Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China

by Tiantian Zheng

Overview

Based on ethnographic research with victims of intimate partner violence since 2014, this book brings to the forefront women's experiences of, negotiations about, and contestations against violence, and men's narratives about the reasons for their violence. Using an innovative methodology - online chat groups, it foregrounds the role of history, structural inequalities, and the cultural system of power hierarchy in situating and constructing intimate partner violence. Centering on men and women's narratives about violence, this book connects intimate partner violence with invisible structural violence – the historical, cultural, political, economic, and legal context that gives rise to and perpetuates violence against women. Through examining the ways in which women's lives are constrained by various forms of violence, hierarchy, and inequality, this book shows that violence against women is a structural issue that is historically produced and politically and culturally engaged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350263420
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/28/2022
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.15(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Tiantian Zheng is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland. She has received two national book awards, and has testified before Congress, UNAIDS, and the United Nations on human trafficking and other issues, and has been a featured guest speaker on NPR, BBC, and NBC.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - A Social and Cultural History of Intimate Partner Violence in China
Chapter 2 - Worthy vs Unworthy Victims of Sexual Violence in Post-socialist China
Chapter 3 - The Criminal Justice System and Intimate Partner Violence
Chapter 4 – Male Perceptions and Rationalizations of Intimate Partner Violence in Post-socialist China
Chapter 5 – Everyday Resistance of Women Against Intimate Partner Violence
Chapter 6 - Activism and Intimate Partner Violence
Afterword
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is an important book that sheds new light on the understudied problem of intimate partner violence in China. Tiantian Zheng has deftly integrated findings from interviews, media sources, and online communities to write a powerful ethnography that tells the stories of Chinese women who experienced intimate partner violence and places them in broader sociocultural, economic, political, and historical perspective.” —Vanessa L. Fong, Olin Professor in Asian Studies (Anthropology), Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Amherst College, USA

“Domestic violence is endemic in China and is naturalized locally by appealing to a reinvented Confucian ideology bent on preserving domestic harmony at all costs and to conceptions of women's and men's temperaments based on their purported biological differences. The state not only blames violence in intimate relationships on its victims but also criminalizes NGOs that attempt to offer them help. Tiantian Zheng's richly textured ethnography documents, in often harrowing details, the predicaments that Chinese domestic violence survivors find themselves in a context in which so little support is available.” —Niko Besnier, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Amsterdam

“Gender discrimination in Chinese society is real. Tiantian Zheng's keen ethnographic eye is on full display as she probes the way cultural assumptions shape government and the public's response to marital violence. It is a sobering account chock full of insight into the dark corners of marital intimacy.” —William Jankowiak, Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“With great sensitivity and a unique ethnographic eye, Zheng offers a rare glimpse of a hidden harrowing world in which some Chinese women endure constant physical and sexual violence imposed by their intimate partners. Her riveting, poignant ethnography and incisive analysis reveal how such personal experiences are shaped by multiple structural and historical forces that put constrains on women's agency and possible interventions. A timely and important contribution to a deeper understanding of postsocialist complexity and gender politics!” —Li Zhang, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Davis, USA

From the Publisher