After they registered their marriage zhou moved into

invitations to the cinema, to Pizza Hut, and other places she had never been. After they registered
their marriage, Zhou moved into the apartment where he lived with his widowed mother, his
divorced sister and the sister’s son. Despite her husband’s seniority in the family as the only son,
Zhou was often at the mercy of her mean-spirited new relatives, who called their marriage a
sham and accused Zhou of marrying for money. When Zhou became pregnant, she confided to
me retrospectively, she considered abortion and even divorce, but stayed in the marriage because
of her feelings for her husband. ‘He is good to me’, she explained.
640 A. Gaetano
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Changing patterns of courtship among rural migrant women are shaped by their mobility.
Raised expectations of the future and demands for a partner with good conditions reflect their
increasing sense of self-worth and achievement compared with non-migrant peers and village
elders. These factors also manifest these women’s ambition to make something of themselves by
taking advantage of the opportunities provided by their distance from home and by the urban
environment. Their emphasis on feelings could be interpreted as providing a moral framework
within which to justify both their desire for material betterment and the behaviors necessary to
attain that goal (Farrer 2002). It may also have insulated them from the urban stereotypes of rural
migrant brides as purely mercenary. These changes in turn challenged parental authority and
demonstrated rural women’s independent agency in marriage. My preliminary findings further
suggest that migrant women who enter freely chosen love marriages may experience more
control over their post-marital household and family. Those who marry up, however, continue to
experience discrimination on the basis of gender and rural origin. For my key informants,
heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family ideal are important anchors both for their
subjectivity and for their social and economic security. In this regard, changing patterns of
courtship do not result in a radical restructuring of sexuality, gender or kinship. Yet the
marriages described here are a practical means for rural women to fulfill their own aspirations
for a better future.
Migration, sexuality and social change
In this article I have used ethnographic methods to explore the subjectivities and experiences of
rural-to-urban migrant women in Beijing as they negotiated gender identity and marital practices
in diasporic space. Rejecting rural identity and all that it signifies, they embrace a more
sexualized, urban femininity. In so doing, they reproduce a discourse of ‘eating spring rice’
Figure 4. Zhao looking at her wedding photo album. (Photo Arianne Gaetano, 2002.)
Gender, Place and Culture 641
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that obscures their real contributions to the economy and rationalizes gender discrimination in
employment, as well as reproducing ideas of suzhi that reinforce urban cultural superiority and
hence perpetuate social hierarchy. Pursuing freely chosen love matches, young migrant women