Upwardly Mobile Women in Urban China: Negotiating Gender Norms and Class

This CCCI lecture will be given by Arianne Gaetano, Anthropology, Auburn University.

Abstract: China’s economic growth and urbanization have created new social mobility opportunities for women through education, migration, and employment. But with shifts in social class and status, new challenges arise, especially as these impact on gender norms. In this talk, I consider women of different socioeconomic status in the metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, particularly rural migrant workers and educated urban professionals, who are in their 20s and 30s and unmarried or newly married.

I draw upon relevant literature as well as my own ethnographic research in Beijing in the 2000s and in Shanghai in the 2010s. Focusing on these populations illuminates conundrums women face as they strive to fulfill normative gender role expectations of marriage and family, on the one hand, and their own aspirations for personal growth and autonomy, on the other. The juxtaposition of two distinct groups of women further highlights how gender intersects with social positionality to shape their unique dispositions and options regarding marriage, as well as their different strategies and resources to negotiate gender norms.

Ariane Gaetano is Associate Professor of Anthropology and 
the Director Of The Women’s Studies Program
Auburn University. She is the author of Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China University of Hawai’i Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2015) about the consequences of rural-to-urban migration on Chinese women’s self-identities and life course trajectories, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing and China’s countryside.

More recently, Dr. Gaetano has explored changing patterns and meanings of marriage in urban China, including the public discourse of “leftover women,” and how these intersect with transformations in gender roles and norms and conceptions of gendered personhood. In her scholarship, she uses a feminist perspective to critically evaluate China’s urbanization process and outcomes for gender equality.

As of this fall, our lecture series has a thematic focus corresponding to the now four-credit course: China's Rural-Urban Integration and is taught by Professor Robin McNeal.  Contact the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative for complete course information: cornell-cci@cornell.edu.