Department of Anthropology

I am a sociocultural anthropologist with broad interests in the intersections between intimate life and political and legal domains in China and Taiwan. My research to date has examined the role of state power, law, and citizenship in gender and sexual identities, intimate relationships, and the embodied politics of labor and desire. Major areas of inquiry include the politics of marriage and citizenship in socialist and late-socialist China; sovereignty struggles in the context of marriage migration between China and Taiwan; how immigration reconfigures practices of citizenship and national belonging; and state marginalization of non-heteronormative intimacies and families. These interests reflect my commitment to asking anthropological questions about intimate lives that integrate valuable insights from gender and sexuality studies and critical legal studies. They also emerge from my experiences living and working in China and Taiwan since the late 1980s.

To learn more about my work on marital immigration and Taiwanese sovereignty, please listen to this interview about the project.

I am currently engaged in two major research projects:

1) LGBT childbearing and family formation practices in Taiwan and China. This project looks comparatively at how LGBT individuals and couples create intergenerational families in relation to shifting possibilities for legal and bureaucratic rights and parental recognition. It asks how traditional family values are transformed by new models of family and intimacy and how such changes are affected by broader population pressures and legal reforms, in some cases creating alternative ideals regarding parenthood and familial rights. This project has been supported by a Fulbright Core Scholars Fellowship and a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant.

2) Middle-class Chinese families opting out of the city. This project studies middle-class Chinese parents who have decided to abandon successful urban lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and alternative education for their children in China’s rural southwest. I am interested in changing value systems in contemporary China that encourage some parents to reject mainstream markers of economic and social success to pursue a non-materialist ethics of individual and familial life. This project examines emerging ideals of happiness and the good life that prioritize self-cultivation and meaningful interpersonal bonds, and it asks how parents reconcile these aspirations with intense social pressure to reproduce their middle-class status.

Books:

2015. Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty. University of California Press.

2015. Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility across Asia. Co-edited with Pardis Mahdavi. University of Pennsylvania Press.

2014. Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China. Co-edited with Deborah Davis. Stanford University Press.

2006. Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China. Harvard East Asian Monographs 265, Harvard University Press.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

2024. “Diversifying Chinese Families and Family Desires in the Twenty-First Century.” In Mayfair Yang, ed. Anthropology of Ascendant China: Histories, Attainments, and Tribulations. New York: Routledge.

2023. “Opting Out of the City: Lifestyle Migrations, Alternative Education, and the Pursuit of Happiness among Chinese Middle-class Families.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29(2): 383-401.

2023. “Same-sex Marriage Legalization and the Stigmas of LGBT Coparenting in Taiwan,” with Chao-ju Chen. Law & Social Inquiry 48(2):660-688.

2021. “Will Marriage Rights Bring Family Equality? Law, Lesbian Mothers, and Strategies of Recognition in Taiwan,” co-authored with Yi-chien Chen. positions: asia critique 29(3): 551-79.

2021. “Productive Encounters: Kinship, Gender, and Family Laws in East Asia,” co-authored with Seung-kyung Kim. positions: asia critique 29(3): 453-68.

2021. “Aspirational Sovereignty and Human Rights Advocacy: Audience, Recognition, and the Reach of the Taiwan State.” In Rebecca Bryant and Madeleine Reeves, eds. The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination Beyond the State, pp. 89-113. Cornell University Press.

2021. “LGBT Movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China,” co-authored with Hsiaowei Kuan, Travis Kong, and S.K. Lau. In Don Haider-Markel, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

2017. “Men who ‘Marry Out’: Unsettling Masculinity, Kinship, and Nation Through Migration across the Taiwan Strait.” Gender, Place & Culture 24:9, pp. 1243-1262.

2017. “Stranger Anxiety: Failed Legal Equivalences and the Challenges of Intimate Recognition in Taiwan.” Public Culture 29:3, pp. 433-55.

2017. “Reproducing Uncertainty: Documenting Contested Citizenship and Sovereignty across the Taiwan Strait.” In Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds. Citizenship In Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness. Duke University Press, pp. 81-99.

2016. “Revaluing Marital Immigrants: Educated Professionalism and Precariousness among Chinese Spouses in Taiwan.” Critical Asian Studies 48:4 (December).

2016. “The Right to Family: Chinese Marriage Immigrants, Chinese Children, and Graduated Citizenship in Taiwan.” In Anne R. Epstein and Rachel G. Fuchs, eds. Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective. Palgrave, pp. 211-231.

2016. “Wedding Marriage to the Nation-State in Modern China: Legal Consequences for Divorce, Property, and Women’s Rights.” Co-authored with Ke Li. In Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy, eds. Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation. Oxford University Press, pp. 147-169.

2015. “Introduction: Migrant Encounters,” co-authored with Pardis Mahdavi. In Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi, eds. Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility across Asia. University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1-21.

2015. “Regulating Cross-Border Intimacy: Authenticity Paradigms and the Specter of Illegality among Chinese Marital Immigrants to Taiwan.” In Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi, eds. Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility across Asia. University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 206-229.

2014. “Deinstitutionalizing Marriage and Sexuality,” co-authored with Deborah Davis. In Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-38.

2014. “Marital Borders: Gender, Population, and Sovereignty across the Taiwan Strait.” In Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 285-311.