Mate Selection and Gender Reflexivity: The Emphasis of Gan jue and the Emergence of a New Generational Pattern of Intimacy in Contemporary China

Introduction

Recent literature has highlighted the conflict between the elevated status of women and the engrained patriarchal gender ideology, indicating that this is the major reason why many Chinese women encounter situations of being stranded in the marriage market (Hong Fincher, 2014; Ji, 2015; To, 2013; Zhang & Sun, 2014). However, knowledge is insufficient in terms of modern Chinese women’s mate selection concerns in this context. This article contributes to the field in two aspects. First, it demystifies gan jue (feelings), which is a central discourse that has appeared in contemporary Chinese young people’s articulations of mate choice criteria and yet which is a discourse that has received inadequate attention in existing literature on courtship and marriage in current Chinese society (Bøe, 2013; Farrer, 2014; Sun, 2012; To, 2013; Zhang & Sun, 2014). The term gan jue basically focuses on emotion; thus, it partly derives from the notion of intimacy or affection, which has served as one of the core elements for relationship formation in China since the May Fourth Movement in the early twentieth century (Pan, 1993; Yan, 2003). However, what distinguishes gan jue from the old discourse of affection is that it also holds many elements together and it shows the interconnectedness of these elements in modern Chinese individuals’ ideals about mate choice. Also, in the analysis of courtship culture in current Chinese society, local studies (Chi, 2010; Huang, 2008; Qian, Wang, Zhang, & Song, 2003; Xu, 2004) tend to criticize the trend that, under the context of marketization, women follow the logic of materialism and pay increasing attention to a potential mate’s socio-economic status and property. In foregrounding gan jue, this article goes beyond such perspectives and seeks to deepen the understanding of Chinese women’s mate selection concerns. Second, from the perspective of gender reflexivity, the present study elaborates on how the emphasis on gan jue in young women’s mating concerns indicates the emergence of a new generational pattern of intimacy in China. The relevant gender role negotiation examined in this study questions gender normativity and reflects modern Chinese women’s changing expectations of marriage; it is no longer a relationship based on making a mundane living together (da huo guo ri zi)－rather, it is an intimate bond that embodies many of their desires in life.

Literature Review

Most existing studies on gender reflexivity build their discussion upon gendering and modernizing Bourdieu’s (1998) original work on reflexivity. Acknowledging that such a reflexive stance helps to illustrate the synchronicity of constraint and freedom in women’s gender role negotiation, feminist engagement with Bourdieu’s works goes beyond the original thesis in several aspects. For example, most scholarly works engaging with Bourdieu’s work foreground in their critiques the observation that Bourdieu underestimates the impact of context and social changes on individuals’－ especially women’s－exertion of agency in dealing with gender relations. For instance, agreeing with Bourdieu’s stance on the habituated nature of reflexive practices, Adkins (2004) further points out that gender is extraordinarily relational and flexible, with its value and effects varying from context to context or from field to field. Similarly, Chambers (2005) maintains that although all fields embody gender rules, gender norms vary across different fields and even across different groups within a certain field. Kenway and McLeod (2004) also argue that women change and are changed by gender relations within existing fields, as well as by new social fields. Insisting that gender “operates across fields” (Chambers, 2005, p. 326), these scholars stress the strength of gender in critical reflexivity. Besides this, they also emphasize that relevant struggles of gender reflexivity are not just between the two sexes, but also within the same gender group in which individuals have different spaces and resources (McNay, 1999).

Regarding the ingrained nature of male dominant gender norms illustrated in Bourdieu’s (2001) thesis, while acknowledging women’s agency in resistance towards these norms, many scholars also admit that such an endeavor always “operates within constraints” (Huppatz, 2009, p. 61). Bourdieu (2001) argues that women tend to encounter double bind in the gendered agency exertion, that is, “if they behave like men, they risk losing the obligatory attributes of ‘femininity’ and call into question the natural right of men to the positions of power; if they behave like women, they appear incapable and unfit for the job” (2001, p. 67). Extending Bourdieu’s argument, Chambers (2005) maintains that gendered habitus cannot be significantly undermined by mobility across fields, because gender also operates across fields. Adkins (2004) warns that reflexivity should not be confused with the freedom to question and break the norms that previously governed gender; it is more likely to be linked to the reworking and refashioning of gender. In her empirical study in the field of sport and physical culture, Thorpe (2009) also finds that while the social context offers some opportunities for women to use their feminine capital to their advantage, it demonstrates ongoing sexism and ideological constraints towards women. These insights and findings are important in that they reveal the difficulties lying in the path of women’s gender role negotiation within and across differing socio-cultural fields.

