MCLC: Family Revolution

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Family Revolution
Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture University of Washington Press, 2014. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/XIAFAM.html
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. 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 “good wife and wise mother.”Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China’s soaring divorce rate. 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 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.
Contents
Introduction: Family Revolution, Divorce Representations
1. Divorcing the Rural: Miss Science and Marital Crisis in the Reform Era
2. Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric: Male Intellectuals’ Divorce Narratives
3. Utopia or Dystopia?: The Sisterhood of Divorced Women
4. What Quality Do Chinese Wives Lack?: Performing Middle-Classness in Chinese-Style Divorce
5. Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society: The Cinema of Divorce in the New Millennium
6. A New Divorce Culture: Rupture and Reconstruction
Appendix 1: Television Dramas about Divorce, 1990–2010
Appendix 2: Feature Films about Divorce, 2000–2010
Thanks and regards,
Hui Faye Xiao, 肖慧
East Asian Languages and Cultures University of Kansas
http://ealc.ku.edu/
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 11, 2014
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