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Doing Family at a Distance: How Different Are LAT Relationships to ‘Conventional’ Partnerships?

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Gender and Family Practices

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences ((GSSS))

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Abstract

This chapter shifts the focus to examine how family is culturally constructed and practised in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in contemporary China. Informed by Morgan’s ‘family practices’ approach, special attention has been paid to the lived experiences of a group of six ‘study mothers’ (peidu mama) who accompany their children to study while living apart from their partner. Their stories serve as examples to demonstrate both the multiple underlying reasons behind married couples living apart and the coping strategies developed by different family members. Doing gender in a way that is congruent with cultural and social expectations of gender roles serves to reinforce the normativity of heterosexuality. Through looking at their everyday doing of family, I discuss how family practices are subject to cultural interpretations and social constraints, and how identity negotiations are formed and affected by certain cultural and social contexts. For a woman, being a full-time study mother, even when it is at the cost of living separately from her partner and established career development, has been considered as a way to privilege ‘motherhood’ over ‘wifehood’. The dramatically opposite parenting roles reinforce and entrench the existing traditional gendered division of the labour and gender hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society. This research suggests that family practices in the multi-local household setting are often closely implicated with practices of gender, class, mothering and social norms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At that time, there was a widely spread discourse in relation to education, defined as ‘knowledge is useless’.

  2. 2.

    The guan is often used as a verb and literally means ‘to control’. In the context of Chinese parenting practices, it is associated with more positive connotation in terms of caring, loving and discipline. See Tobin et al. (1989) for more discussion about Chinese parenting styles.

  3. 3.

    Wangba (internet café) was seen by many Chinese parents as harmful due to their stereotypical views on the environment of internet cafés, which are often full of smoke with some ‘disreputable’ youths coming in and out (Sun, 2012). Parents of school-aged teenagers feel a sense of being out of control when faced with online gaming and ‘unhealthy’ online information, and therefore tend to control children’s internet usage.

  4. 4.

    Hou hui yao literally means regret pills. In this context, this slang connotes that there is no going back because it is too late to regret if children were ill-behaved when parents are not around to look after them.

  5. 5.

    Guang chang wu (square dancing) is a collective dancing activity practised in public spaces. Although this fitness activity has been criticised for noise pollution (Huang & Mi, 2015; Zhang, 2016), it is popular among dama (grannies) who are middle-aged and retired in rural and urban China (Martin & Chen, 2020).

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  1. School of Social, Political and Global Studies, Keele University, Keele, UK

    Shuang Qiu

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Qiu, S. (2022). Doing Family at a Distance: How Different Are LAT Relationships to ‘Conventional’ Partnerships?. In: Gender and Family Practices. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17250-2_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17250-2_4

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