Publication Christiane Brosius et al. publish “Being Single in the City” with heiUP

Christiane Brosius (Visual and Media Anthropology), together with Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Melissa Butcher and Jeroen de Kloet, publishes the results of the former HERA-project “Creating the 'New Asian Woman' - Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi (SINGLE)”. The book has appeared open-acces with heiUP in the series “Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality”. 

What does it mean to be a single woman in India or China? Being single is an advancing trend, also in Asia. There is an ambivalent fascination with the single woman as a new type of empowered, pleasure-seeking, competent lifestyle-surfer, and dedicated career-maker. And yet, the single woman is also stigmatized and isolated, discriminated against or stereotyped as someone who challenges social norms. Place matters for singlehood. This is the focus of Being Single in the City. Cultural Geographies of Gendered Urban Space in Asia - just published free and open access by Heidelberg University Press, as part of the Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality. It has been co-edited by Christiane Brosius, Jeroen de Kloet, Laila Abu-Er-Rub, and Melissa Butcher, and resulted from a 3-year EU-funded research project "Creating the ‘New Asian Woman’ – Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi (SINGLE)”.  The articles in the book focus on the urban fabric of India, mainland China, and Hong Kong, for it is here that social, economic, cultural, and political transformations become manifest and new possibilities of living are tested and vividly contested.

Book Cover