Gender and Family Practices

Book excerpt: This book examines how gender and heterosexuality structure the lived experiences of people in living apart together (LAT) relationships in contemporary Chinese society. Using in-depth interview data with Chinese LAT people of different ages, the author explores why they live apart; how they construct and make sense of their everyday family lives and negotiate their gender roles; and how they experience intimacy while being physically apart. This text sheds new insights on non-cohabitating intimate partnerships by bringing together themes of gender, family, intimacy, and relationality. Through looking at people’s lived experiences in LAT relationships, it argues that practices of family and intimacy are closely implicated with doing gender, and consequently, that gendered family lives and heterosexuality are reconstructed, rather than deconstructed, in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in Chinese social, historical and cultural contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars across Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Family Studies, in addition to scholars of contemporary Chinese culture and society.