The representation of Stay-at-home fathers in Chinese TV drama – Marriage Battle
Stay-at-home fathers (SAHFs), as a newly emergent gendered identity, have recently featured in several TV family dramas in China. While much has been written about the discourses of familial relations in televisual culture since the late 1990s, no research has been done on the representation of this particularly gendered identity of SAHFs on the Chinese screen. This paper uses Marriage Battle, a TV drama series that revolves around the lives of three SAHFs, as a case study to examine how SAHFs are represented, so as to provide a new perspective to academic debates about the cultural production of gender difference and hierarchy in China. I identify four key themes in the construction of SAHFs’ masculinities and their familial relationships in this series: the centrality of work to these fictional SAHFs’ sense of masculinity; the class specificity of the wider fictional SAHF family; the absence of intergenerational impact within this family; and the unifying happy ending that this family experiences.
Through analysis of these four themes, I identify a paradox in the televisual representation of SAHFs, that while the male characters in this series all seemingly embody a new model of familial masculinity, as caring and sensitive men who herald a paradigm shift in traditional familial gender roles, they still cling to patriarchal ideologies when negotiating family matters. My discussion of the paradoxical representation of SAHFs in the series offers an illustration of how continuing patriarchal ideologies are sustained despite the ongoing renegotiation of gender roles within the Chinese family.
Fei Huang is a Chinese-English interpreter/translator and third-year PhD candidate in Chinese and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her research interests include masculinities, gender studies, and family life in contemporary China. Her current research explores stay-at-home fathers in contemporary China.