Women, gender and individualization in rural China

This paper explores the impact of individualization on gender relations in contemporary rural China. The main question is whether ongoing individualization could dissolve the traditional norms of gender and emancipate rural women. Based on the studies on individualization and gender in rural China and findings from the author’s field research, this paper shows that there are an increasing number of women who have expanded their spheres for acting autonomously to search for the life of one’s own and to pursue individual desires. But this expansion proceeds disproportionately between the public domain and the private domain and we can find the differenciation among women in terms of the degree of individualization. This illustrates the gap of abilities to adopt individualization, and it is partly attributed to one’s own quality but also to failure of women’s empowerment caused by unchanged gender norm. To understand this situation, two contrastive theoretical explanations are presented. One is to perceive it as a transitional situation of individualization; the other is as a finiteness of individualization. In the last section this paper discusses possibility of Chinese society to cope with the risk accompanied by individualization.