Sara L. Friedman
slfriedm@indiana.edu

Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology

G215 – Sex & Gender in Cross Cultural Perspective

Professor Friedman's research focuses on the relationship between political processes and intimate life in China and Taiwan. Her first book, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Harvard UP 2006), looked at how China's socialist regime sought to produce new socialist citizens through transforming intimate practices associated with marriage, labor, bodily adornment, and same-sex networks. She then went on to study how cross-cultural analyses of intimacy and sexuality challenge norms rooted in Euro-American cultures. Through an analysis of transnational film circuits, she asked whether same-sex intimacy is always perceived as sexual or whether more varied frameworks exist cross-culturally for interpreting and experiencing intimacy outside of sexual identity.

Professor Friedman is currently completing a multi-sited project that explores changing conceptions and practices of citizenship in the China-Taiwan region. Her manuscript in progress, Exceptional Citizens: Chinese Marital Immigrants, Contested Borders, and National Anxieties Across the Taiwan Strait, examines the identity and citizenship struggles of Chinese marital immigrants in Taiwan and shows how the intimate lives of those in transnational marriages are permeated by the effects of broader political tensions.

• "The Politics of Marriage: Lessons Learned from China's Efforts to Regulate Intimate Relations." American Sexuality. Official publication of the National exuality Resource Center. May 1.

• Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China.