Edition
Published on 18. May 2023
216 pages
978-1-350-32962-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
ISBN-13
978-1-350-32962-1 (9781350329621)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
10/2024
Bloomsbury Academic
€43.70
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). She is a member of the College of Experts, Australian Research Council (2020-2022). She is best known for her work in the fields of Chinese media and cultural studies, migration, and social change in contemporary China, and diasporic Chinese media. She is the author of four research monographs including Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination (2002) and Maid in China: Media, Morality, and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009).
Content
Introduction. Love Troubles
Governing Romance
Chapter 1. Rural Migrants' Marital Problems and the Discourse of Governing
Chapter 2. From Revolution to Consumption: The Cultural Politics of the Future
Moral Economy of Love
Chapter 3. "Love on the Assembly Line": The Clichés of Romantic Consumption
Chapter 4. Dark Intimacy and Its Moral-Economic Logic
Men, Women and the Pursuit of Intimacy
Chapter 5. Making Choices or Making Compromises: Women and the Onus of Intimacy Work
Chapter 6. "Left Leftover Men and their Masculine Grievance: Making Sense of Rural Migrant
Men's Emotional Hardships
Conclusion
