Gender and Family Practices : Living Apart Together Relationships in China

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 bookwill 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.

Shuang Qiu is a Lecturer in Sociology based in the School of Social, Political and Global Studies at Keele University. She obtained her PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York and her research interests lie in the field of sociology of the family, intimacy, gender and sexualities, agency, emotion, and East Asian studies. She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Sociological Research Online and Families, Relationships, and Societies.