Date of Award

11-3-2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discipline

Arts

Department

Cultural Studies

First Advisor

Prof. PUN Ngai

Second Advisor

Prof. CASTILLO BAUTISTA Roberto Carlos

Abstract

A new generation of Chinese women is questioning the family by examining internal contradictions in parent-child relationships, particularly in how intimacy and care are enacted, while also challenging the legitimacy of the family institution that underpins gendered divisions of labor and hierarchies. Some of them are revealing the problems within the family and refusing patriarchal marriage and family as their daily act of resistance. Their resistance extends beyond the family, into their workplaces, where gender division and hierarchies are also at work. This emerging phenomenon presses us to theorize today’s family problems, especially concerning those related to women’s gendered oppression, exploitation, and emotional constraints. The research question involves: how do these Chinese women comprehend the sufferings they have experienced within their families? How do they interpret these family problems as factors contributing to their gender constraints? How can we understand today’s family problems related to gendered oppression and exploitation within the specific Chinese socio-economic cultural contexts?

These initial research questions guided my fieldwork, conducted from October 2023 to July 2024, in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu. I approached potential informants by entering female-only communities. These communities serve as my field sites and simultaneously as collective efforts by women to refuse patriarchal family structures and marriages. During the study, as both a participant and a researcher, I engaged in 11 community activities, including screenings, reading groups, and workshops. Further key questions that have emerged, as my deepening engagement in these female-only communities continues, include: what do they mean when they talk about refusing family? How do they understand the relationship between building female-only communities and their refusal of family? How do these initiatives influence our understanding and practice of alternative ways to invest love, care, and intimacy beyond self-preservation within family relationships? More importantly, how does their refusal of patriarchal marriage and family connect to their critiques of capitalist work? Throughout the research, I conducted 27 semi-structured, in-depth interviews and took 44 detailed field notes from my participatory observations in 11 community activities. All of these serve as my primary research materials.

I am developing a unified analytical framework that considers the refusal of family and work— referred to as the double refusal—as interconnected processes to understand their resistance efforts. The refusal of family focuses on how Chinese women challenge the dominance of familial ideology, including discourses on love, and how they oppose the privatization of social reproduction by contesting and reshaping gender divisions of labor and hierarchies. The refusal of work mainly examines how it questions work ethics, organizational forms of labor, and privatized production and social relations. I argue that the double refusal of family and work reflects Chinese women’s ongoing daily resistance to gendered exploitation and oppression amid China’s deepening social reproduction crisis. In addition, this double refusal seeks to revitalize the social and interpersonal significance of love, care, and labor through collective efforts to build an alternative life. Female-only communities are their current attempt.

Language

English

Recommended Citation

Chen, P. (2025). Chinese women’s rising refusal of the family: The problems, the resistance, the post-family and post-capitalist work imaginaries (Doctoral thesis, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd/269/

Download

Share

COinS