| Summary/Abstract |
China has witnessed the rise of cohabitation and the delay of marriage among young people, but less attention has been paid to cohabitation as a process of living arrangement that may create new room to define gender roles or replicate conventional gender relations. Previous studies have debated on whether cohabitation is an egalitarian union with more symmetric bargaining power and individualistic pursuits, and this study sheds light on how young people in China negotiate their gender role ideologies in cohabiting unions. Based on in-depth interviews with 18 cohabiting couples in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and nearby cities in South China, this study finds that men were more divided in their gender role ideologies and women were predominantly favorable toward egalitarian beliefs. In the “intended egalitarian” couples, both partners supported egalitarian ideals and reported sharing housework equally, which served men’s family-oriented masculinity and women’s individualistic pursuits and self-development. In the “discordant” couples, with a typical “traditional man and egalitarian woman” combination, traditional men were more defensive than egalitarian women. Most discordant couples adopted traditional arrangements, and only a few traditional men tolerated egalitarian arrangements as “temporary” due to their unemployed status or other real-life constraints. Both the celebration of egalitarian ideals in some couples and the persistence of traditional arrangements in others reflect the mixed and uneven trends of gender equalization in the reform-era China.
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