Introduction

The Chinese language itself lacks an accurate and equivalent term to describe ‘masculinity’ or ‘manhood’. As Song and Hird (2014: 1) record, this led to a senior female Singaporean Chinese researcher sneering before a faculty meeting: ‘Chinese masculinity? Is there such a thing?’ In spite of this linguistic dilemma, relevant ideas are not unfamiliar to Chinese men. Represented by wenren (scholar), haohan (good buddy), nan zi han (macho man) and niang niang qiang (effeminate man), there is actually a range of vocabulary to describe different male images. From historical periods to the current era, ways to be Chinese men have been heterogeneous and inconsistent, but also with a series of continuities. Some male identities have largely withdrawn from the contemporary stage while new forms of mediated and everyday masculinity are constantly emerging. Moreover, there have always been variations of manhood in terms of class disparities, the urban– rural divide, sexuality and ethnicity. This chapter therefore starts with an overview of the literature on Chinese masculinities in order to explicate who the ‘ordinary young men’ in this research are.

While masculinity making is a multifaceted social process, in this book, I mainly focus on embodied masculinities, practices of intimacy and the temporal dimension of men's identities as constructed and narrated through kinship. Essentially, I chose these three aspects based on the rich data available from my interviews. At the same time, each of these themes provides a distinct angle to investigate how ordinary young men make sense of their masculine selves. These dimensions of masculinity also evoke larger themes, such as health, relationships and families, which are of paramount importance to being a Chinese man today. Furthermore, I am interested in studying men's negotiation of masculinity in the context of everyday life. It is through numerous mundane and unnoticed days and nights that culture is lived out (Williams, 1981, 1993 [1958]), mechanisms of power operate and wider transformations become possible (Bennett and Silva, 2004). The themes of embodiment, intimacy and kinship enable me to explain those trivial, regular, or taken-for-granted gender practices that may be easily overlooked. Analytically, I have sought to investigate the masculinities of ordinary young men in a Chinese cultural framework imbued with a historical Confucian legacy without overlooking Western debates on personal lives, reflexivity and individualization.