Extramarital Love in Shanghai

Abstract

This paper describes ordinary peoples accounts of how they deal with extramarital affairs. By looking at such personal accounts we hope to better understand the workings of moral discourse in everyday life. Rather than searching for an underlying system of consistent values or a domineering public voice we will investigate how people use competing discourses of motive to make sense of extramarital love in the contexts of their own lives and those of people around them. In doing this we also hope to provide a description of changes in Chinese moral codes and the factors that shape their use. While we must emphasize that our interviewees are special cases as all of our interviewees are or were dealing with extramarital sexuality in their own lives we also wish to emphasize that the moral discourses these individuals employed are almost all common in contemporary Chinese society. That is the personal stories people told us were not amoral accounts but rather deviant or sub- cultural uses of dominant moral discourses. We must understand how such moral values play a role in enabling deviant behaviour. (excerpt)