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

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Description

Winner of the 2022 Research Publication Book Award from the Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences in the United States. Based on ethnographic research with victims of intimate partner violence since 2014, this book brings to the forefront womens experiences of, negotiations about, and contestations against violence, and mens 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 womens 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 womens 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.

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 womens and mens 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 Zhengs 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 Zhengs keen ethnographic eye is on full display as she probes the way cultural assumptions shape government and the publics 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 womens 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 *

Author Bio

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.