How to Cite

Brosius, Christiane et al. (Eds.): Being Single in the City: Cultural Geographies of Gendered Urban Space in Asia, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2024 (Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, Volume 11). https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1425

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Identifiers

https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1425
ISBN 978-3-96822-277-6 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-278-3 (Hardcover)

Published

10/17/2024

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Authors

Christiane Brosius (Ed.), Jeroen de Kloet (Ed.), Laila Abu-Er-Rub (Ed.), Melissa Butcher (Ed.)

Being Single in the City

Cultural Geographies of Gendered Urban Space in Asia

Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality

What does it mean to be a single woman in India or China? Being single is an advancing trend, also in Asia. There is an ambivalent fascination with the single woman as a new type of empowered, pleasure-seeking, competent lifestyle-surfer, and dedicated career-maker. And yet, the single woman is also stigmatized and isolated, discriminated against or stereotyped as someone who challenges social norms. Place matters for singlehood. This book focuses on the urban fabric of India, mainland China, and Hong Kong. For it is here that social, economic, cultural, and political transformations become manifest and new possibilities of living are tested and vividly contested.

Christiane Brosius is professor of visual and media anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Since 2000, she has studied changes in globalizing cities, focusing on emotions and ritual practice, on contempo­rary art production, cultural heritage, and intergenerational relations. Her main regional foci are Delhi and the Kathmandu Valley.

Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is affiliated with the Beijing Language and Culture University. His work focuses on the politics of Chinese popular culture, in particular music and cinema, and contemporary art.

Laila Abu-Er-Rub holds a PhD in anthropology from Heidelberg Univer­sity. She is currently the academic coordinator of the interdisciplinary Indo-German Centre of Advanced Studies (ICAS: MP) in New Delhi, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Her research interests include visual and material culture, fashion studies, advertising, colorism, and gender.

Melissa Butcher is a former professor of social and cultural geography at Birkbeck, Uni­versity of London, and currently the Programme Director at Cumberland Lodge, UK. She uses ethnographic, visual, and participatory methodolo­gies to examine questions of identity and belonging within contexts of cultural change and contested urban space.

Chapters

Table of Contents
Pages
PDF
HTML
Title
i-iv
Table of Contents
v-vi
Christiane Brosius, Jeroen de Kloet, Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Melissa Butcher
Acknowledgements
vii-viii
Christiane Brosius, Jeroen de Kloet, Laila Abu-Er-Rub
Introduction
On Being Single in Urban Asia
1-35
Kinneret Lahad
Acquiring a Divine Composure
Singlehood, Excessiveness, and the Changing Gendered Order
37-60
Lucie Bernroider
Landscapes of Loneliness and Interdependence
An Essay on Urban Alienation, Friendship, and the Modalities of Anthropological Fieldwork
61-87
Penn Tsz Ting Ip, Jeroen de Kloet
The Precarity of Trust
Domestic Helpers as “Working-Singles” in Shanghai
89-114
Shilpa Phadke
“You are Next”
Unmarried Urban Women in India and the “Marriage Talk”
115-147
Chenying Pi
Finding Mr. Right
Single Professional Women Imagining Ideal Masculinities and Negotiating Femininities in Contemporary China
149-174
Yin Shan Lo, Yiu Fai Chow, Guo Qingling
Foregrounding and Backgrounding
An Interview with Guo Qingling
175-186
Paromita Chakravarti
Of Homes, Hostels, and Addresses
Intergenerational Perspectives on Habitations and Women’s Singleness in Contemporary Kolkata
187-211
Lucetta Y.L. Kam
Moving with Precarity
Transnational Mobility of Chinese Queer “Single” Women
213-230
Sanjay Srivastava
Technotopias, Consumer Cultures, and the Gendered City
231-254
About the Authors
255-259

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