'Apron Husbands' in Shanghai television dramas: From a placebo to a threat

Abstract

Mass media plays a vital role in constituting social norms and public discourse on gender and food practices. The close relationship between women and household cooking is not only acknowledged in daily lives, but also embedded in media representations. In contrast to this discursive representation of women, the images of Shanghai men have been exaggerated as ‘apron husbands’ in Chinese media, who are henpecked and willing to cook at home. Those representations build up people’s perceptions of Shanghai ‘little man’ and at the same time distance Shanghai women from the household domain. My study tries to provide a different perspective to the existing literature by bringing the public discourse on ‘apron husbands’ in Shanghai into the discussion. I explore how the unusual discourse of ‘apron husbands’ is represented in Shanghai-produced TV dramas and its impacts on the gender settings of the interrelation between women’s food practices, their relationship with families, and their power at home. I analyze four representative Shanghai TV dramas produced in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. I argue that albeit being depicted as positive symbols of a companionate marriage in the TV drama produced in the 1990s, the images of ‘apron husbands’ are now being constructed as threats to family, a patriarchal strategy aiming at pushing women back to the traditional gender division, resulting in more conflicts and resistances in family, and obscuring Shanghai women’s domestic power and their contributions in both private and public spheres.