Arianne M. Gaetano

Education

About Me

A cultural anthropologist, Arianne Gaetano’s research focuses on social transformations in contemporary China. Her 2015 book, Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China is about the experiences and consequences of internal migration on rural Chinese women’s lives, based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing and China’s countryside. Her recent research investigates changing meanings and patterns of courtship, intimacy, and marriage, particularly marriage postponement, in urban China. Gaetano applies a feminist perspective to critically evaluate China’s urbanization process and outcomes in regard to gender equality. Gaetano's newest research focuses on the experiences of international students from Asia in the US during and since the pandemic and involves undergraduate students as research assistants.

Gaetano is a faculty affiliate of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and a contributor to the Asian Studies curriculum. Among the courses she regularly teaches are Anthropology: Culture and Adaptation; Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies; Anthropology of Gender; Culture, Marriage, and Family; Gender, Culture, and Development; Peoples and Cultures of Asia; Ethnographic Methods; Language and Culture; and Anthropological Theory.

Research Interests

Chinese society, gender, migration, social mobility, and social change

Publications

Books

• Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China (University of Hawai’i Press 2015)
• On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China (Columbia University Press 2004). Co-edited with Tamara Jacka.

Articles

• "Social Mobility and Single Women's Marriage Dilemma in Urban China." American Behavioral Scientist 2024, special issue on gendered dimensions of social and geographical mobilities in East Asia, edited by Jing Song and Stevi Jackson. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642241242749
• "The Chinese State, 'Reform and Opening,' and the Regulation of Women in Urbanizing China." Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 47(3-4) 2018: 301-329.
• “A Feminist Reflection on Ethnographic Research in China: Gender, Sex, and Power in Cross-Cultural Context.” ASIANetwork Exchange 23(1) 2016: 47-65. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/ane.163.
• “‘Leftover Women’: Postponing Marriage and Renegotiating Womanhood in Urban China,” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 4(2) 2014: 124-149.

Book Chapters

• “Women, Work, Marriage, and the Challenges of Gendered Mobility in Urban China,” chapter 7 in Zongli Tang, ed., China’s Urbanization and Socioeconomic Impact. Springer Press, 2017: 109-124. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-4831-9_7
• “China’s Leftover Women’: Myths and Realities,” chapter 8 in Xiaowei Zang and Lucy Xia Zhao, eds., The Handbook on Marriage and Family in China. Elgin Press, 2017: 125-141. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785368196.00013
• “Gender and Citizenship Inequality: The Story of Two Migrant Women,” in Martin K. Whyte, ed., One Country, Two Societies? Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China. Cambridge, MA: Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies and Harvard University Press, 2010: 265-286.