by Chenying PI, PhD candidate

(Lectures in Love Club, photos taken by Pi Chenying)

Since the mid-2000s, the label shengnv (leftover women) has saturated public discourses and imaginations in China. It is puzzling and unsettling that educated and professional young women are not entering marriage in large numbers in big cities. The late marriage of this group of women has testified to and foregrounded the destabilization and reconfiguration of once well-accepted femininities as well as the transformation of intimate relationship amid far-reaching neoliberal transitions in contemporary China. As intimacy opened up for public scrutiny, commercialization and entertainment, it emerges as a vital site for single women to negotiate and perform their identities. Therefore, this research project asks what the desires in intimate relationship of single professional women in Shanghai are, and interrogates how gender, class, and city intersect in their articulation and performance of the self. To unfold the entanglements, this study adopts an ethnographic approach and examines the emergences and popularity of emotional training courses like Love Club (lianai xunlianying), television dating programs like If You are the One (feichengwurao), and recent male pin-ups (nanshen) in Chinese popular culture.