chinese calendar prone to marital strife

#Chinese calendar prone to marital strife tv#

Xiao contributes to this enterprise through a feminist reading that lays bare the discursive contestation and structural inequality within one of the most significant affective labor projects in postsocialist China-that is, the dissemination of male-centered family ethics through literary and visual cultures. Generally referring to work conducted to produce or modify emotional experiences that have collective regulatory power, the notion of “affective labor” has increasingly been applied to contemporary Chinese cultural studies (see, e.g., Lu 2007). Xiao offers a powerful feminist critique of the familial operation of affective labor in postsocialist China. The family revolution is, as she rightfully notes, a “subjectivizing project” (182) that produces seminal positions of gender and class.

As Xiao keenly reminds her readers throughout the book, the dramatically changing familial practices are largely attributable to the complex reciprocity between the governance of Chinese neoliberalism and the formation of a new domestic culture.

Xiao is to be lauded for offering this thought-provoking volume, which analyzes “family” as a historically-situated and ideologically-mediated social institution with multifarious meanings vis-à-vis the postsocialist Chinese state-market-culture nexus. According to Xiao, while these divorce narratives demonstrate a collaboration with the male-centered state and society in cultivating women’s wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for China’s ongoing family disintegration and social disconcertment, they simultaneously embody the resurgence of gender inequality and the tightening of social control over the individual autonomy of private life.

#Chinese calendar prone to marital strife tv#

She argues that the representation of divorce in recent literature, film, and TV drama fashions a discursive arena for battling ideologies of family and marriage. With Family Revolution, Hui Faye Xiao makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the cultural representation of marital strife in contemporary China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Includes bibliographical references and index.Hui Faye Xiao, Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. A devastating critique of the social, economic, and cultural regendering of China in the reform era.' -Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota'Insightfully manages to situate the chosen texts in relation to the larger contexts of ideological and socioeconomic changes.' -Xueping Zhong, Tufts University'- Notes: While these narratives present women's cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.Hui Faye Xiao is assistant professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Kansas.'An original and important contribution to the scholarship on Chinese culture in the post-Mao era with a breadth of perspective and depth of insight that few works have matched. Reading popular 'divorce narratives' in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary 'freedoms' of economic and affective autonomy, women's roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal 'iron girl' of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented 'Ïgood wife and wise mother.' Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China's soaring divorce rate. 'As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution-an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. Seattle : University of Washington Press,.