Leftover women's choices in marriage and childbearing: navigating through the complexities of state law, social attitudes, and parental expectations
Date
2020-07-22
Authors
Liu, Qian
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Abstract
In recent years, unmarried women in China face great pressure to marry when they reach their late 20s and beyond. These women are referred to as leftover women, a terminology that plays into the notion that they fail to sell themselves in the marriage market at the best timing.
Based on interviews and focus groups with leftover women in China, this dissertation situates their choices in the complexities of social and legal orders in today’s China to make sense of their decisions. Starting with a postcolonial critique of current literature on leftover women, this dissertation revisits leftover women’s decisions and demonstrates how their choices are made after evaluating all the available options rather than decisions made out of false-consciousness. I discuss how societal and parental expectations interact with state law to affect leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing. To understand how leftover women navigate through multiple levels of social ordering, I investigate the legal consciousness of these women when they judge which level(s) of social ordering they should follow. My analysis of leftover women’s strategies in engaging with state law challenges the assumption that ordinary Chinese people’s reluctance to use the formal legal system is a result of their lack of legal knowledge.
My interviewees’ emphasis on family relations and public attitudes regarding marriage and childbearing complicates and contributes to feminist relational theory by questioning its strong attachment to autonomy. Building on postcolonial feminist legal thoughts, I advocate that feminist relational theorists need to distance themselves from autonomy in order to understand the choices made by women who prioritize familialism over individualism. To unsettle feminist relational theory’s unconditional attachment to autonomy, I elaborate on leftover women’s understandings of the relationship between the self and the family and other people in their social networks. This elaboration is achieved by investigating the impact of societal and parental expectations, as well as leftover women’s participation in constructing the notions of filial piety and motherhood.
This dissertation offers a detailed discussion of leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing by demonstrating their navigation through multiple levels of social ordering. It also provides a postcolonial analysis of the approach of “blaming culture,” which has been used by many scholars who study leftover women, as well as other issues concerning marginalized populations in authoritarian states such as China. At the same time, this dissertation illustrates a way of analyzing women’s choices without focusing on autonomy, which is of great importance for research on women whose culture prioritizes familialism over individualism. This dissertation also contributes to the areas of legal consciousness and legal pluralism by explaining ordinary people’s reluctance to separate state law and non-state social ordering. This is a timely empirical study aiming to serve as a springboard to invite future research on law and emotions, and law and family relations, relationships and legal consciousness, and postcolonial analysis of the impact of patriarchal Confucian culture and Chinese legal culture in general.
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Keywords
leftover women, legal consciousness, legal pluralism, marriage, China, family relations, relational theory