Description: Based on recent primary research in anthropology, sociology, history and politics, and on insights from political activism, Gender in Flux addresses gender as a main axis of social organization and cultural practice in China. Covering the impoverished rural 'sending' villages of western China to the big and wealthy Yangzi valley city of Nanjing, the far northeastern village of Huangbaiyu to the major urban centres of Tianjin and Beijing, it examines gendered practices and experiences in socio-economic, political and administrative configurations, family and household organization, education, employment and mobility, and generation. The volume addresses gendered expectations and practices as lived experience within and across different scales, challenging the standard social science division of urban, rural and migrant. Gender in Flux thus sheds important light on how the changing manifestations and articulations of gender across different practices confound any attempt at a uniform analysis.
Brief description: Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Contemporary China Centre at the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender Since 1949 (1997), and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (2008). She is currently working on an oral history of urban change in central Beijing and local practices of cultural heritage.