Stay-at-home Fathers in Contemporary Urban China

This research investigates stay-at-home fathers (SAHFs) as an emerging gendered identity in contemporary urban China. Being a SAHF constitutes an unconventional gender role in China, which has been marginalised by longstanding prejudice against men who are not the main wage-earners in the family unit. My scrutiny of the discourse surrounding this new role contributes to existing literature on the social production of gender difference and hierarchy in urban China. This research is particularly significant now, at a time when gender inequalities in China coexist with an increasingly individualistic culture, and yet these inequalities remain largely unaddressed by government discourse and often reinforced through popular discourse.

This research seeks to answer three questions: What motivates men to become SAHFs? How do they perceive, experience, and enact their role as SAHFs? How does the construction of SAHF masculinity intersect with changing representations of urban family life and masculinity in contemporary urban China? To address these three interrelated questions, I examine three sources of data about SAHFs – TV dramas, social media articles, and interviews – focusing on how SAHFs’ perceptions, experiences, and practices are understood both by SAHFs themselves and wider society.

Current research on SAHFs has been predominantly focused on the Global North to the extent that this is the first research on SAHFs in mainland China that focuses on how multiple discourses contribute to the construction and reconstruction of familial masculinity and wider family relations. By highlighting the plurality and ongoing reconfiguration of masculinity that has emerged from my three data sources, I show how discourse produced by and about SAHFs not only sustains but also sometimes transforms conventional notions of gender. In doing so, my research adds new perspectives to existing literature on Chinese masculinities and family life, as well as studies of SAHFs and the family in other countries.