Arianne M. Gaetano

Education

About Me

A cultural anthropologist with a background in Asian Studies, Arianne Gaetano’s scholarship critically evaluates socioeconomic transformations in contemporary China and Taiwan, specifically their impact on gender, family, mobility, and social (in)equality. Her current research investigates changing meanings and patterns of (non-)marriage, family, and reproduction in China and Taiwan. During 2025-2026, Gaetano was a US Fulbright Senior Scholar based at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. She also has conducted a study on the experiences of international students from Asia in the U.S., with Auburn undergraduate students serving as research assistants. Her 2015 book, Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China, examined the experiences and consequences of internal migration for rural Chinese women, and was based on a decade of fieldwork. 

Gaetano is a faculty affiliate of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and teaches courses in that minor, as well as in Asian Studies and International Studies. Courses she regularly teaches include Anthropology of Gender; Anthropological Theory; Culture, Marriage, and Family; Ethnographic Methods; Peoples and Cultures of Asia; Introduction to Anthropology: Culture and Adaptation; and Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies. 

Selected Publications

Books

• Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China (University of Hawai’i Press 2015)
• On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China (Columbia University Press 2004). Co-edited with Tamara Jacka.

Articles

• Good Fortune: My Fulbright Experience. Research and Reflections: Fulbright Taiwan Online Journal, July 2026. https://journal.fulbright.org.tw/good-fortune-my-fulbright-experience/.
• Social Mobility and Single Women's Marriage Dilemma in Urban China. American Behavioral Scientist 2026 70(6): 764-769. Special Issue on Moving Away, Moving Up, and Moving Back: Gender Dimensions of Social and Geographical Mobility in East Asia, edited by Jing Song and Stevi Jackson. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642241242749
• The Chinese State, "Reform and Opening," and the Regulation of Women in Urbanizing China. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 47(3-4) 2018: 301-329.
• A Feminist Reflection on Ethnographic Research in China: Gender, Sex, and Power in Cross-Cultural Context. ASIANetwork Exchange 23(1) 2016: 47-65. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/ane.163.
• “Leftover Women": Postponing Marriage and Renegotiating Womanhood in Urban China,” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 4(2) 2014: 124-149.
• Rural Woman and Modernity in Globalizing China: Seeing Jia Zhangke’s “The World.” Visual Anthropology Review 25(1) 2009: 24-38.
• Sexuality in Diasporic Space: Rural-to-Urban Migrant Women Negotiating Gender and Marriage in Contemporary China. Gender, Place, and Culture 15(6) 2008: 629-645, special issue on heterosexuality and migration in Asia edited by Katie Walsh, Hsiu-hua Shen, and Katie Willis.

Book Chapters

• Women, Work, Marriage, and the Challenges of Gendered Mobility in Urban China. In Zongli Tang, ed., China’s Urbanization and Socioeconomic Impact. Springer Press, 2017: 109-124. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-4831-9_7
• China’s "Leftover Women": Myths and Realities. In Xiaowei Zang and Lucy Xia Zhao, eds., The Handbook on Marriage and Family in China. Elgin Press, 2017: 125-141. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785368196.00013
• Gender and Citizenship Inequality: The Story of Two Migrant Women. In Martin K. Whyte, ed., One Country, Two Societies? Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China. Cambridge, MA: Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies and Harvard University Press, 2010: 265-286.

Research Interests

Chinese society, gender, migration, social mobility, and social change