This book focuses on a group of typical “urban professional women” who are highly educated and successful in their careers but choose or have to marry late. These women have been labeled as “leftover women” by mainstream media and their families, but they themselves are not criticized by society for being “too picky” or “career-oriented”. On the contrary, what they are confronted with are structural limitations and gender biases.
The article employs the in-depth interview method, mainly interviewing highly educated women in first-tier cities to analyze how they encounter the construction and pressure of the “leftover woman” identity in their daily lives, family conversations, dating scenarios, and the workplace.
The author believes that “leftover women” are the result of the joint shaping by the triple systems of the state, society and family.
In my intervention measures, I also adopted the interview method, but I will further expand the sample selection to include voices with a more cross-disciplinary perspective. In addition to highly educated women in big cities, I will also join women from remote cities and transgender women groups to conduct small-scale focus group interviews, attempting to present how “marriage choices” are heterogeneous constructed across different identities, regions, and body types. This is not only an extended understanding of the label “leftover women”, but also aims to challenge the implicit gender norms and institutional exclusions behind contemporary marriage and love discourse.
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