Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China

by Sara L. Friedman

Overview

On a visit to eastern Hui'an in 1994, Sara Friedman was surprised to see a married woman reluctant to visit her conjugal home. The author would soon learn that this practice was typical of the area, along with distinctive female dress styles, gender divisions of labor, and powerful same-sex networks. These customs, she would learn, have long distinguished villages in this coastal region of southeastern China from other rural Han communities.

Intimate Politics explores these practices that have constituted eastern Hui'an residents, women in particular, as an anomaly among rural Han. This book asks what such practices have come to mean in a post-1949 socialist order that has incorporated forms of marriage, labor, and dress into a developmental scale extending from the primitive to the civilized. Government reform campaigns were part of a wholesale effort to remake Chinese society by replacing its "feudal" elements with liberated socialist ideals and practices. As state actors became involved in the intimate aspects of Huidong women's lives, their official models of progress were challenged by the diversity of local practices and commitment of local residents. These politicized entanglements have generated what the author calls "intimate politics," a form of embodied struggle in which socialist civilizing agendas—from the state-sponsored reforms of the Maoist decades to the market-based "reform and opening" of the post-Mao era—have been formulated, contested, and, in some cases, transformed through the bodies and practices of local women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674021280
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2006
Series:	Harvard East Asian Monographs , #265
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Sara L. Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Table of Contents

Table, Maps, and Figures

Note on Romanization and Transcription

Introduction: Intimate Politics

Part 1: "The Hui'an Woman" as Feudal Subject

1. Industrious Women and the Changing Meanings of Labor

2. Fashioning Liberated Socialist Subjects

Part II: Intimate Life in the Post-Mao Era

3. Marriage, Intimacy, and Late-Socialist State Power

4. The Ties That Bind

5. Stone-Carving Factories, Youth Culture. and the Lure of Consumption

Part III: The Production of Difference

6. Ethnicity in Drag: Mass Media, Tourism, and the Politics of Representation

7. Symbolic Citizenship in a Civilized Nation

Epilogue

Appendix: Propaganda Folk Songs and Protest Poetry

Notes

Works Cited

Character List

Index

Editorial Reviews

In her ethnographic study of rural coastal women in Fujian province, anthropologist Friedman documents in excellent detail the diverse impacts of the modernizing Chinese state on women who are symbolically represented in wider Chinese society as 'the Hui'an woman.'

Choice - E. P. Lozada

In her ethnographic study of rural coastal women in Fujian province, anthropologist Friedman documents in excellent detail the diverse impacts of the modernizing Chinese state on women who are symbolically represented in wider Chinese society as 'the Hui'an woman.'
— E. P. Lozada

Choice