Food practices, gendered intimacy and family life in contemporary Guangzhou

This article is concerned with the intimate spousal relations through the analysis of their management of daily meals and domestic food work. It extends beyond research focused on the relations between gendered power, identity and the space of home, through a focus on food practices. Based on three case studies, this empirical research analyses how the gendered nature of domestic food work makes, remakes and unmakes the intimate relations between women and men. In particular, the narrated food stories explore how gendered domestic food work is undertaken in families with different forms and geographies of homemaking, creating intimacies even when families have to live apart. Moreover, the construction and reconstruction of the geographical terms of distance and proximity under the discourse of intimacy in the mobilised urban Guangzhou are discussed. The main argument suggests that both genders play important roles in the process of practising intimacy in the family sphere. This work contributes to the wider critical and cultural geographies of family through engaging men's agencies into the domestic sphere from a non-Western perspective.