Specifically in the case of China, existing literature suggests that the tradition of patriarchal culture does not disappear in contemporary society(Farrer, Suo, Tsuchiya, & Sun, 2012; Hong Fincher, 2014; To, 2013). Some empirical studies also provide examples that illustrate how gender reflexivity and consequential gender role negotiations are difficult to achieve. For instance, scholars find that even though women succeed in destabilizing the gender norms in certain fields (e.g., in the educational system and the job market), strategically or involuntarily they also entrench the male dominant norms in fields like courtship and dating (Ji, 2015; Liu, 2014). In this article, I further demonstrate how the tradition of patriarchal culture becomes a complex resource through which women make sense of their gender identities in their mate selection process. While the natural sex differences and women’s family-oriented disposition are still emphasized in post-socialist Chinese society (Liu, 2014; Wu, 2012), there emerges a neoliberal-style discourse on women’s individualized selfhood, which provides a glimpse of the renegotiation and potential redefinition of womanhood in China (Gaetano, 2014). Such contradictory discourses are especially conspicuous in the life experiences of women who belong to the post-80s generation of only children. While still being influenced by the traditional patriarchal culture, they are also influenced by globalization and westernized culture. Compared to their parents, they are more self-oriented, conscious of rights, and risk-averse, especially when dealing with their parents and loved ones in the private sphere (Cameron, Erkal, Gangadharan, & Meng, 2013; Cao, 2009; Yan, 2006). Also, the post-80s are the first batch of young women who benefit from a series of social structural changes in China’s modernization process. For example, factors like the one-child policy, market-oriented economic reform, and the expansion of the middle class job market all facilitate the empowerment of this particular group of women (Tsui & Rich, 2002; Zhang & Sun, 2014). Therefore, compared to the situation in which traditional Chinese family ethics promoted mundane marital life (da huo guo ri zi) and women in the Mao era were bound by unitary mating standards that prioritized one’s political status and family background (Xu, 2004; Zhang, 2013), these women have expanding and more idiosyncratic expectations when it comes to mate selection. Using the example of these young women’s pursuits of gan jue in their mate choice journey, I discuss how their relevant gender role negotiations offer the basis for a reflexive critique of gender normativity in China.

Research Site

The data in this article is derived from my research project about women’s mate selection experiences in contemporary Chinese society. This research took place in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong province located in southern China. I chose Guangzhou as the research site for two reasons. First, according to the statistics in 2010, the number of single women in Guangzhou ranked the third highest in China, behind Beijing and Shanghai.¹ When it comes to women’s mating ideologies in Guangzhou, results of a 2014 survey indicated that 73.17% of Guangzhou women insist on remaining unmarried until finding the loved one; this answer ranked first compared to women from other parts of China.² In a place where the influence of commercialization is ubiquitous and the ideology of pragmatism is highly valued,³ women’s persistence in their pursuits of love gives rise to an interesting and puzzling picture. Second, although Guangzhou is regarded as one of first-tier cities together with Shanghai and Beijing and it also functions as an important financial and cultural center in China, this southern city is less researched than its two counterparts in existing literature on courtship and marriage in contemporary Chinese society (e.g., Bøe, 2013; Farrer, 2014; Sun, 2012; To, 2013; Zhang & Sun, 2014). Therefore, situated in Guangzhou, this study facilitates our understanding of social life in Chinese big cities in the context of a changing socio-structural and cultural environment.

Method

From August 2011 to December 2012, I conducted in-depth interviews with 36 women for data collection. The majority of participants were in their late 20s or early 30s. Thirty-one of them were born after China’s post-socialist market-oriented reforms began in 1978. Table 1 provides descriptive information about these 36 participants.

Table 1.

