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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how remote work reshapes masculinity and gendered social relations among male workers in urban China. It explores how working from home and third spaces unsettles established work–home divisions, and how male workers negotiate domestic space, intimacy, and everyday sociality.

Paper long abstract

This paper is part of the ERC project Remote Work and Social Change. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among male remote workers in Shanghai, a cosmopolis where skilled and well-educated remote knowledge workers are employed by both foreign enterprises and local firms, or are self-employed, this paper examines how remote work reshapes everyday practices of manhood and gendered social relations.

In the Chinese context, dominant models of masculinity have long been associated with men’s orientation toward the public sphere of work and relative separation from domestic life, often articulated through the gendered distinction between zhu wai (men positioned in the “outside” world of work) and zhu nei (women as primary carers of household and family life) (McDougall and Hansson, 2002). Yet remote work has blurred and reworked this conventional division, as male workers no longer have a fixed office in a professional setting, and instead work primarily from home and/or third spaces such as cafés and coworking venues.

This paper draws on the ethnography of male remote workers’ relationships with partners, family members, friends, and peers, design and use of home offices, engagement with domestic labour and care responsibilities, and the strategic use of cafés and other third spaces. It examines how masculinity is negotiated amid blurred gendered divisions between work and domestic life, and how such negotiations give rise to new expectations and norms of manhood among remote knowledge workers in urban China.