Good stories: Chinese women's international love stories as cosmopolitan sexual politics

Abstract

For some Chinese women dating foreign men, narratives of international love and sexual adventure break with conventional marital sexual scripts and serve to portray them as cosmopolitan Chinese women living eventful lives in multicultural Shanghai. Such sexual stories are simultaneously personal but collective products with both aesthetic and political dimensions. This study investigates this process of story making through a type of reflexive methodology, examining the process of story making as a dialogic interaction between the non-Chinese male sociologist, two Chinese female research assistants and the female interviewees who shared stories of international romance. Through this reflexive approach to writing about interviews, we can understand how sexual story making works as a collective production of meanings with diverse political and ethical implications that emerge throughout the processes of interviewing, analysis and writing.