Representing Divorce, Reforming Interiority: Narratives of Gender, Class and Family in Post-Reform Chinese Literature and Culture
type: CreativeWork
description: "This project stands at the juncture of modern Chinese literature, post-socialist studies, cultural history of divorce, and critical studies about global middle-class cultures. Employing analytical tools mainly from literary studies, cultural studies and feminist theories, I examine stories, novels, films and TV dramas about divorce produced between 1980 and 2004, in the wake of China's ""economic reform and opening up"" as well as the post-Reform China's changing divorce scene. Investigating the transforming intersections of gender, family, and class, I argue that divorce is not simply represented as the disintegration of a conjugal family. Rather, divorce is represented more of a projection of the ongoing reconfiguration of Chinese family structure in alignment with the localization of a global middle-class culture, a intimate imagination of which has been circulated through imported films, TV dramas, domestic fiction, interior design magazines and so on. In other words, divorce representations play a key role in projecting and channeling the desire and fantasy of a middle-class domestic culture and in remapping a harmonious and self-contained domestic and psychic interior cut off from both the revolutionary past and the marketplace. Tackling rampant gender-related social problems in contemporary Chinese society, my research also seeks to address the predicaments that divorced women are confronted with in the process of actively negotiating their self-value and gender identity."
abstract: "This project stands at the juncture of modern Chinese literature, post-socialist studies, cultural history of divorce, and critical studies about global middle-class cultures. Employing analytical tools mainly from literary studies, cultural studies and feminist theories, I examine stories, novels, films and TV dramas about divorce produced between 1980 and 2004, in the wake of China's ""economic reform and opening up"" as well as the post-Reform China's changing divorce scene. Investigating the transforming intersections of gender, family, and class, I argue that divorce is not simply represented as the disintegration of a conjugal family. Rather, divorce is represented more of a projection of the ongoing reconfiguration of Chinese family structure in alignment with the localization of a global middle-class culture, a intimate imagination of which has been circulated through imported films, TV dramas, domestic fiction, interior design magazines and so on. In other words, divorce representations play a key role in projecting and channeling the desire and fantasy of a middle-class domestic culture and in remapping a harmonious and self-contained domestic and psychic interior cut off from both the revolutionary past and the marketplace. Tackling rampant gender-related social problems in contemporary Chinese society, my research also seeks to address the predicaments that divorced women are confronted with in the process of actively negotiating their self-value and gender identity."
author: Xiao, Hui
language: eng
keywords: Asian Studies
date published: 2015-09-28T15:40:13Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:28Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/87211