Liberating sex, mobilizing virtue: Cultural reconstructions of gender, marriage, and family in Shanghai, China

This dissertation examines transformations in the meanings and practices of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family in Shanghai, China in the 1990s. It is based on ethnographic research undertaken in 1993 and 1994-1995 among middle- and upper-class Shanghainese women between the ages of 18 and 50. It incorporates data from in-depth interviews with women about their sexual and marital practices, along with analyses of television, radio, advice hotlines, and other mass media that shape public discourse about these topics. It also draws from the author's role in a television drama addressing themes of gender and transnational marriage in Shanghai.; In the 1990s, Shanghai's upwardly mobile, elite women are icons of mainland modernity. Their lifestyles and values reflect active engagement with the economic and sexual opportunities presented by China's opening to the West. However, their sexual openness poses a threat to the stability of the Chinese family. Widespread concerns over moral decay and social instability accompanying economic reform have led to a resurgence of discourses about "traditional" values, including the virtuous wife, good mother ideal. This ideal positions women as ballasts of family and social stability during a time of rapid social change. Women must therefore negotiate between competing demands to be open and modern and to uphold Chinese family values as a basis for achieving the nation's modernization goals.; Thus, women and sexuality serve as tactical objects in the realignment of state, family, and capitalist power in 1990s China. At the same time, women manipulate the importance placed on their virtue to pursue their sexual and marital desires. Identifying with the virtuous wife, good mother ideal allows women to conform to the family regime of power, even as they engage in sexual practices afforded by the capitalist regime. This accommodation is possible in part because the socialist state no longer positions itself uniformly against these alternate regimes. Rather, they are largely aligned in the constitution of a Chinese modernity based on openness and stability. Cultural transformations in sexuality, marriage, and family in 1990s Shanghai are therefore a product of both the realignment of power structures in China, and women's own agency.