Love Troubles
豆瓣
Inequality in China and its Intimate Consequences
Wanning Sun
简介
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.
contents
Introduction. Love Troubles
Governing Romance
Chapter 1. Rural Migrants' Marital Problems and the Discourse of Governing
Chapter 2. From Revolution to Consumption: The Cultural Politics of the Future
Moral Economy of Love
Chapter 3. “Love on the Assembly Line”: The Clichés of Romantic Consumption
Chapter 4. Dark Intimacy and Its Moral-Economic Logic
Men, Women and the Pursuit of Intimacy
Chapter 5. Making Choices or Making Compromises: Women and the Onus of Intimacy Work
Chapter 6. “Left Leftover Men and their Masculine Grievance: Making Sense of Rural Migrant
Men's Emotional Hardships
Conclusion