Love Troubles: Inequality in China and its Intimate Consequences

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. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Governing love Chapter 1 Rural Migrants’ Marital Problems and the Discourse of Governing Chapter 2 From Revolution to Consumption: The Cultural Politics of the Future Part II Documenting Pain Chapter 3 “Love on the Assembly Line”: Class and the Clichés of Romantic Consumption Chapter 4 Dark Intimacy and Its Moral-Economic Logic Part III Doing Intimacy Chapter 5 Making Choices or Making Compromises: Women and the Onus of Intimacy Work Chapter 6 Leftover Men and Their Masculine Grievance: Making Sense of Rural Migrant Men’s Emotional Hardships Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index