Family, Marriage and Love: Exploring Intimate Relationships in Contemporary China

Catalog description

This course goes beyond the idealized family patterns to examine critically recent transformations in family forms, reproductive technologies, politicized sexualities, and gender relations in China. It seeks to denaturalize notions such as family, marriage and love through contextualization--putting them back in the historical, political and socio-cultural context in which they are embedded. The questions that will be raised in class include: What factors shape the economic and social formations of intimate relationships in contemporary China? What does it mean to say that romantic love is an ideology? How do Chinese people "do" family today? Are intimate relationships formed in the virtual world any less authentic than those formed in the real world? The course approaches various kinds of intimate relationships through an anthropological lens, which means that we will explore people's intimate life experiences via ethnography. Based on a series of captivating readings, video clips, discussions and other class activities, this course invites the students to pay attention to the interconnectedness between the "private" and the "public" -- the everyday practices and the economic and socio-political processes. Moreover, this course aims to show how to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and how to use the data collected during fieldwork for analyzing intimate relationships in Chinese society.