Sample Description (N=36)

Participants in the study were recruited mainly through the following four channels. First, I reached out to my friends and their social networks to find four research participants. Second, I posted a research participant recruitment advertisement on my personal page of the micro-blog, Sina Weibo (http://weibo.com), which is one of the most popular networking sites in China. Three women initiated contact with me and said that they were willing to participate in the study. Third, I contacted the executives of two popular matchmaking websites in China (jiayuan.com and zhenai.com) and found three participants with their help. Fourth, I found three participants during my participant observation on matchmaking activities. In the following stage of data collection, I made use of the key participants found via these four channels and adopted snowball sampling to expand the number of research participants.

Among the 36 in-depth interviews, 30 were face-to-face, most of which averaged around two hours in duration. Interviews were conducted in places chosen by the participants. Besides face-to-face interviews, I also conducted six online in-depth interviews, as proposed by participants. These women requested online interviews for different reasons such as privacy concerns, timetable clashes because of frequent business trips, and a personal preference for online interview which provided a more relaxed communication environment for them. These six interviews were carried out in the form of online chats via QQ.⁴ I conducted multiple interviews with five participants to clarify the data and enrich the content of the emerging themes.⁵ In order to ensure that key issues of the research were addressed, I used an interview guide as a reference in both the face-to-face interviews and the online interviews. However, great flexibility was allowed during all these interviews. All interviews were conducted in Chinese. For ethical considerations, all names are pseudonyms. Several participants required me to conceal their demographic details to better ensure confidentiality. Accordingly, I suppressed these details in my research reports and relevant publications.

Findings

In this study, a subtle term gan jue frequently appeared in almost all participants’ articulations when they expressed their expectations about their future or ideal partner. The definition of feelings in mate selection varied among different women. It could be the impulse to be together, or my cup of tea, or we can communicate, or the sense that I’ll be happy with him, etc. For some interviewees, they could not even explain this term in detail, but they still insisted that it is an indispensable factor in deciding to develop a relationship with a man.

Based on the examples provided by participants in the present research, I endeavor to demystify gan jue and summarize elements that constitute this central discourse in Chinese women’s mate choice considerations. Through the lens of gender reflexivity, I also look at how these women’s emphasis on gan jue in their mate selection rewrites the script of (heterosexual) intimate relationships in Chinese society.

Discussion and Conclusions

This study shows that the frequent appearance of the term gan jue in modern Chinese young women’s articulations of their mating concerns reflects a new generational pattern of intimacy. Through probing the elements constituting gan jue, I find that there are three characteristics of this new script of intimacy.

The first one is the increased emphasis on affection in young individuals’ mating selection concerns. For these young Chinese individuals (most of whom belong to the post-80s generation), mate selection has gone beyond the conventional purpose of marrying a bread earner (jia han jia han, chuan yi chi fan). Marriage is no longer the means of survival as it once was. Gan jue hardly appeared on the mating checklist in their parents’ generation, when mating ideology emphasized political class background (Zhang, 2013; Zhang & Sun, 2014) and prioritized the purpose of upward social mobility under the context of extreme societal instability during Cultural Revolution (Egri & Ralston, 2004). In mate selection and marital life, these young Chinese individuals also dream beyond the conventional pattern of intimacy that centers on mundane marital life. Specifically for young Chinese women, even though the material condition of the potential partner is still crucial in their mate choice considerations, their material concern in courtship relates more to solidifying commitments in the precarious post-socialist environment (Farrer, 2011) than to the traditional intimacy pattern of making a living together (da huo guo ri zi).

Second, the increased equality between the two sexes is also a crucial factor of this new generational pattern of intimacy. This characteristic especially helps to distinguish gan jue from the notion of affection in Chinese courtship culture (Pan, 1993; Yan, 2003). Besides the desire for affection, emphasis on gan jue in modern Chinese women’s mate selection also relates to their cultural compatibility concerns, their requirements of the potential mate’s physical attractiveness, and their need for egalitarianism in an intimate relationship. In their pursuit of equality and their demands about a male partner’s physical attractiveness, they question gender normativity and thereby challenge the traditional male dominant and privileged role in the fields of courtship and marriage.

