Wenzhao Chen

This project examines the transformations of intimacies in post-reform China under women’s rising financial power, individualist cultures, and patriarchal legacy. Specifically, urban upscale hair salons provide a unique vantage point to investigate the gender and class dimensions of intimacy in the context of urban-rural divide in China. Viewing intimacy as ambiguous, dynamic relationships bridging private and public realms, this research explores how “effeminate” male rural-to-urban migrant hairstylists (MRMHs) from disadvantaged economic backgrounds form intimacies with female urban middle-class customers (FUMCs) despite the disparities in their social class. Such intimacies may go beyond hair salons, with the hairstylists’ deft use of social media to build them. In this project, I ask: First, how do MRMHs and FUMCs understand their aspirations and precarities in the intimacies? Second, how do MRMHs negotiate their masculinities in the intimacy-making process? Third, how do MRMHs use social media to build such intimacies? Based on a one-year ethnography in two high-end hair salons in the megacity of Guangzhou, this project will shed light on how intimacies inform politico-economic power and how they (re)shape economic relationships. Thus, this project aims to understand the classed and gendered processes in the context of the socio-economic restructuring in post-reform China.