On intimate choices and troubles in rural South China

Abstract

This article explores how marriage practices and intimate relations are being refashioned inreform era China in the context of increasingly entangled intersections between privatenegotiations and public dialogues in law, state policy, science, and the media. Based on long-term field research in impoverished rural areas, the article focuses on the intersections between intimate practices of the everyday and large-scale projects of social engineeringaimed at turning ordinary ‘peasants’ into ‘modern civilized citizens’. The article drawsparticular attention to the important role played by the Birth Planning Policy in shaping local reproductive practices and intimate structures, but the approach here developed to the linkagesbetween globalised Neo-Malthusian state power and the construction of local intimatemodernities does not neglect the agency of ordinary individuals and communities. Instead ofassuming that changes in local practices follow primarily from the top-down impact ofexternal forces such as Neo-Malthusian state policies and technologies of birth planning, thearticle suggests that local practices and global forces co-produce each other through ‘frictions’of various kinds. This focus on the micro-macro intersections of what I call here the ‘technopoliticsof intimacy’ joins recent efforts in the humanities and social sciences to move beyond conventional top-down approaches to global intimate transformations.