Third, there is increased agency in modern Chinese individuals’ pursuit of love. This is mainly reflected in the change in the central grammatical term in everyday Chinese romantic talk. Farrer (2002, 2011) found that in 1990s and early 2000s, Chinese young people tended to use the discourse of yuan/yuan fen (karmic destiny) in their conversations about love and relationships, which ascribes “a transcendental or mystical quality to feelings” (2002, p. 197) and functions as an indirect way of emphasizing the emotional content of a relationship (2011). The shift from waiting for yuan/yuan fen to pursuing gan jue in contemporary Chinese people’s articulations of their relationship ideal reflects more agency and proactivity in their practices of mate selection and relationship formation.

Findings in the present research also provide examples of how young Chinese women’s gender reflexivity is influenced by the context of Chinese modernity and the one-child policy. Most of the participants belong to the post-80s generation. They are the only children in their families. This could be one of the major reasons why they have different expectations of relationships and marriage compared to those of women in the Mao era, who mostly had siblings and grew up in a collectivistic culture (Zhong, Wang, & Di, 2001). The disposition of self-centrism derived from their early experiences as well-off, only children who are exposed to Western individualistic culture (Cameron et al., 2013; Cao, 2009; Yan, 2006) may also account for their picky mating standards and their resistance towards the imbalanced gender rules in the marriage market.

Echoing the literature which shows that struggles of gender reflexivity are also within the same gender group in which individuals have different spaces and resources (McNay, 1999) and that the single women (leftover women) phenomenon in China is a class-specific one (Zhang & Sun, 2014), it must be highlighted that most of the participants who emphasized gan jue in mate selection are middle-class, educated career women who are financially independent. For participants with lower socioeconomic status, although sometimes they also brought up gan jue when talking about their relationship ideal, they paid relatively more attention to men’s material resources in their mate choice consideration. As the middle-class women do not need to depend on a male partner for the necessities of life, they desire a partner who can fulfill their psychological needs such as love, passion, sense of belonging, intimacy, etc. However, as some recent studies suggest, the traditional male-dominated gender norms are still engrained in current Chinese society. Thus, there exists a problematic reality that the more accomplished a woman is, the more difficulties she may encounter in her mate selection journey (Hong Fincher, 2014; Ji, 2015; To, 2013; Zhang & Sun, 2014). Although the young women in this new generation are able to express higher and more idiosyncratic mate choice standards, the plight they face in the marriage market reflects the gender inequality perpetuated in the Chinese marriage market. Under such circumstances, in the present research, among the 36 interviewees, 11 women mentioned that if an ideal relationship seems unlikely, they would prefer to be self-reliant and to maintain an independent lifestyle as opposed to a traditional partnership—at least, this is the case when they are in their late twenties and/or early thirties. Judging from this stance, compared to women in previous generations who tended to marry in their early twenties because of socio-political culture and pressure (Parish, Laumann, & Mojola, 2007; Wang & Yang, 1996), they possess more breathing space in their mate choice journey, though this respite may only be temporary due to their fertility concerns and the insufficient institutional support for out-of-wedlock childbearing in China (Zheng, 2015). Moreover, since engrained patriarchal gender norms still exert conspicuous effects in current Chinese society, these women’s higher expectations toward intimate relationships entail greater risks of them being “leftover” in the marriage market. Participants in this study are conscious of this reality and they have weighed up the alternative of early marriage. However, even though facing a situation of being stranded in the mate selection process, many of them are not willing to lower their mating standards or give up their pursuit of gan jue in relationship formation. With higher opportunity cost in the marriage market, these women are actually pioneering another option for unmarried women in China. If such a no compromise stance is not representative of their future action, it at least can be seen as a gendered symbolic resource that could create some space for further empowerment of modern Chinese women.

Finally, I must acknowledge the limitations of this research, which is based on qualitative data of a limited sample size. Based on voluntary participants’ articulations, the applicability of the findings in the present study to individuals who do not feel comfortable with volunteering to participate in studies on women’s mate selection experience is unclear. Due to this limitation, the conclusions are made cautiously and the interpretations cannot be generalized. Also, the study is contextualized in Guangzhou, a first-tier city in China. The majority of the participants are college-educated career women. However, a deeper and more thorough understanding of how modernity and marketization shape and reshape Chinese women’s mate choice concerns and practices of intimacy would require more studies, especially ones conducted in less developed regions and featuring women of lower socioeconomic status.

Acknowledgments

* This work was supported by Shenzhen University under Grant 85202-17QNFC48.

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